Having a dedicated CRM can give your venue a tremendous boost in terms of generating new business and driving incremental revenues from your existing clientele.
It also helps reduce your operating costs as you can easily pinpoint which marketing channels are effective and which are not.
Let’s explore the checklist you need to succeed and see how the CRM can work wonderfully with other solutions such as venue management software to deliver the maximum impact to your venue.
Getting it right from the start
Implementing a new solution for your venue such a CRM can be a time-consuming exercise. A poor implementation can lead to low user adoption, unnecessary expense and ultimately impact the return on investment.
Here are our recommendations to guide you through the process of CRM implementation:
1. Define your outcomes
You need to start with a clear set of end goals. For example:
- You want to increase the number of bookings by X% to your existing clients
- You want to increase the efficiency of your sales team
- Improving the quality and effectiveness of your marketing campaigns
- Streamline the order process – less time on admin and more time invested on customer service
- Improve the process of sales people recording activities and being able to produce accurate forecasts
These outcomes need to be clear business goals not technological. While having your data in one place is a great technological goal it is not a benefit in itself. What you do with that data is key.
2. Clarify value
Once you have defined your outcomes the next step is to be able to clearly articulate the value this creates for your venue. This is critical in terms of justifying the expenditure you need – in time and money – to deploy a new solution.
The value can be both tangible:
- We expect to grow all revenues by £x million over y years
- We expect to save x man hours a month worth y for the business
Or softer benefits:
- Our staff will be more motivated because they spend less time on admin
- Our customers will get a greater experience and will be happier
3. Define your requirements
Once you have clearly defined your outcomes the next step is to engage the whole organisation to define a clear set of system requirements.
This provides a great basis for when you approach CRM vendors to request a demo and pricing.
4. Evaluate your investment
In order to build the business case for your CRM project you need to have a clear idea of the investment required.
If you have done a good job articulating the previous steps then your vendor should be able to quickly give you indicative costs of what is involved in a successful project.
Ask them to talk you through similar projects so you get an understanding of the scope and what the responsibilities will be for both parties.
Then you can get an understanding of what is required in terms of resourcing in order to fully define the investment required.
5. Ask yourself some questions
The next step is to ask yourself some questions:
- Will we lose business as the result of not having a CRM?
- Have I clearly defined the business case and documented clear outcomes?
- Do I have the support of the executive team?
- Do I have a budget signed off? Have I allowed enough contingency to ensure the project will reach completion?
- Do you have a clearly defined set of requirements?
- How shall I select the right vendor?
- Do I have the resources I need?
If you can answer yes to these questions then you are ready.
Look at the CRM holistically
A wider question to ask is how the CRM can fit into your existing or future infrastructure – and enhance it.
Creating an integrated technology toolkit or eco-system will deliver a better result than deploying solutions in isolation.
For venues, we recommend the Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution integrated with our Rendezvous venue management software.
Dynamics and venue management software integration offers a number of key benefits:
- Easy to use
- Cloud-based for fast deployment
- Excellent tools for social media and email campaign management
- Highly graphical and accurate pipeline reporting
- Full capture of client communications
- Integration with Microsoft Office – no more hunting through email chains
- Ability to access the events diary from the CRM – great for client calls and show rounds
- Capability to create engaging customer retention campaigns powered by historical data
- Further integrations with e-signature applications and online event bookings totally streamline the sales order process
Thanks to this integration you eliminate time spent on rekeying bookings into the venue management software, you achieve one centralised database and you can analyse and, more importantly, act on your historical booking data.
Watch our video to find out more about the benefits of the integrated approach.
Conclusion
A CRM is a crucial part of your wider venue technology toolkit. Careful consideration and a systematic approach can ensure that your CRM implementation is a roaring success.
For true success, you need to consider the wider implications of how you use your data, where you can store it and the systems that you can integrate to create the total solution that will drive efficiencies, maximise sales and deliver the best possible return on investment.
Check out our brochure or watch the dynamics video to see what success could look like for you.
