Having the right customer management systems in place can be a significant factor in sales effectiveness and quality of service to business customers.

Typical areas where customers experience frustration include:

• Recurring inaccuracies in invoicing, despite their drawing this to the supplier's attention. This can take up significant customer resources and rapidly undermine good work in other areas
• Unable to get relevant management data from the supplier in use of a product/ service, e.g. use by site, region, business unit
• Supplier regional offices not able to access agreed national terms, therefore discounts and special terms not being provided

Typical areas where management and staff can be frustrated include:

• Unable to see a comprehensive national profile of a customer across all products/ services
• Unable to respond quickly on status of agreed actions
• No efficient system for entering and communicating sales reports
• No easy means of modelling customers and resources to optimise use of sales and other resources

However, some companies 'overkill' the role of systems by attempting to bring in large and expensive 'one size fits all' CRM systems.

Such systems are frequently very expensive, take a long time to implement and don't support managing different customer segments in different ways. They are often based on weak assumptions about what customers actually want from their suppliers and what contact staff are looking for at a practical day to day level.

Our experience is that customer management systems should reflect and support good customer management processes. Key account requirements are often not complex and can frequently be addressed quickly.

Macquarie Marketing Group work with companies to identify what is optimal based on customer expectations, staff and management needs, the supplier's customer management approach and external best practice.

Before investing millions in CRM systems, we strongly urge companies with major accounts to undertake this kind of analysis. The results can be quite dramatic in identifying priorities that vendors do not focus on and achieving quicker and more cost-effective systems.