Two Cores of CRM System Design: Core Object and Core Process

Well Joe
9 min readApr 22, 2022

Introduction

The CRM system of our company comes into the system analysis stage. After the CRM system is built, it will provide support for various business systems. The content I am responsible for is mainly marketing tool products, but I am curious about the CRM system. Therefore, I have conducted some investigations on the CRM system. This article is more about my understanding of the CRM system and the core content of CRM system design.

1. Introduction of CRM System

CRM system is the customer relationship management system.

Customer relationship management system refers to the use of software, hardware and network technology to establish an information system for enterprises to collect, manage, analyze and utilize customer information.

For example, a gym has just started business. If the gym wants to record the information of gym members, it only needs a notepad to manage the records, and the sales representative can make related sales. With the development, the gym has established several chain gyms in the city. In order to process and store member information, the gym can be managed through EXCLE form. With the expansion of the gym business, members in different cities and countries are recorded, and business opportunities are sought for related sales. At this time, a CRM system is needed to record customer information and help relevant personnel make decisions.

In short, CRM system is to collect customer related data and use it in subsequent enterprise decision-making.

1. Core of CRM

The core of the CRM system is the customer, and the main task is to collect customer data as accurately, completely and timely as possible, including the basic data of the customer itself and the data of the interaction between the customer and the enterprise.

Why should we collect customer data as accurately, completely and timely as possible?

Customer data is actually information about customers. Only when it is described clearly and recorded as completely as possible can it better help business personnel carry out business conversion and be used for subsequent analysis. The information is time-effective. If a customer expresses his intention to buy an air conditioner and sale representative follows up with the customer within one month, it is more likely to reach a transaction. If this information is entered after one year, there is no possibility of this transaction.

Customer-enterprise interaction not only refers to person-to-person contact and communication between customers and business personnel, but also includes interactions between customers and enterprises in various Internet scenarios, such as participating in corporate lottery on festival, Facebook Homepage event, etc., as well as the interaction of customers with enterprises in various offline scenarios, of course, such information is difficult to collect.

The core of all kinds of customer and potential customer data in CRM is to help companies better understand their customers and potential customers, and ultimately help companies provide customers with more suitable services and products (note that it is not better services and products. ) to increase the company’s turnover.

2. CRM types

  • As far as my previous research results, combined with other companies coming to our company to sell CRM systems, I can roughly divide CRM systems into two types based on the way the CRM system has channels for lead collection and lead conversion:
  • Business ecosystem CRM system. This kind of CRM system provides relevant channels for enterprises to use to help enterprises collect sales leads and lead transformation. Generally, such CRM system providers themselves have a strong ecosystem, which is directly the sales channel or operation channel of enterprises, such as the Tiktok CRM. This kind of CRM itself has many constraints, and the CRM system of a big company we came into contact with before has great binding force on the customer portrait.

These two types of CRM systems for large enterprises, enterprises of business ecology CRM system will more choose API to call services and data (because large enterprises are involved in various platforms). Enterprises of pure tool CRM system integrates and manages the data of all platforms.

2. Core Objects of CRM

The core objects of the CRM system are customers, leads, contacts, and business opportunities. The correspondence between these four is as follows:

  1. Customer: the subject of transaction. In different industries and different links, customers correspond to different objects, which can be an organization or an individual, and can have a certain organizational structure.
  2. Leads (potential customers): It is the object or object data that may have a transaction. Leads can be converted into customers through business opportunities, and the process of converting leads into customers is the conversion process of leads. In some CRM systems, leads and potential customers are again distinguished. In a more detailed distinction, leads are defined as object data that may be traded (with a lower probability), while potential customers have a high intention to trade. , and enter the purchase phase of the object.
  3. Contact: The main body interacting with the enterprise, the person who has an influence on the transaction, or the business contact person. In the retail industry, the contact person may be the customer itself, but not necessarily in other industries. For example, a school is going to buy a batch of air conditioners, and the customer is the school organization, but the contact person may be the school finance manager, or principal. There is a subordinate relationship between them.
  4. Business opportunity: an opportunity to generate a transaction. Business opportunities come from customers. A customer may have multiple transactions. Business opportunities are the intention of customers to buy a product or service every time, and it is also the beginning of completing sales performance.

Most of the information in CRM is to describe these four types of objects. The characteristics of these four types of objects are better described by means of system tagging and manual tagging, and then the customer portrait is analyzed and the crowd is grouped with the help of tags, customer information, interactive information and other information.

3. CRM core process

The main users of CRM system are the operation and sales personnel of the enterprise. Through the analysis of enterprise customers and contacts, the operation personnel determine the operation direction of subsequent activities, and conduct accurate marketing through crowd grouping, while the sales personnel better recommend products and services for customers through customer information. In addition to operation and sales personnel, the analysis of customer group portraits in CRM can help enterprises plan their future development direction and products.

