Customer Relationship Management (CRM) RFP Template Sample

1.1

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation creates a beneficial bind between service and sales organizations. The CRM software solution should be able to deliver on a range of goals in multiple environments (such as business-to-business and business-to-consumer).

Often, the CRM software solution is expected to be able to identify market segments and target them in as many ways as possible. CRM Marketing automation software solution should be able to identify customer prospects by name, location, and buying habits.

In addition, it must have appropriate analytical components to support reporting and prediction of customer behavior so that it can improve future campaigns.

1.2

Sales Force Automation (SFA)

Sales Force Automation (SFA) is the automation of the sales cycle by linking your outside sales, inside sales, technical support, management, and service and customer care. The goal is to increase communication and hence efficiency between sales and support teams.

1.3

Customer Service and Support

Customer Service and Support helps better understand one's customers and anticipate their interest in an enterprise's products and/or services through processes occurring throughout the marketing, sales, and service stages.

Customer relationship management (CRM) applications are front-end tools designed to facilitate the capture, consolidation, analysis, and enterprise-wide dissemination of data from existing and potential customers.

Multi-channel interaction management is the ability to prioritize, route, track, manage and report on all interactions regardless of media type, and provide real-time and historical reporting on each of those interactions. These capabilities help companies understand their customers and business practices, and allow them to adjust accordingly. A multi-channel interaction management solution helps companies derive value from each and every interaction.

1.4

Partner Management

Partner management supports, usually through a web portal dedicated to partners, basic functionality for partner management, such as partner information management (create, search, update, and delete), opportunity and lead source tracking and automatic notification, opportunity and lead assignment and automatic notification, all of these based on user-definable rules and workflow.

The CRM software solution should provide a variety of pre-designed partner management reports, partners sales and performance reports, and tools to help implement best practices regarding different partner management activities.

1.5

Contract Management and Creation

The Contract Management and Creation section enables organizations to manage, whether electronically or in a more conventional manner, contract lifecycle from contract creation and modification, to contract expiration and renewal, while supporting for multiple currencies; all of these based on user-definable rules and workflow.

The CRM software solution should provide a contract data record management process, a user-maintainable library of pre-designed contract templates for clauses and layouts, tools to help implement best practices regarding contract management activities, and pre-designed contract-related analytics (charts and graphs) available for display on dashboards and reports.

1.6

Project and Team Management

Project and Team Management enables organizations to manage project lifecycle and project team, from project kickoff and role definition to personnel assignment, project execution and completion; all of these based on user-definable rules and workflow.

The CRM software solution should provide a project and personnel data record management process, a user-maintainable library of pre-designed project templates, tools to help implement best practices regarding project and team management activities, and pre-designed project-related analytics (charts and graphs) available for display on dashboards and reports.

In addition, the CRM software solution may be requested to support third-party client-based project management applications, like Microsoft (MS) Project for instance.

2.1

Internet Sales

Internet sales enables visitors to look for and select products of their interest, and complete their purchase online. To do so, the CRM software solution should provide an on-line product catalog with real-time price and availability information, shopping basket management with secure payment transaction processing, and profile information management (registration, subscription, shipping and billing addresses, purchase history).

The CRM software solution may provide additional features like personalization, product recommendation (up-sell and cross-sell), and order acceptance, rejection, execution, and tracking.

2.2

Email Response Management

Email Response Management ensures management of incoming emails from customers with automatic guided-through questionnaires and outbound emails combined with customer's data. It includes rule-based routing with reporting capabilities.

2.3

B2C Analytics and Business Intelligence

B2C Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) are analytical applications using complex rules-based techniques, neural networks, pattern recognition and other profile settings within peer groups to identify certain transactions and set thresholds for what is considered "normal" shopping behavior.

3.1

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the electronic form of direct marketing. It may be seen as the most efficient way of communicating to your potential or most valuable customers in order to call them for pre-determined actions. Indeed, by enhancing the relationship with your customers, email marketing encourages them to do business repeatedly with you, thus building, if well done, brand recognition, credibility, and loyalty.

The CRM software solution should provide the 5 most important modules:

• mailing list management (recipients), including tools to manage list brokers, list hosts, list managers, list rental, and recipient-related information usage (demographics, psychographics, segmentation or targeting, privacy with express or tacit consent like opt-in/opt-out, double opt-in/double opt-out, subscribe/unsubscribe management).
   
• mailing campaign management (messages sent), including tools to manage (sending pace, trigger-based messaging, bulk sending).
   
• mailing content management (message content), including tools to manage message format (subject line creator, conditional subject line and content, call to action, multi-level message personalization, advertisement), to enable tracking (message opening, click-tracking features), and to optimize message deliverability (Bayesian spam filter testing, recommendations related to sender policy framework [SPF] and Microsoft's Sender ID).
   
• mailing bounce management (messages received), including tools to manage auto-response (out-of-office notification, white list inclusion request and confirmation, confirmed opt-in and double opt-in), bounce back management (hard bounce, soft bounce, false positives), and replies to alleged spam complaints.
   
