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Buying CRM - Avoiding "Ready, Fire, Aim"
If you are ready to invest in a CRM solution, we recommend that you temporarily put your checkbook away and get out your dry erase marker. If you haven’t done at least a little legwork, your company may not even be ready for CRM. The CRM planning process is important and often overlooked.
Before jumping into the technology side of CRM, it pays to look inward
at your organization. This means thinking about every aspect of your
company, from marketing, to sales, to support, to billing and determine
if you truly know your prospects and customers and have programs in
place to foster your relationship with them.
It’s also important
to get management, particularly the final decision maker in your
company, involved early in the process. We’ve seen many companies
whose staff members have done a lot of up front legwork only to be
denied a funding request when they later approached management.
EXERCISE #1: WHITEBOARD YOUR ISSUES AND PROCESSES
A good first step is to get a small team together that represents each department that touches a customer or prospect. What are the key issues that are facing your company and how would you like a CRM system, ideally, to solve these issues? What are the barriers to solving your main business problems? Answer these questions not only on an overall company level, but on a department by department level.
Create flow diagrams so that you can visualize your current and/or ideal processes. Ask yourselves some key questions -- there is a list of questions later in this article.
Who should be on this team? Ideally a representative of each department that touches a customer or a prospect.
EXERCISE #2: CATALOG YOUR REQUIREMENTS
After some questioning and brainstorming, translate your key issues and process requirements into a more formal list of requirements that you can provide to your trusted CRM advisor. Make sure you prioritize your requirements and separate the "have to haves" from the "nice to haves".
If you present a clear list of requirements to your prospective vendor(s), the buying process will become much more efficient and easier on you and your team.
When writing up your requirements, try to be as specific as possible. For example, if one of your requirements is "accounting system integration", try to define: what the integration touchpoints are; what data needs to flow from system to system and in what direction; and how the data should display in the respective systems.
Below are a few questions to help you with the exercises above.
- What are the specific steps in your sales process? What is your quote to order process?
- What will enable my salespeople to spend more time in front of prospects and customers?
- Are you able to segment your customers based on their value to your business? Should your business processes differ based on customer value?
- How do you manage information going through your different communication channels?
- In what geographic regions are your prospects and customers concentrated?
- What’s the cost of acquiring a new customer?
- What made your current customers decide to do business with you? Was it your product, your service, price, quality, the salesperson, your expertise, or something else?
- What marketing campaign or lead source did your customers come from? Which campaign was most effective?
- What is the average lifetime value of your customer?
- What data do you want to track about customers and prospects? Put another way, what details do you need in order to profile your prospects and customers? Examples are annual revenue, number of employees, industry, ticker, etc.
- What customer support options do your customers want? Examples are 800 number help desk, Web customer portal, e-mail, on-line knowledgebase, etc.
- What reports would you like to easily generate or have streamlined?
- What are all your customer touchpoints and what are the processes, technology, and organizational support for these touchpoints?
- Which customer-related activities are internal, such as overstocked inventory? Which are external such as a product installation? Which are temporal (time-based), such as delivering reports to customers?
- Which events or activities have value to your customer and which activities have no value to the customer?
There are many more questions that you can ask yourselves and that are specific to your business. Only after answering these questions will you have the insights that you need to make an informed decision about how to best automate your business processes.
Future RequirementsHockey great Wayne Gretzky’s father taught him to skate to where the puck is going, not where it’s been.
As you ask yourselves these types of questions, think about not only your immediate needs, but also your needs one, two or more years down the road. When considering a new CRM solution, analyze your current situation, but try to anticipate your future requirements as well.
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