Rules of the road
for CRM
Contact and Customer
Relationship Management
When it comes to choosing the right
Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) system for your business, it’s
important to understand all the benefits
of a CRM system before beginning your
selection process. When you launch
a CRM implementation, your choices
can impact nearly everyone in your
company. That’s why this booklet has
been created.
These 17 “Rules of the Road” for CRM were collected
from executives, managers, employees and consultants
who shared their experiences with Sage. The goal is to
provide you with useful information as you choose a
new CRM system. We’re confident that forewarned
is forearmed and that the educated choice will be a
Sage product.
17 Rules of the Road
for Contact and Customer
Relationship Management
1. CRM is more than a product, it’s a project
When your company chooses to implement a Customer Relationship
Management system (CRM), it is taking a dramatic step forward in it’s
customer commitment. And, since customers drive your business,
you’re leaping ahead in your ability to generate and manage revenue,
too. The benefits of CRM come not only from the product you
purchase, but also from the implementation plan you follow. The more
thoroughly you embrace a company-wide CRM project, the more your
company will benefit from the features your CRM software offers.
Choosing a CRM system is often the simple part: the implementation
can be hard. That’s why we always recommend working with a
recognised expert in the area and learn from their experience in
delivering a successful project. Through the course of a widely
scoped project it is common to uncover areas and functions that
can be automated that were not considered before. In principle give
the CRM project time; it will repay you many times in what it delivers
to your organisation.
2. Customers are everywhere: clients,
vendors, employees, mentors
It used to be easy to define the word “customer.” But companies are
becoming more diverse, with multiple locations, employees who
telecommute and vendors who function as partners. The idea of
“customer” has broadened to include a wide range of end-users of
different kinds of corporate information.
For example, employees are customers when they need self-service
information on pension plans or other benefits. Shareholders are
customers when they’re looking for financial information. Vendors are
customers when they need detailed specifications before they can
proceed with a project. A colleague is a customer when you need
to deliver time critical data. And, of course, the buyer is always a
customer whose experience is critical to your bottom line. With a
CRM system, you can serve all of the groups who rely on your
company for important, timely information.
3. Bigger is not always better
CRM is a broad discipline. Solutions are built to deliver and match
different levels of functionality, complexity, structures, methods of
working and robustness. Just as you are unlikely to buy a tractor to
mow your lawn you should avoid looking to buy enterprise-focused
systems it your company’s requirements are simple or modest.
The reverse is also true. One of the key areas of dissatisfaction in
CRM is a mis-sold solution. Our advice is simple - take a proper look
at what the current and potential needs for organising customer
interactions are in your company. Are your relationships long lasting
or brief, do you re-sell or look to cross-sell? Do you need to link
other departments and people together on a shared system? All of
these requirements have tools that suit them, and very often contact
management, for example, is enough. Sometimes more of an
investment is needed. Work with an expert to assess this, it need
not be expensive and it could save you much money and hassle in
the long term.
4. CRM solutions are different for
mid-size companies
Some software companies selling CRM would have you believe that
you need to buy what they call an enterprise solution that includes
all the bells and whistles required for the largest of global enterprises.
But for small to mid-size companies this may mean paying for
more capacity than is required. In fact, the price of these systems is
often so high that any company smaller than a FTSE 500 firm cannot
reasonably afford one.
But other vendors have created CRM solutions with the mid-sized
company in mind, offering applications that include virtually all of the
features common in enterprise solutions, but at a cost that is
reasonable for smaller scale users. Even better, many of these
solutions can be scaled from as little as a single user to as many
as you are likely to need in the future. With a CRM solution designed
for mid-sized companies, you can start small and grow big without
ever wasting your valuable resources on capacity you don’t need.
You buy what you need, when you need it.
Another benefit of CRM solutions designed from the ground up for
mid-sized companies is that they are easier to implement and are
fully functional right out of the box. Maybe larger enterprises have
the time and resources to spend tailoring a solution and integrating it
into their enterprise. But mid-sized companies want a CRM solution
that they can get up and running easily, quickly and at minimal cost.
And they want one that can be seamlessly integrated with back
office systems such as accounting - without the need for custom
programming.
5. Planning Pays
To ensure a successful CRM project, planning is essential.
Begin by defining the need for a CRM solution. Arm yourself with
the background information to justify the investment costs and to
demonstrate where the benefits, savings and Return on Investment
will come from.
Next, define the stakeholders in the project and use the needs
analysis and benefits projections as a foundation for establishing
a common, company-wide goal for CRM. With this groundwork
completed, you can now establish a budget, planning for the
costs associated with identifying vendors, testing solutions,
implementation, integration, training and support. A team should
then be assembled to begin the drive towards completion of the
project - a drive that begins with a clear description of your
company’s CRM objectives and any processes that will have
to be modified to make the project successful. Make sure the
head of this team is a CRM champion - someone who completely
believes that CRM will make a difference.
