The difference between the marketing concept and customer relationship management is thatMultiple choice question.CRM is the process of learning about existing customers and exceeding their expectationsCRM is the process of focusing on the goods and services that will make the most profitCRM recognizes that the product features are most important in making the saleCRM focuses on persuading customers that your products are better than competitors' products

Customer relationship management (CRM) focuses on the net present value of a customer’s business over the span of its expected relationship with the selling organization.Group of answer choicesfalsetrue

The implementation of customer relationship management (CRM) is a method ofMultiple Choicemanaging inventory.rearranging the facility layout.changing the organizational structure.getting close to customers and understanding their needs.improving an organization’s product development plan.

Analyse the link between the technology used by the organisation and the concept of Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

What is the primary purpose of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?Question 12Answera.To manage detailed information about individual customers and all customer “touch points” to maximize loyaltyb.To design marketing campaignsc.To develop new products

Section 5Customer Relationship ManagementCustomer relationship management, or CRM, refers to a company’s efforts to manage its interactions with current and potential customers. For many companies, these interactions involve more than just emails, thus email marketing represents only one of many channels in the CRM portfolio that must be coordinated. An email marketer in these companies must understand how email marketing functions within the CRM ecosystem. CRM is especially important and common in the business-to-business sector.Figure 8.5.1 shows a basic CRM system. The marketing team works to generate leads: potential customers who have expressed interest in the product or products being sold by Company X. These leads can come from a variety of sources. They might request information from the company’s website, fill out an information card at a business expo, or attend an event hosted by Company X. Company X will not assign a salesperson to pursue every lead, for a variety of reasons. First, the lead may come from someone who has no decision making authority in his/her company, so Company X’s time would be wasted trying to sell to this lead. Second, Company X might generate hundreds of leads per day, so it is better off focusing only on the small number of leads that could potentially generate sales. Third, some leads are not yet ready to convert. These leads need more information before they are ready to talk to a salesperson. Company X should send these leads regular emails with information that can help them come to a place where they might be ready to engage in serious discussion with a salesperson. This is known as lead nurturing.Figure 8.5.1 (Source: Stukent)Email marketing is an important part of the CRM system because for many companies, the majority of leads are not passed onto the sales team but rather kept within the marketing team to be nurtured via regular emails from the company. Measurement of email response is important because it can indicate when a lead has been sufficiently nurtured and should be passed on to the sales team. If a lead never opens any emails from the company, then this lead should not be passed on to sales and should eventually stop being sent emails. But if a lead opens emails regularly, clicks on information within the email to learn more, regularly visits the website to find additional information (this can be tracked in most CRM systems), and is only one of many people from that company to express interest in Company X’s products, then Company X should pass that information to the sales team to open a more active dialogue.Email marketing can also play a role in the Customer Support section of CRM. When Company X closes a sale with another company, employees within the client company will have to be trained on Company X’s product(s). Email marketing can provide worthwhile training information to these employees. In addition, these clients can further be nurtured via email for potential upselling or cross-selling opportunities. For example, if Company X sells product management software, a client may only use a portion of their software suite. Through email marketing, Company X can inform the client’s employees about the other portions of the software suite to enable further selling opportunities to the same client.In Section 2 of this chapter, you learned about email segmentation, or targeting subsets of the email list with content that is likely to match their interests. The CRM system enables even more sophisticated segmentation, because a CRM system typically contains more information about the lead than his/her email address. The CRM system might know the company, position, and website history of a contact, for example. If the lead is an IT professional, you might send him/her different emails than if the lead is a VP of Marketing. Similarly, if the lead has visited your website many times and mainly visited pages dedicated to the topic of IT infrastructure management, you know to send emails related to that topic.A close cousin of CRM is marketing automation. Marketing automation refers to software that allows a company to automate and optimize digital marketing efforts across multiple channels. In the example just mentioned, a marketing automation system would be able to automatically cater email content toward that lead’s interests in IT infrastructure management, but only if the manager of the marketing automation system is able to program good guidelines for the system to optimize the timing and topics of email and other marketing content. A good email marketer should be able to write good email content that can match various interests likely to be expressed by potential customers. Being a smart email marketer can thus benefit your company’s marketing and sales efforts by improving both its CRM and its marketing automation.