Xact Software Exposed , Part 3

This is part 3 of our ongoing Xact Software Exposed series, In the last part we talked about Project management and how we put together a project tracking system that did the job and didn't cost us the world.

Today we'll be focusing on how we use the data we've collected over the years to make sense of whats going on within our business.

Like most businesses out there we have a customers database (you do have a customers database right??) , this database is fed information from all sources, leads from our website, phone calls, Emails, referrals etc.

In addition to all of that our database is used to manage our day to day activities, our sales process and few other things.

Collecting this amount of information is pointless if you had no way to make sense of it, luckily our CRM database comes with some built in reports and Dashboard views, not to mention some very powerful search features.

However, that wasn't enough for us, we wanted more. there were a lot of things that we wanted to analyze which we couldn't get from the out of the box tools so we went ahead and built our own.

Being a visual person I've always believed in the good old saying "A Picture is worth a 1000 words" , when it comes to looking at summaries and trends I believe that a graphical representation of your data is the way to go.

Enter the Xact Dashboard (as its currently known in the office) , a dashboard control for ACT which allows anyone to build their own dashboard views using the data in their ACT database or any other compatible data source (read: ODBC and OLE Enabled databases).

We've been using this little gadget for sometime now and even as the creator of this tool I am sometimes amazed by what it can do, for those of you who enjoy doing data analysis here is a small sample of what you can do with this dashboard:

• Break down your contacts by their status (e.g. how many customers have we got , how many prospects are in the pipeline etc).
• View your prospect by products , lead source, geographical distribution and more.
• Analyze your prospect to customer conversion rate over a given period of time
• View your staff's activities summary, how many call have been made, how many meeting they've had, how many tasks have they yet to complete.
• View the location of your meetings on a map, use that to workout a more efficient meeting schedule for the day.

Plus much much more....

The idea here is that any business with a customers database is practically sitting on a gold mine of information, this information can be analyzed , disected and as a result it can be used to make informed business decisions.

This process of analysis applies to all levels of a business , managers might be interested in seeing trends and financial summaries at a strategic level, team leaders and project managers might want to see how their staff are doing over a given month, sales personnel and shopfloor staff might just want to view a summary of what they need to do on a given day.

At the end of the day the goal is to provide the tools, processes and the knowhow to help steer a business forward, what we've done is provide just that , we've been analyzing our own database for a while now and believe me when I say it, you sometimes dont know whats going on within your business until you take a step back and look at the big picture.

If you would like to know more about Xact software then make sure to visit our website at http://www.xactsoftware.co.nz/ , you can also contact us directly by emailing Support@Xactsoftware.co.nz

Measuring Business performance through CRM

These days any business be it large or small is expected to have a repository for recording information about its customers, some businesses use whatever is on hand such as their Email software address book, a spreadsheet or maybe a combination of the two.


Other businesses however take this concept to the next level and record their customers information in a properly designed database (be it an off the shelf CRM system or a database built from the ground up).


Having your data stored in a proper CRM system gives you access to a wealth of information which you can utilize to measure the overall performance of your business, whether its done through the use of reports , Dashboards or even by eye balling your database records, as long as your data is accurate and as long as it is being updated consistently then you should be able to measure your business’s performance with very little trouble.


So why is this important? The answer is simple, in order for your business to achieve growth you need to be able to see where you are at now in order to be able to setup a growth target and formulate a plan to hit that target.


Without an accurate view of your current state it is very difficult to determine the best way to move forward and this day and age if a business does not keep on moving forward then it will simply loose out to the competition.


With all of that in mind, one might wonder where does CRM fit in this picture? the answer is simple, most CRM systems excel at keeping track of the business sales funnel history and tracking the day to day business activities (e.g. Sales Calls, internal meetings, client meetings etc).


In terms of sales performance tracking, CRM systems introduce the concept of Sales & Opportunities (Sales Opps for short). Sales Opps encompass a process which can be defined by the business, for each Sales Opportunity the process can go through multiple stages, with each stage the sales person in charge of managing a particular opportunity can update its status and probability of closure (e.g. 80% chance this opportunity would result in a sale or 45% chance this opportunity will be lost to a competitor).


As a result, with all of this information being recorded, business analysts can draw on this data to see how their business is performing in terms of sales, it becomes very easy to answer such questions as “How many sales have we lost to a competitor?” and more importantly “Why did we lose X number of sales to a competitor??” Or “Why did X number of customers did not like using one of our products?”


On the other side of the coin, you can use CRM to measure your internal business performance, most CRM systems provide the tools to manage and schedule daily activities, you can usually customize the types of activities and track their outcomes (e.g. a Sales Call to a Prospect was made or a Meeting with a client was cancelled etc).


Say you wanted to setup a number of KPIs to determine if the business is performing as it should, your sales team might need to make at least 4 Sales Calls per day, your On the road staff might need to do at least 3 product demonstrations per week. By providing your staff with the tools to record all of this information you ensure that you are always up to date on how close or far the business is from meeting its performance targets.


This knowledge can greatly assist in the decision making process when it comes to working out how your business should adjust in order to meet its performance targets.


The above is just a fraction of what you can do with CRM in order to keep on top of what is going on within your business, we hope this article has given you insight into the power of CRM and how it can help you take your business to the next level.


If you have any questions or comments or if you would like to know more about CRM in general then feel free to contact us or visit our website at http://www.xactsoftware.co.nz