CRM and Mapping Technologies Help Bank & Finance Sales Managers and Reps Find, Keep Customers by Bob Sullivan, President, InfoGrow Corporation (Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio) Recent market research suggests that banks should consider investing in technology solutions for better customer service. These technologies should, among other objectives, focus on making bank data easily accessible and usable by all end users in a banking system, as needed. This means all users should be able to create, access, analyze, and apply database information. [a]

To this end, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) technology, which grew 12% in 2012 worldwide, can help banks and financial institutions find and keep customers. In this growing market for CRM, banking and finance was one of the biggest spenders, following communications/media/IT services and manufacturing. The largest categories: customer service and support (37%), sales (26%), and marketing (20%). [b]

Investing in CRM technology pays off. For every dollar a company spends on CRM, it earns $5.60. [c] Even better, when mapping is combined with a CRM system, data is revealed graphically with color- and symbol-coding capabilities, and street and satellite images – helping banks and financial institutions to see sales intelligence that often lies hidden in spreadsheet rows and columns. Below are CRM/Mapping benefits for sales managers and reps to find, serve, and keep loyal customers. What can bank & finance sales managers do better with CRM and mapping? • Help assure that reps are most productive while they're travelling; For example, on a map you can see a point for every won or lost opportunity. You might be surprised to find that a rep has not targeted companies in a particular area for some time. Although you could look at the data in a table, a map makes the data more visible, jumping out to you for making better decisions. • Manage sales territories more efficiently: Reviewing customers and/or prospects by territories displayed on a map often reveals the need for changes in territory assignments and balanced territories. • Know where sales reps are and what they're doing and, accordingly, if necessary, manage them better for more productive calls. For example, in cloning “A” accounts, mapping with CRM will help to get “B” players to better focus on core customer accounts. And the mapping-and-

CRM combo can increase the adoption of CRM itself, allowing users to achieve the results they expected for their installed CRMs. • Easily evaluate competitive risk by seeing and understanding where competitors have penetration in your areas. Determine a plan of action with customers that might be at risk. How can CRM and mapping also help bank & finance sales reps? • Find all customers and prospects in a particular area. Let’s say a rep is travelling to location X and wants to visit customers and prospects in radius of10 miles of that location. With a map inside CRM, a rep can easily make callbacks and arrange appointments to visit all nearby key customers and prospects. CRM with mapping also saves time when planning trips. • Filter sales calls by specific CRM data (such as sales per year and number of employees), build a radius around a call location, and spend time setting appointments with higher valued targets. Because not all customers or prospects are created equally, reps need to ask, "With limited resources, where do I spend my valued time?" References [a]

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=251301&ref=g_sitelink [b]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/04/26/2013-crm-market-share-update-40-of-crm-systems-sold-are-saas-based/ [c]

Nucleus Research, Boston, MA

Bob Sullivan is president of InfoGrow Corporation. Bringing 24 successful years of experience in CRM, mapping, lead management, business intelligence, and B2B market analytics, InfoGrow helps clients identify their best prospects, discover missed opportunities, focus reps on the most profitable accounts, and reduce marketing waste. Contact Bob at 800-897-9807, x224.

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