Silvana Buljan
How to Use CRM to Sell Better in Automotive Retail
Let me tell you a story about how not to sell a car. A couple went to a premium brand dealership and wanted to buy a family car with some air of glamor. The car should be beautiful, powerful, functional and sportive, and they...
Shareholder Value Versus Customer Value or How to Destroy and How to Create Value
Short-term focus on shareholder value is the reason why one big multinational brand is falling after the other in current times. Would the big names have fallen if they had only TRULY focused on customer value? I'm convinced they would have done better if...
How Do You Sell Cars? Forget Big Change and Just Focus on Making a...
What happens when you're trying to sell premium automobiles and there's such a long wait in your showroom that prospective customers leave? What happens when customer emails go unanswered? What happens when customers have to wait so long on the phone, they hang up? The...
Don’t Manage All Industrial B2B Firms the Same Way
Consider two real industrial business-to-business companies. The first is a manufacturer who produces premium electrical components like interrupters and switches. Its main customers are big construction companies, architecture studios and specialized retail shops for industrial equipment. The second company designs, installs (turnkey) and maintains...
Lawyers, Too, Can Benefit From CRM
When the law firm that took over our company's legal advisory services two years ago asked me what Smartworxx did, I tried to find the right words to explain CRM to someone in daily contact with "customers"—in most cases, for extremely relevant and confidential...
If You Want Customer-Centricity to Take Hold for the Long Term, You Need Full-Fledged...
Matthew was a customer management and marketing employee at an automotive retail client of ours. He didn't know much about CRM, but his company had identified him as the future internal CRM trainer. The company's goal was to set up a continuous CRM training...
You and Your Employees Must Live a CRM Collaborative Culture
The European low-cost airline EasyJet is known for having a culture that motivates employees, which in turn leads the employees to make the customers feel welcome. It's one firm that is working on creating what I call a CRM collaborative culture. That is what happens…
The Ultimate Customer Experience
As a European, I love traveling to the U.S. because customer service seems so perfect compared to the service that you experience as customer with the majority of European companies. And I ask myself how we can learn from this customer-oriented culture and move...
Think Global, Act Local: Is CRM Country-Specific?
Imagine the following situation: You've been a customer of a multinational bank for 10 years. You are very satisfied with customer service and the relationship your bank is maintaining with you. Apart from such basic services as online and telephone banking, you personally know...
Have Your Employees Participate Proactively When You Prepare for Redesign
Customer relationship management goes far beyond the implementation of new processes, organizational structures and new databases and systems. CRM touches the heart of the organization: the culture defined by management and lived by each employee. If an organization is not able to transfer a...
OEMs and Partners Need to Learn to Share Ownership of Their Customer
When it comes to implementing CRM in an original equipment manufacturer, the main question is: Who has customer ownership? Who will be the master of customer data—the OEM, because the customer buys the product? Or the distributing partner, which is the customer touch-point at...
CRM and Human Resources Are an Indispensable Duo
When implementing big CRM programs in their organizations, many companies are mainly focused on fulfilling the standard steps for CRM success: defining a CRM strategy, optimizing processes with a customer-centric view, aligning organizational structures with the re-assignment of roles and responsibilities and installing a...
The System Won’t Work, Unless Your Training First Focuses on Strategy
Once you've migrated your data, implemented programming interfaces and consolidated the IT architecture, all CRM IT implementation projects have a common objective when coming closer to the end of implementation: assuring that users really use the new CRM system. Generally speaking, user training is focused...
Sales and Service Have To Know They’re in the Same Boat
How can sales and service work together to turn a contact center into a profit center? You could also ask: How can Tom and Jerry be friends? The first thought you may have is that it is impossible to educate two completely different individuals...
What Is Senior Management’s Role in Cultural Change?
CRM cannot be implemented within an organization without any effort in cultural change management. Why? Because, rather than being just another system implementation, customer relationship management means a substantial change in the company's culture. You are moving from a short-term view on annual sales...
CRM Fear Factor: When Is It OK To Say No to a Customer?
CRM Fear Factor is an occasional series of articles in which an expert shows you how to meet a challenge. A car rental customer notices a minor scratch on the car before returning it. He does not mention this incident when he turns it in...