marketing and CRM

Today i had my first class on Marketing at the European Educational Resource Center. The course is called "Marketing in 7 days" :D but it's not like those "learn C++ in 30 hours" things... :D

I'm interested in marketing and sales, i have some knowledge and practice mostly from AIESEC, but this is now quite good for me for ordering and laying out the knols (unit of knowledge as of google :D), i have from this subject - on their proper shelves.
The good thing is that my company is paying for this course and that it's very close to my office :))))
I promised Masha that I will write down the things i've learnt from there...

So here we go.
Today we had kind of a general lesson, about the principles, stages, about international marketing and marketing in Armenia.

Here are some definitions:

Marketing is an ongoing process of planning and executing the marketing mix (Product, Price, Place, Promotion often referred to as the 4 Ps) for products, services or ideas to create exchange between individuals and organizations.

Marketing tends to be seen as a creative industry, which includes advertising, distribution and selling. It is also concerned with anticipating the customers' future needs and wants, which are often discovered through market research.

Essentially, marketing is the process of creating or directing an organization to be successful in selling a product or service that people not only desire, but are willing to buy.

The class was quite interactive, the trainer luckily had some presentation skills :) he was asking questions, getting the attention of people who were about to "switch off" after the long working day.

The best thing is that during explaining the things, the trainer often gives parallels or asks us to think of parallels in our lives, our job, find similarities, etc... as for me, i couldn't always think of one thing,. As an example, in my mind I had our web studio products (websites, yerevan.ru portal etc) also Yerevan Productions' products and also Sharm's and even AIESECs.

In our group there are about 12 people, almost all of them are employed and are representing some companies. We have a group of 5 from an oil distribution company, a girl from VivaCell, one from a security services company and one from a water supply company. We are discussing examples from all these companies so my knowledge is enriching also in these fields, especially about oil things :D the guys are very active and quite funny :D

Then we talked about CRMs. No, not the systems (for me CRM is something computer-related, reminding me my univer, my thesis and also the thingy we used to implement in AIESEC :D). CRM actually is the process of managing the customer relations :)
This is something Armenian companies didn't yet grow enough for... they don't value the loyalty of customers, they are just trying to sell and sell more, not thinking about building sustainable relationships with customers or partners, even when they usually bring the most profit with less costs.

Now i'm so motivated and determined to start the process of implementation of a CRM system in my company. We do really need it.

this is it for now :) more to come soon as we have the next lesson tomorrow!

by the way, this is a good practice to review the materials (we got the printed slides and agenda) later the same day of the training, and to write a brief in a blog =)


some office fun :)

at the end something about self-improvement:)