Answer Key

1. What are the typical objectives of implementing CRM by organizations? Give suitable examples
to justify your answer.
a. Objectives can be
i. Identifying customers/prospects
ii. Acquiring customers and prospects
iii. Developing customers
iv. Cross selling upselling
v. Managing migrations
vi. Servicing customers
vii. Retaining customers
viii. Increasing loyalty
ix. Winning back lost customers
2. CRM can be classified as: Operational, Collaborative and Analytical. Explain the role of
Operational CRM.
a. Covers customer facing transactions
b. Includes Sales Force Automation, Enterprise Marketing Automation, Front Office Suites
c. Includes typical business functions like customer service, order management etc.
3. What is meant by Customer Life Cycle? Why is it importance in Relationship Management?
a. The stages a customer goes through from the time before deciding to do business with
an organization until he/she decides to stop being a customer.
b. The progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using,
and maintaining loyalty to a product or service.
c. The goal of effective CRM is to get the customer to move through the cycle again and
again.
4. What is information empowerment of the sales force? What data sales force have to collect to
make CRM successful?
a. CRM is providing sales forces with the capability to monitor their business better.
b. The foundation for these capabilities is the acquisition of better information collected
from a variety of customer touch points.
c. Sales collects and inputs the following buyer organization data:
i. objectives
ii. motivations
iii. purchase cycles
iv. available budgets (open to buy)
v. purchase authority
vi. buying-committee involvement
5. What is Sales Force Automation?
a. Putting account information directly in the hands of field sales staff.
b. Making them responsible for it for better results
c. Making them more productive.

d. Synchronize information with the corporate client/server database.

6. What is Key Account Management? What are the advantages to the sales professionals of
maintaining key accounts?
a. What is KAM?
i. Important account
ii. Prioritise resource allocation
b. Advantages
i. Develop closer relationships: trust, align products/services closer to business
requirements or strategic goals
ii. Customer base stability buyers not switching between suppliers
iii. Profit / sales volume increases
iv. Word of mouth promotion
v. Personal relationship development
vi. Problem solving ability
7. Explain the terms: Data Warehouse, Data Mining and Data Mart.
a. Data warehouse (DW)
i. More static than ODS
ii. Large depth and breadth of information
iii. Data transformed into knowledge
iv. Analysis strategy and planning applications
b. Data marts (DM)
i. Receives data from DW or ODS, but usually the former
ii. Limited but concentrated information
iii. Data transformed into knowledge
iv. Analysis, strategy and planning applications
v. Usually designed for use as a narrow application
vi. Data mining and statistics
c. Data Mining
i. Convert data into information
ii. Information aging
iii. Convert information into knowledge
8.