ERP supporting critical CRM within SMEs

“Brands are built by what people are saying about you, not what you are saying about yourself”, Guy Kawasaki, one of the original Apple employees.

Businesses spend 80% of their marketing funds going after new customers and clients rather than nurturing, retaining, and maintaining the customer relationships they already have.

It is important to build relationships with the customers you currently have as they are your assets and potentially the key to future growth. Consider the following facts…

•Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers.
•Referrals among repeat customers are 107% greater than non-customers.
•It costs six times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to a customer.

Companies that fail to nurture and retain their customer base ultimately fail. You will also spend twice as much to get new clients as you will in maintaining your existing customer base as well as being limited in your ability to attract new clients if you can't hold onto and satisfy your existing customers and clients.

The bottom line is that one of the key components in marketing and business growth is to spend the majority of your time and effort nurturing customer relationships, so that you get business from existing clients and customers. This is a strategy that will move you forward in increasing your sales by 50% without increasing your budget.

As a small business CRM is even more important as you are more likely to depend upon repeat business rather than sales volume.

CRM is one piece of the new wave of ERP that focuses on outward facing processes, tying them together with the inside-the-enterprise transaction processing engine of the original ERP systems.

With the popularity of the Web and Web-based business, companies operating in a mass production world were able to truly personalise relationships with customers. The ability to build strong relationships with customers is causing renewed efforts among businesses to achieve lifetime value from current customers and to put strategic plans in place to go after lifetime value for new customers in new markets.

In the world of eBusiness, companies can replicate the personal customer relationship that existed prior to mass markets by using knowledge of the customer to personalise customer service while continuing to sell standard products.

The SAP Business One CRM application provides the tools to turn prospects into customers, grow customer sales, and profitability, and increase customer satisfaction.

To find out more visit www.beabetterbusiness.com or contact sales@iisystems.net

Sources: ERP Bandit.com, Ezine Articles.