Anchor Every Project to Your Key Business Strategies

A Global 100 company's traditional dominance of its market has been eroded in recent years through emerging competition. The company was no longer able to simply let their products “sell themselves” on a reputation of superior performance and quality. Furthermore, projected growth in the core product's market would not be sufficient to meet the company's overall growth targets. Meanwhile, the company had tremendous potential for growth and profitability through a wide range of associated products and services, from financing and training, to spare parts and service (figure 1, below).

The company needed to transform how they responded to customers needs and maximize the sales of its core products and related products and services. This meant redefining customer relationships, how products and services were marketed, and how sales opportunities were identified and acted upon. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was identified as the means to accomplish those goals. Simply put, CRM is a way to customize and most effectively interact with each customer based on their individual wants and needs.

The company move to CRM represented a major change in how they approached and managed customers. The traditional model of sales and support was organized around each project or service. That is, sales teams were dedicated to each product or service and operate autonomously from each other. This autonomous approach did not maximize sales opportunities across all products and services. Customers would often get competing offers from different sales teams in the company. Imagine going to a car lot, and having a new car salesperson, a used car salesperson, and a leasing representative all telling you that they had the best deal. As you might imagine, this can confuse the customer and lead to lost sales. CRM would resolve this by reorganizing and integrating sales teams around the customer. Instead of a sales team offering a product, the sales team would respond to a customer opportunity. This customer opportunity would be a complete package of products and services based on their needs.

While CRM is primarily a business strategy, technology is the enabler. Large companies are able to understand individual customers because of large data warehouses that collect information about a customer from all parts of the company, from their sales patterns to their service history. Before creating a CRM business strategy, the company wanted to understand how technology could enable the results they desired. A project was launched to pilot off-the-shelf CRM technology in one primary sales region.