Customer relations management, or CRM that is integrated within your business plan dictates the success of a business. When venturing in a market, you need to build your relationship with your customers and create more networks to potential clients. This should be an important factor to consider when creating a business plan.
What is CRM?
CRM is one strategy implemented by many businesses and companies to increase profits by focusing on how to build networks between them, which will help strengthen the business’ scope. Basically, the main idea here is to prioritize the needs of your customers. The objective of CRM is to develop the integrity of the business’ branding so that customers will have a sense of loyalty, therefore they’ll patronize and purchase your products or services.
Here are the reasons why a CRM should be incorporated in your business planning:
1. Helps in business goal setting
Basically, you do planning because you want to achieve a particular goal. In the context of creating a business plan, the main idea is to raise money. Your goals can both be for short and long term. The only difference between the two is the duration on how the business plan will take effect to achieve them.
Short term goals have a smaller window in terms of business plan implementation. Somehow, it’s more focused on how you’ll gain more profits and how you’ll deliver more of your products and services.
Examples of it are:
- Daily sales
- Monthly quotas
- Target monthly production
On the other hand, long term goals are focused on establishing your business’ branding and integrity, and to make it more competitive to other businesses that are similar to yours. The scope of long term goals in business planning is associated with:
- Building partnerships
- Customer relations management such as product CRM and best sales CRM
- Shareholders and investments
- Business expansion
- Employee requirements
Knowing your customers and market will help you set your goals in the business. As a business owner, one of your
If you want to increase profits, you’ll also need to be aware of your customers’ preferences and tastes and how customers behave if there are changes in the market. Incorporating CRM in your business plan will help you determine those.
2. Provides salient points
A good business plan should drive your company forward to success. The key elements of a good business plan should include the following:
- Formulations that makes your company and branding unique. Your business plan should cover the question “What do I have to offer that others don’t?”. Strategies that will make your product stand out from the rest should be included under the formulations of your business plan. Trade secrets are usually under these. Examples are your recipes, secret ingredients, modified procedures, and others.
- Execution to make your formulations work. It doesn’t stop in the previous concept, but it should be executed to produce a finished product. Different methods and techniques can be applied in the execution process when making your business plan, and you have to identify what will work for your company to make it efficient and effective.
- Implementation of strategic planning in marketing, people management, customer relations, and expansions should also be included. Since business is multidisciplinary, you have to know how to run and balance these elements to make it successful.
Since CRM focuses on marketing and people management, integration of this particular strategy when creating a business plan will make it easier for you to determine the following:
- How to formulate products and services that customers will love.
- How to execute marketing strategies to attract more customers in the business.
- How to improve customer relations.
3. Provides problem solving strategies
An impressive business plan doesn’t only tackle a proposal on how you’ll implement things, such as product development, marketing strategies, ways to increase profit and many others. It should also include basic troubleshooting skills and issue management if there are difficulties experienced in the business.
CRM enables to address the problems that can arise in the future regarding marketing, customer feedbacks, and even internal conflicts between people inside the business. It’s a proactive strategy to resolve the problem and recommend solutions. It can also identify how to properly mediate if there are complaints from the customers to the management, or even between employees in the business.
Final thoughts
A good CRM strategy that is coherent to your business plan will dictate the success rate of your business. Its objective is not only to increase profits, it’s also to improve the integrity and branding of the company. It should serve as a guide in proper decision-making and management of the company.
