Information is King, and the correct analysis of the information is the Kingdom.

It’s a recession and it time for all hands on deck. The obvious course in a company is to work overtime to bring in new customers. Above and beyond this, companies and employees need to work smarter as well. With the right ERP & CRM systems, your business can shine in challenging climates by becoming more resourceful, strategic and ultimately profitable by focusing resources on serving existing customers and developing incremental revenues and profits in the process.

Information is King, and the correct analysis of the information is the Kingdom.

It’s A Recession And That’s Good News for ERP & CRM Systems, Now Is The Time To Shine

It’s a recession and it time for all hands on deck.  The obvious course in a company is to work overtime to bring in new customers.  Above and beyond this, companies and employees need to work smarter as well.  With the right ERP & CRM systems, your business can shine in challenging climates by becoming more resourceful, strategic and ultimately profitable by focusing resources on serving existing customers and developing incremental revenues and profits in the process.

How  can you use your enterprise systems (ERP & CRM) to maximize your profitability in an economic downturn?

Here are four ways that ERP & CRM systems can maximize your customer relationships during an economic slump.

One. Use your relationship with current customers to provide more value and get more business-  An economic slowdown does not mean that everything stops.  Companies know that in order to stay in business in the long run it’s important to not let the competition drive you into obsolescence.  A company that halts all spending in an economic slowdown, may find that they lose critical competitive advantage that may never be recovered when business picks back up.  In any environment there are always opportunity to sell more value added goods and services to existing customers. The secret is using effective selling strategies that offer the right products at the right time.

The greatest benefits of ERP & CRM systems are that they retrieve, organize and store valuable information about your customers and let you regroup and analyze important information about your client that may bring to light obvious needs and solutions that can build their business and ultimately your own.  For instance, ERP & CRM information can generate a needs-based report to highlight what their organization is needing and what they are not buying.  Crafting a sales strategy with this information showing return on investment, increased customer satisfaction, or an increase in speed of processing, whatever the case may be, is an effective way to offer additional products and services in an attractive manner, one that may infact save the customer money in the very short term as well as in the long run.


Furthermore, ERP & CRM can highlight products and solutions that are the most beneficial to your customers’ productivity.  These may not be your company’s highest ticket items, or the ones with the highest profitability, but it’s a great way to help your customers become more profitable while increasing sales in your organization.

A very useful analysis that is easily prepared from ERP & CRM data is the hourly profitability of sales resources for each product category or group.  The benefit of this type of report is intuitive and easy to understand, but nothing will be intuitive unless you first get the information.  As was stated before, information is king, and the correct grouping and analysis of the information is the kingdom. Once you have both, you can strategize and formulate an effective and fruitful sales plan.

Two. Go with the 80 20 rule.  Highlight who your best customers are.  As the 80 20 rule shows, 20 percent of your customers account for 80 percent of your revenues.  Find out who these customers are and focus your sales resources on this select group accordingly.  In tough times its important to maximize your resources.  While every customer is important you can improve your average revenue per sales hour achieving higher average sales.

As with product analysis, ERP & CRM systems have the capability of thoroughly analyzing your customer database so you can categorize and classify them to maximize your productivity.  Once you see the information presented in various scenarios and groupings, you may be surprised and even amazed at what you find.  In many cases these findings have led to dramatic restructuring of sales strategies, incentive plans and staffing.  By highlighting the diamond in the rough customers who were virtually ignored, you may find a wealth of new opportunities at hand that will drive significant incremental revenues with minimal resources.

ERP & CRM analytical tools go above and beyond simply customer rankings by revenue.  By going one level deeper, you will be able to look at return per saleses hour for your customers and see what products are the most profitable and which customers are more likely to purchase them.  The various ways to dissect the information are many and the beauty of the enterprise systems software is they allow you to customize the analytics to your business needs.

Three. Now Look for New Customers. Once you have combed the opportunities with existing customers, its time to go outside of the ecosystem.  The economy may be a little rough, but that does not mean that its impossible to get new customers, not by a longshot.  The only difference may be that there are less resources to spend and a lower margin for error.  This means that you will have to work smarter as well.  This means that lead analysis is more and more critical to your company.  Streamlining the process of finding out which leads are the highest probability of becoming customers and what products would they most likely purchase are critical in developing an effective external sales strategy.

You need to use your ERP systems to find the pool of customers with the highest probability of purchasing your goods.  Pinpointing where a customer is in the sales cycle process can streamline your efforts and increase your conversion percentage.  Focusing your sales strategy on these two data points alone will greatly increase sales results and productivity.

Four. Keep your Bread And Butter Happy- Make sure your current companies are happy and keep them happy.

Keeping a customer happy can entail quite a few things, but in reality it’s a lot more straightforward than it seems.  If you are sure to keep to your commitments and do what you said you would do and generally look out for their needs you will be in good shape.  ERP and CRM enterprise systems can help you ensure that both of these things happen. Unfortunately, many times there was a simple communication gap, a promise or follow up was simply forgotten by the sales person or customer service representative.


Mistakes of forgetting commitments can be eliminated with proper processes and the right enterprise systems.  Unfortunately, sometimes the smallest misstates can lose customers.   With the right procedures in place and the right ERP and CRM systems to ensure follow-up, provide the right information and  analysis your will maximize all your business has to offer and thrive in economic downturns.