• mailing tracking and report management (campaign efficiency), including tools to enable computation of bounce rate, open rate, unique clicks, click-through rate (CTR), click-through rate by position; while allowing you to share this information whether internally with your management or project owners, or externally with your partners or advertisers through the generation of user-definable and cross-campaign enabled activity reports.

The CRM software solution should provide a variety of message templates for variety of content (newsletter, commercial email, lead generation, etc.) and graphical layouts, pre-designed management reports, and tools to help implement best practices and compliance to Internet standards (unsolicited commercial email [UCE]), and governmental regulations (CAN-SPAM Act of 2003) related to different email marketing activities.

3.2

Relationship Capital Management (RCM)

Relationship capital management (RCM) empowers sales organizations to drastically accelerate their sales cycle by rapidly inventorying and charting their social and personal relationships, whether internal (local relationship) or external (global relationship), in order to target, reach, and influence key decision makers and influencers more efficiently thanks to the so-built trusted introduction.

Although you may find a huge literature amalgamating the two concepts, RCM is not per se equivalent to CRM. Nonetheless, a CRM software solution may be considered as one of the tools available to support relational capital management, particularly in both information gathering and dispatching phases.

Also would-be-called Corporate social networking management (CSNM), relationship capital management is, in fact, the formalization of intuitively-developed best practices that are observed at the most effective sales professionals.

3.3

Survey Software

Survey software are business intelligence tools aiming at increasing product acceptance, and customer loyalty by ensuring that customer needs are better understood and addressed.

The survey software solution should provide the following standard capabilities:

• survey design (survey content)
• survey administration (deployment and management)
• survey analysis (reports)

3.4

Sales Proposal Automation Software

Sales proposal automation software streamline the process of responding to a request for proposals (RFP) by automating the proposal production, making it easier, faster, and more efficient.

Sales proposal automation software should also provide tools to determine whether submitting a proposal is worth the time and effort spent.

Sales proposal software should support the following features:

• Proposal submission decision analysis (bid/no-bid analysis based on requirements and evaluation criteria)
   
  • previous winning ratio
  • bid/no-bid checklist
  • bid/no-bid decision matrix
  • letter of intent
  • no-bid letter
     
• Content management
   
  • easy import of initial RFP
  • definition of strategies and supporting winning themes
  • content reusability (search, copy/paste from previous projects or templates)
  • content import from Microsoft (MS) Excel spreadsheets and XML files
  • file attachments
  • fully internationalization (Unicode support)
  • customized look & feel
     
• Compliance matrix (requirements matrix)
   
  • identification of required information set forth in the RFP and respective proposed solutions
  • automatic references (RFP requirements vs. proposal solutions)
  • compliance matrix validation against RFP (compliance matrix alignment)
  • proposal validation against compliance matrix (proposal alignment)
     
• Collaborative project management
   
  • concurrent document authoring
  • proposal creation progress tracking
  • question assignment to specific collaborators and experts
  • user-definable due dates and approval workflow
  • email-based tracking of team members' actions

The CRM software solution should provide a general proposal outline, with a variety of templates for the most important proposal sections:

• Cover letter (transmittal letter)
• Compliance matrix
• Executive summary
• Understanding of needs
• Proposed solution (objectives, scope, method, schedule)
• Facilities
• Budget
• Staff
• Conclusion
• References and credentials
• Appendices

3.5

Product and Price Configuration

3.6

Web Conferencing

3.7

Mobile Computing

3.8

Channel Management

3.9

Retail Solutions

3.10

Customer Reference

3.11

Commission Management

3.12

Field Service

4.1

Business Functionality

Business Functionality provides the comprehensive Business Process Management (BPM) capabilities needed to automate the long-lived, multi-step business processes common to all modern companies and their value chains.

4.2

Technical Functionality

Technical Functionality defines the technical architecture of the CRM software solution, and the technological environment in which the CRM software solution can run successfully. Sub-criteria include CRM software solution architecture, software usability and administration, platform and database support, application standards support, communications and protocol support and integration capabilities. Relative to the other evaluation criteria, best practice selections place a lower relative importance, on the CRM software solution technology criterion.

However, this apparently lower importance is deceptive, because the CRM software solution technology criterion usually houses the majority of the selecting organization's mandatory criteria, which usually include server, client, protocol, and database support, application scalability and other architectural capabilities. The definition of mandatory criteria within this set often allows the client to quickly narrow the long list of potential vendors to a short list of applicable solutions that pass muster relative to the most basic mandatory selection criteria.

During the process of CRM software solution selection a great deal of attention is given to the functional capabilities of the CRM software solution being evaluated. While this aspect is obviously important, ignoring the technical mechanisms by which the CRM software solution actually operates can be fatal to the CRM software solution selection project.

4.3

Ongoing CRM Solution Support

Ongoing CRM Solution Support encompasses implementation support, training for users, developers, and administrators, and ongoing technical support.