Good planning will involve discussions with internal and external
customers. What are the best practices for your sales force, for your
marketing team, for customer service? Also consider the various
types of data that are important to track for each group involved.
Data required by different groups of system users, such as field sales
representatives, may be different from those of customer service
agents. Plan for the needs of each group by confirming that your
data requirements list is complete.
Remember: any person who requires information available through
the CRM solution should be considered a system user, whether he
or she is an internal staff member, an external partner, or a customer.
6. Prepare for product demonstrations
Once possible products and vendors are identified, a demo will be a
critical factor in determining which solution is best for your company.
But before inviting vendors’ representatives to perform their demos
be sure you have told them exactly what you are looking for. Why
waste time evaluating a product that may be very functional but just
will not work in your environment?
Also be sure to find out from the vendor what platform is required to
run the demo. Again, don’t waste time scheduling a demo only to
find out you don’t have the right hardware or the right operating
system to support the product.
When comparing several products it is advisable to establish a
scoring system that makes it easy to track the various benefits and
shortcoming of each product being evaluated. By tabulating these
scores, the decision process is often simplified. But be sure to include
qualitative information in these lists, such as a vendor’s history of
innovation, customer satisfaction, financial stability and so on.
And finally, make sure the CRM implementation team attends the
demo, and encourage them to share their concerns and feedback.
If the vendor or reseller cannot immediately address any issues
raised, make sure they do so in a reasonable time frame.
Responsiveness is often a key differentiator in the vendor selection
process, so some planned tough questions may be critical to making
a selection you can live with long into the future.
7. Implement relevant technology
When you choose a CRM system, make sure it’s based on current
technology. Don’t let a salesperson talk you into product vaporware
based on future promises. Insist on seeing a current version of the
product as it can be deployed today. Equally important, don’t accept
old technology that’s past its peak performance curve. You don’t
want to have to replace the system in the near future.
Look at what is in the product roadmap, planned enhancements and
other features that reassure you that this is a product being invested
in by the vendor for the long term.
Take a view on its integration capabilities and plans and the
relevance to your back office systems. Decide whether the interface
and usability is suited to your user type - i.e. for a power user
keyboard short cuts might be better, for ease of use a web-based
interface might be more appropriate. A good business consultancy
will be able to help you make the right decision.
8. CRM is not a single department solution
CRM solutions should provide company-wide benefits. But many
products that claim to be CRM applications only address a single
functional area such as marketing, sales force automation or
customer support. True, these role-specific solutions may be
adequate for their specific intended purpose.
But what happens when your requirements broaden?
If you implement a dedicated sales force automation solution, for
instance, and down the road realise that you also need to automate
your marketing efforts, you have to start from scratch, looking for
vendors,trying products - and wasting time. Plus, you’ll be faced
with two separate products, two separate vendors and no single
point of contact for support and problem resolution.
Even worse, with multiple point solutions, how will you share
information across your company?
Will information captured by the sales force automation solution
be leveraged in new marketing campaigns?
Will marketing campaign data find its way to the customer
support centre where cross-selling opportunities could be
made, or lost?
While it is true that custom code can be written to integrate
products, a true CRM solution provides the functionality of any
single function solution, as well as a cost-free, seamless way
to add features and capabilities whenever you need them.
So, if your needs require it, don’t settle for anything less than a
comprehensive solution that delivers on the true promise of CRM:
■
Marketing campaign management
■
Sales force automation
■
Customer care
■
Contact management
■
Task management/scheduling
9. Integration with back-office systems
can speed Return On Investment
One area many companies overlook when evaluating CRM solutions
is the fact that accounts payable and accounts receivable data can
form an integral part of CRM. If a customer calls to order a product,
for example, wouldn’t it be beneficial to instantly know whether that
customer’s accounts are up to date?
Although some CRM solutions offer patches to link back to an
accounting system, others offer this seamless integration out of the
box. The cost benefits of this approach are so great that some
companies report an immediate ROI because they were able to get
their application up and running without incurring the high costs of
custom integration.
10. Multi-channel access is the only
way to go
To be truly effective, a CRM solution needs to support customers on
their own terms. This means delivering the information into the hands
of agents who respond to customer inquiries over the telephone, fax,
e-mail or written letters. And, of course, in this Internet age, the CRM
solution should also support interactive Web chat with customers
and make a wide range of information available to them over robust
Web sites.
For internal staff, such as field service employees and sales staff, the
solution should also support all standard wireless devices; solutions
that are restricted to a single device or operating system will become
too limiting as this technology evolves. With support for PDAs, for
example, sales reps can get real time updates about the prospects or
customers they are about to visit - before they walk through the door.
11. Delivery Method that is right for
your company
An item of increasing relevance to many companies is whether they
want to actually bring their CRM solution “in house”; the alternative
being that they give their data to a provider to host and the company
itself only accesses information through a browser.
