Customer Relationship Management is all about maximizing the long term business relationship with your customers. In order to do this you need to ensure that you become efficient with how you market, sell and provide service to your customers. The problem here is that this is a significant challenge for most small to mid-size businesses, who often do not have the resources or experience to become a more efficient sales and service organization. Those who foolishly believe that a good CRM system will address this requirement have found out the hard way that it won’t and are now frustrated that a year has gone by with little to no change.

The fact is that online CRM software programs have proven to be an excellent tool for facilitating change and helping you to improve sales execution and customer service, but like an automobile that’s driven by a human being, CRM software doesn’t work by itself. It’s driven by experienced people who understand business workflow, sales process management and can manage change.  Well what if you don’t have these people?  Does this mean you can’t become more efficient or improve your internal business processes?  Of course not and in fact the availability of experienced resources is one of the key components that is now differentiating one CRM software provider from another.

Commence Corporation for example has been providing customer management software to small and mid-size businesses for more than two decades and while in the past businesses selected Commence CRM for its  powerful feature set and flexibility, today it’s an array of professional services that’s making the difference.

“We’ve got a top rated CRM solution” says Larry Caretsky, President of Commence Corporation, “but it’s the value added services that we provide that is making the difference for our customers and for our business.  We have a staff of sales, marketing and customer service personnel that average 20 years in the business who are filling the resource gap and providing substantial value to small and mid-size businesses at an extremely affordable cost. This team has helped companies establish business practices for managing the sales cycle, created target marketing campaigns, improved lead generation and lead qualification and implemented an automated ticket management system for improved customer service.  No other CRM software provider can offer this level of service to the SMB community” says Caretsky, “and it is the difference between a failed CRM implementation and providing a return on investment for our customers.”

Image “UX Help” by Betsy Weber on Flickr under Creative Commons license.