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What Supermarkets Can Teach Us About Business Software And CRM Accounting Integration
I’m often baffled by the roaring success of supermarkets. They sell inferior meat, awful fresh produce and the bread could never compare to something fresh baked from your local bakery. But we can’t help shopping there. Why? Because it is all in the one place. Your weekly shop can be done in under an hour.
Business systems should be more like supermarkets, built on convenience. But the vast majority of systems aren’t. I’m talking about the divide between CRM software and accounting systems.
In most companies the client database and accounting software are two separate systems. If you have a separate accounting and CRM system your staff squander a large portion of their day fiddling with duplicate data trying to find the information required to service your clients, instead of actually servicing your clients.
They could also miss key data completely. For example some of your most profitable clients might not appear prominently in your CRM system. Often there is a group of clients in your business who are happy to place orders with minimal support or sales intervention. So they are essentially invisible to your sales team.
Now you might be tempted to say ‘well if they are placing regular orders without being chased why do we need to know about them?’. The fact is that these low maintenance clients could be stolen by your competition without you ever knowing why or even acknowledging the loss. In addition low maintenance clients who order on a regular basis are a great asset to any business, an easy source of revenue. In an ideal world you not only want to know who these clients are you also want their demographic data so you know where to find more easy customers just like them.
Protecting and locating more of these clients all hinges on identifying them and this can only be achieved with CRM accounting integration.
The problem is that accounting software and CRM software developed along very different lines. CRM software was squarely aimed at capturing client data (usually demographic related) and manage client relationships. While on the other hand accounting software was developed to handle the numbers.
Very few providers were interested in offering an all in one system. In fact up until the recently the best you could do was CRM accounting integration. With CRM accounting integration your still running (and paying for) 2 separate systems but at least they talk to each other and make relevant client data more accessible.
However things have changed.Now you can have a CRM system that includes accounting capabilities without compromising on Customer Relationship Management Functionality.
I guess you could say it’s better than a supermarket, you still get the convenience without losing the best of both software types. With a total business solution you get the whole picture. You can locate those elusive low maintenance clients and protect them. In addition you gain the ability to thoroughly asses the success of marketing activities as you can link responses to actually profits derived. And finally when you move to a total solution you save and productivity. Time that would have been wasted searching for information or switching between applications can be diverted to income producing work.
Looking for CRM accounting Integration? Download our free CRM Accounting Integration Guide
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Tags: crm accounting, crm accounting integration, crm accounting software
It really makes sense to have a CRM solution with accounting tools incorporated to ensure the sales team is working in a sensible fashion.
You offered a great example with with “silent” customers that offer good business with minimum support levels. Another place sales could be using their resources wrongly would be by chasing sales where with companies that your accounts team have blocked for whatever reason.