Victor Papanoum - people_to_help - Grow Your Business - David Reid Group Perth - Strategy, Marketing, Sales, People, Technology, Consulting and Coaching

Victor Papanoum

Victor is the proprietor of his own IT consultancy group that works closely with DRG. Victor helps DRG's clients develop and implement Customer Relationship Software (CRM) to support their marketing and sales strategies.

In this DRG snapshot Victor discusses how to get a CRM up and running effectively.

What are some of the problems businesses encounter when implementing technology?

One of the main problems is that technology gets forced upon people rather than implemented to help them. I've learned that it's very important to really understand what people want to do and what they need, and then implement the appropriate technology. One of the common problems is the communication gap between people who know a lot about technology and people who don't. People who have a need but don't understand technology often have trouble communicating that need to technology-minded people. I've learned that bridging this communication gap is very important.

When businesses are thinking about putting in a CRM system, what kind of things should they consider?

Firstly, they need to think about their business processes. They need to identify what it is they do to actually acquire their customers. Then they need to think about the number of customers they deal with and how many people in their internal staff are going to need to access the CRM system. These are the main factors that will influence the end decision of which technology to choose.

Can you describe the typical process you go through to help businesses make these decisions?

We start by looking at an overview of their business. Our aim is to help them

develop a strategy for what the technology will do for their business. Improving business processes before we implement technology helps save people a lot of effort adapting technology to meet their processes - which so often happens after implementation. The second step is to work out what their requirements are for a CRM. We look at how many customers there are and how many people will be using the system. We try to work out in as much detail as we can what the business needs from their CRM system.

How do you choose the right CRM?

When it comes to CRM's there are a range of products to choose from. This is why the requirements of the number of customers and number of users become so important, because the type of features you are looking for influence greatly the type of CRM. We can implement turn-key CRM solutions for our clients. This includes the business analysis discussed above, plus installation, configuration and maintenance of a CRM system. In addition, sometimes off the shelf CRM systems do not fulfill all of a client's requirements, so we can build custom applications for our clients that compliment the CRM system.

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