SaaS CRM Delivers Agility to Charity Business

The greatest benefit to be achieved from Software As A Service (SaaS), particularly in the area of customer relationship management (CRM) is agility. Particularly for small and medium sized businesses, the ability to switch on an application and have results within weeks or in some cases days of its implementation is a tremendous advantage. With the economy still struggling after a deep recession, threats from competitors, the red tape of bureaucracy and the need to react quickly to changing market dynamics, SME’s with their often limited resources need agile solutions that are not expensive and/or prone to need an army of specialists to implement. SaaS CRM is putting greater IT power and flexibility in the hands of the business, allowing sales and customer service functions to have more control on their application, how it is implemented, used, changed and expanded.

An example of this type of agile implementation can be seen from Charity Business (CB), a social enterprise that provides financial outsourcing and consultancy for the not-for-profit sector. CB’s sales have risen year on year since the organization was formed in 2000; however the vast majority of increased turnover was reactive arising from word of mouth referral and charities contacting CB for assistance. No adequate application was in place to be able track and monitor leads, opportunities, forecasts, providing the ability to properly qualify sales leads and follow the process through to closure.

To make a real step change and dramatically increase turnover, particularly in tough economic times,  CB needed greater visibility and transparency of the sales process. Less than a month into their adoption of a SaaS CRM product CB had loaded into the new system all their two thousand plus contacts from a legacy database, setup opportunities, implemented pipeline reporting, was accurately forecasting sales income, had greater knowledge of their customer base (who they could cross sell services to) and could view the activity from sales in order to measure staff performance. After the first month they were in a position to start linking their website to the SaaS software automatically generating leads from their website, they have also introduced the ability to request product setup automatically via the web with SaaS. Outlook was easily integrated from the beginning and all correspondence with potential clients/opportunities is tracked with the ability to hold standard documentation within the SaaS application (proposals, contracts etc). This ensures a consistent sales approach with each and every client. Campaign management has been setup to provide feedback on which marketing activity delivers the best results.

The organization is also now looking to use the service management element of SaaS CRM, replacing an existing system so that they can achieve a single point of contact database, providing staff with the ability to view each communication with the client, this benefits account managers when they have reviews with clients and customer services where potential opportunities can flag the importance of a client experiencing service issues.

Starting with a small number of users CB has easily scaled up their use of the system and has further plans for increased adoption throughout the organization, which for a small organization is a very cost efficient manageable and agile way to implement a very sophisticated solution to an age old problem that many small business face.

Some may consider that SaaS erodes the role of the IT function, but in fact, IT still has the traditional role to play of providing the infrastructure (which in the case of SaaS is the network link, gateway out to the internet and the desktop/laptop environment), ensuring that any integration requirement with other software is successfully carried and the continual support of those elements. The advantage is that the sales and marketing function is not dependent upon the IT function to make configuration changes to the SaaS application which supports their sales and marketing processes. As we now live in such a dynamic age with new ideas and concepts being introduced all the time – e.g. social networking, the sales and marketing function needs the ability to respond quickly and in a manner that suits the business requirements – SaaS provides those benefits.

About the author:

Val Austin has ten years experience in executive and non-executive roles for both private equity firms and FTSE 250 organisations. Each new role in her career has posed not only a unique IT, but a wider business challenge. A challenge Valerie has been eager to meet as it has allowed her to gain invaluable commercial experience of sourcing, negotiation, corporate governance, recruitment of senior staff, implementing best practice and formulating IT strategy. Val has implemented two SaaS CRM solutions, one in a large waste management organization and more recently within Charity Business. Val runs her own consultancy/interim management practice – Zen Technologies Limited and can be contacted at valerie.austin@zen.co.uk.

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