The functioning of the above CRM systems are based on CRM customer information. Therefore, for the CRM system, its core processes are as follows:

  1. Leads collection
  2. Leads conversion

Leads collection

The collection of online leads mainly focuses on the source of data / information. The collection methods can be divided into automatic collection and manual addition.

  1. Automatic collection: Collect online leads through the data API provided by each platform. For example, if you register a software for use, you can collect some information into the leads pool for subsequent corresponding conversion and grading. It should be noted that the data of each platform needs to be standardized.
  2. Manual addition (including information import): You need to provide an upload template to standardize the data upload format.

In the actual business scenario, when the lead is submitted and imported, the CRM system needs to perform the following processing according to the actual situation:

Lead verification: mainly exclude invalid contact information, such as mobile phone number, irregular format of open_id, etc.

Lead deduplication: in the actual business scenario, there are often repeated submission of leads in the online lead collection, and the conditions for identifying repeated submission of leads need to be formulated. The actual situation of the scene needs to be taken into account when removing duplicated leads. Whether a lead is a duplicated lead needs to take into account the collection channel, market events, upload time and other factors. In CRM system, it is suggested to provide system configuration rules and user-defined rules.

Lead merging: lead merging refers to that potential customers may express their trading intentions in different channels and at different time points. Different business opportunities can be derived from different trading intentions, or follow-up leads can be graded according to the number of intention expressions.

Lead duplication override: Lead duplication override refers to covering the previous information with the latest information. For example, the same potential customer expressed the intention to trade three months ago and one week ago, and the previous leads can be covered with the leads from one week ago. The advantage of Lead duplication override is that long-term and invalid leads can be closed in time to save resources, but more careful lead duplication override rules are required.

Lead cleaning: lead verification mainly verifies the specification of the data. In fact, it is not known whether the lead information actually corresponds to the entity. The main goal of lead cleaning is to ensure that each lead ultimately corresponds to an entity that can conduct transactions. . Generally speaking, two methods of intelligent cleaning and manual cleaning are used, or a combination of the two methods is used. Which method of lead cleaning is selected is related to the number and type of customer objects of the enterprise.

Lead grading: Lead grading is to score based on lead information to prepare for subsequent lead assignment. Generally speaking, the scoring basis of leads includes basic customer information, key information, key behaviors, interactive behaviors, etc., which can better provide a basis for subsequent customer conversions through tags.

The above content cannot be applied to all enterprise scenarios. The more business models that are oriented to individual consumers, the more detailed leads need to be collected. However, for products and services directly oriented to enterprise, the link Could be more refined.

2. Conversion of leads

The conversion of leads is to find suitable business opportunities for sales. In addition to providing guidance and help for the actual business, in the actual scenario, the first thing that needs to be done for the conversion of leads is the distribution and assignment of leads.

  • Lead distribution: refers to the distribution of leads from the upper-level organization to the lower-level organization, for example, from the headquarters to the dealers. The distribution of leads mainly considers which organization the lead belongs to, and the uniqueness and confidentiality of the lead between organizations. There are two ways to distribute leads: system distribution and manual distribution. System distribution is mainly responsible for satisfying distribution rules and distributes in a timely and orderly manner. Manual distribution is a supplement to system distribution and mainly deals with abnormal situations during distribution.
  • Lead Assignment: Assign leads from departments by managers to employees. Lead assignment mainly considers how to assign leads to the right people. Some CRM systems will provide system assignment, and you can configure system assignment rules. This method can be selected for transactions with low customer value and a large number of customers, but manual assignment is more suitable for transactions with high customer value.

The distribution and assignment of leads vary in different enterprises. The above is just a general situation. The stronger the upper level organization controls the lower level organization, the better the organization can carry out lead distribution. However, the relationship between the organizations of many enterprises is more similar to cooperation than that between the upper and lower levels. The headquarters provides products for brand publicity, but the sales companies and stores master the main sales channels and a large number of customers, Especially many traditional manufacturing enterprises.

For these enterprises, in terms of online lead distribution and lead distribution, we need to consider the organizational structure and lead sources, abide by the leads collected by the organization should be distributed, and maintain their own lead pool.

After the leads are distributed and assigned, the sales staff are required to follow up the sales. At this point, the system is more of a supervision and guidance role, such as untimely follow-up of leads, suggestions on sales tactics, and so on.

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Summary

So far, the main content of CRM has been summarized. With the accumulation of data in the CRM system, subsequent data analysis, customer portraits, marketing settings and other features will also be supported by data.

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