Why Your Company Should Only Have One Client List

At RightSite, one of the most common customer requests that we get is for assistance in managing their many client lists.

Essentially, the idea is that a few hundred separate Excel files containing customer information can be made into a few hundred online systems. Although we can’t really tell most clients this directly, the real answer is that most of your client lists need to be thrown away.

I have blogged about this earlier in my post about syncing your CRM with your email marketing platform, and it continues to be the case, that for any company to handle their sales, marketing, customer service and back office operations efficiently, and to best serve the needs of their customers, everyone in the company needs to be working together on one big list. A winning company is a one list company.

Working as a Team Means Sharing One List

Whether the customer is a Fortune 500 firm or a startup operation, we often find that they maintain separate client lists for each department and that there may even be several different lists in any one department.

Somehow these companies then expect their team members to work together on the basis of occasional meetings to discuss key clients, and maybe a semi-annual team building operation.

For any company which is serious about cross-selling and breaking down the silos that separate team members, one of the first steps is to get client information off of individual workstations, out of departmental shared drives and onto shared systems that operate around a single client list. Before there is any discussion about what kind of CRM or ERP software should be used, the company needs to have a strategy for unifying their customer information.

Of course, there may be very good reasons why you don’t want your customer service team seeing revenue information, and there needs to be separation and safeguards for protecting client information even within an individual sales team, but that’s why business systems are usually set up to offer users access rights according to teams and rank within those teams.

Good Systems Facilitate Collaboration

If your company is using a system that does not allow your team members to easily share and collaborate in working with customers, then that is a bad system.  And yes, Excel was not set up as an information sharing system.

As CRM applications have improved, and a universe of software emerges that can tie your CRM to social media, email and other platforms, it is easier than ever to unify information in your company and to give your team systems that actually make their jobs easier instead of just satisfying the reporting needs of senior management.

In the weeks to come I will continue to share with you some of the latest applications and innovations for helping your company track customer data, and if you have ideas of your own, please feel free to contact me here on Mingtiandi.