Know-How Exchange : Other

Hi,

I work for a local government agency we provide services to local public bodies - we are a consultancy of sorts.

I have have had little CRM experience so far and have been tasked with pulling together a CRM system of our clients using rather basic methods (i.e. Excel as we don't have a budget for a proper system yet).

The first steps are collating customer information from the various teams on their current contacts and details of the last contact made, follow-up required and which services they have bought from us in the past.

This is proving to be a bit of a slow process and people in my organisation are wanting clarification on who to include in the system. I guess it makes sense to put together a criteria of who we want to populate the CRM system with.

So far I have said:
- senior level decision makers
- contacts we have met recently (i.e. those we have a relationship with currently)

Any suggestions of other possible criteria?

Does anyone have any experience of putting a CRM list in place? Can anyone recommend a free/cheap CRM system, as I'm sure that Excel has its limitations!

One of the objectives of the CRM system is to avoid us tripping up over each other e.g. there have been instances of different people from various teams meeting the same contact for several different services on different occasions, which makes our organisation look unprofessional! Another key objective would be to do more cross selling of our services as many of our clients don't know our full range of services.

I'm studying for a Marketing Diploma which involves writing a Marketing Plan and am trying to figure out where does CRM fit within the 7ps? Would it be under People or Process?

Thanks very much,

V