Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System Assignment
Added on 2020-04-01
4 Pages1637 Words51 Views
REAL CHOICES AT THE SMITH’S SNACKFOODCOMPANY
Question 1: What are some of the critical issues facing Smith’s?Solution 1: Smith’s Snackfood Company is facing some really daunting challenges. Firstly,there is an increasing trend of eating a wider spectrum of snack products plus healthier snacks.This has heightened competition in the wider “macro snacking” marketplace. With growingcompetition in the healthy snack segment as well, Smith’s is faced with the challenge ofcompeting for the already small shelf spaces in the retail stores. It is highly critical to managingrelationships with retailers and with the intensifying rivalry, this becomes harder and harder.Identifying whitespace prospects which match the marketplace dynamics, taste preferences andculture take a detailed and critical analysis of the retail landscape plus the customer trends whichdrive buying habits. Processing so much amount of information and filtering only the onerequired is another major challenge faced by the company. The challenge is to gatherinformation from different markets and assimilating it into one so that all members of the salesforce are equipped with the necessary information about every store (Solomon et al., 2013).Moreover, with rising competition in the “macro snacking” market, the company faces thechallenge of deciding the type and amount of information required by its sales force to beeffective. Although the company has a knowledge management portal which offers a centralpoint of access to the database, however, with the changing consumer trends and buying habits,plus rising competition, there is a need for more sturdy knowledge management. Question 2: What strategies could be introduced to manage these issues?Solution 2: It takes more than a hearty crunch and great flavours to sell a Snack. It is evidentthrough the case that capturing the corporate information and industry best practices have helpedthe Smith’s management earlier in providing employees something they could use for efficientsales. Below mentioned strategies are recommended to manage the issues highlighted above:Employing a sales-oriented CRM system – An efficient CRM system with a sales focus can helpSmith’s salesforce in staying focused and organized. With properties like automatic reminders,lead prioritization, and customer specific data, the sales team is likely to receive only thatinformation which is critical in increasing sales. With help of such system, Smith’s can expect toexperience a rise in its salesforce closing ratio together with greater productivity (Hung et al.,2015). Arming the sales team with collaboration and mobile communication tools – The company’ssalesforce is likely to spend most part of their time on the field, hence they require remote andeasy access to critical and timely sales and consumer information via a mobile CRM app orsolution. This will enable them to perform with real-time data and to modify a prospect’sinformation instantly, instead of waiting till they come back to the office. This will also enablemanagers to track data efficiently through the sales funnel (Tseng and Pin-Hong, 2014). Smith’smust also make it convenient for its salesforce to have immediate access to the up-to-dateproduct specs and contracts from a device – phone, laptop or tablet. Moreover, as they will beneeding to edit or draw documents, for e.g. a contract to finalize a deal at the quarter end, thecompany must make sure that they can do so easily without having to jump across multipledevices and apps (Fu, 2015). Using an advanced search engine – As there is no advanced search engine being used at Smith’scurrently, the company can choose from different advanced search engines available. These willenable the users (salespeople) to find information spread in various repositories like
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