Companies need to decide for themselves how comfortable they are
with the data stored outside the company. It is difficult to provide
guidance except to say that it is vital to check out the security and
recovery arrangements of anyone that is hosting the data. Another
consideration for smaller companies is telco connection charges as
well as looking at total cost of ownership over a 2 or 3 year period
for a renting model over an ownership model.
For larger companies one must consider whether the compromises
inherent in the system in terms of its ability to be integrated and
customised are something that can be lived with. That all considered
a rental model (or ASP, i.e. from an Application Service Provider) has
terrific advantages in terms of maintenance, cost of hardware and
ease of upgrades (albeit compulsory) and for smaller businesses in
particular needs to be considered.
12. Experience in the wrong sector
is very often the wrong experience
A recent trend in CRM is the movement of enterprise vendors into
the middle market space as the larger sites are saturated or locked
in with one CRM vendor or another. The solutions and experience
of these vendors can often seem impressive, but the question needs
to be asked as to how relevant working with a Top 5 consultancy
on a multi-million pound project with almost complete soup to nuts
customisation is to your company. The realities of the middle market
are very different. Budgets are tight, projects are tightly aligned to
ROI, products must deliver a large proportion out of the box and the
project cycles are short. In essence they are in many ways the
opposite of the project and product types we see at the enterprise
level. By all means, particularly for larger projects, take time to
assess enterprise products in their “mid-market” apparitions but
take time to ask:
What has been delivered in the middle market by
this company?
What does a mid-market product mean; enterprise
with features removed?
Experience of their middle market partners of delivering
on time and to budget.
What works out of the box in these products and
what needs to be “customised”?
Look at the overall cost of sale in particular with
a likely extended project cycle.
13. CRM is not for any single department,
it’s for the whole company
Often, the sales department will be motivated to implement CRM
long before other groups get on board. And it can be a great
strategy to implement the new software one department at a time.
But don’t lose sight of your overall goal, which should be to
implement CRM throughout the company.
You’ll get immediate results by putting CRM into Sales, Customer
Service or Support departments. But when you have everyone in the
company connected to CRM - when everyone has instant access to
the critical information they need to keep driving business forward that’s when you’ll see the most exciting benefits of CRM.
It’s great to start your implementation with a departmental focus,
but keep your larger goals in mind.
14. Implementation method is as
important as product choice
Just as a chain is only as good as its weakest link, a CRM solution
is only as good as its implementation. The best product in the world
will not meet expectations unless it is implemented in a way that
matches your requirements.
Once you’ve chosen a product, make sure it will work for your
environment by creating a blueprint describing your goals and
expectations for the implementation before the implementation
process begins. Any questions regarding these expectations should
be directed to an implementation team member who is designated
as the liaison between the vendor and/or the consultant or reseller
handling the implementation.
Beyond loading software on to a server and tailoring it to specific
needs, a CRM implementation requires the involvement of all
employees who will be using the system. Fail to obtain this support
and you can safely assume that the system will not be fully utilised.
Instead, reassure staff that they will receive all training required and
that the system will make them more productive while making their
jobs easier. Make the system even more alluring by letting all
stakeholders and end users know how the implementation process
is progressing. The result: they will become eager for the process
to be completed and to get up and running on the new system.
15. Training can’t be “on the job”.
Employee buy-in is the key to a
successful CRM implementation
Good training, tailored to the different skill levels of employees,
is essential. Don’t bore a technically adept sales manager with a
beginner’s level dissertation on using a computer-based scheduler.
And don’t intimidate a customer service agent with techno-speak
about the ins and outs of back-end integration. Just as you tailor
the product for your environment, tailor the training to the end-user.
These training programs should begin before rollout to ensure
end-users are ready to use the system when it is ready for them.
In addition, this early training will add to the enthusiasm for the
rollout and lay the groundwork for widespread acceptance.
16. Test, or crash and burn
Don’t overlook the importance of testing the software implementation
before rolling it out. A test that involves mock customer data can
be invaluable in determining how well the system receives and
processes information. Better to find a glitch pre-roll-out than
to get stuck on one when talking to a customer.
As part of this testing process be sure that all back-office integration
is working properly. Make a list of typical operations that end-users
will engage in, and test each and every one. Try to access data from
the accounting system, for example, before a customer service agent
needs to actually do so. Try to update customer data in the
centralised database and make sure those updates are available
throughout the system.
17. Focus on CRM goals: improve
customer satisfaction, shorten sales
cycles and increase revenue
Never lose sight of the fact that the customer is the reason for your
CRM implementation. Get feedback from customers to see if their
satisfaction levels are really increasing, or if there are improvements
they would like to see. If you chose your CRM solution carefully, it
should be flexible enough to adapt to evolving customer needs.
And don’t overlook your end-user groups.
Could the sales staff benefit from an updated
synchronisation system with their Laptops that lets them
access contact information directly from their Laptop
without always signing onto the CRM system?
Would the marketing department like to see a new kind
of analytical report that links post-sale collections data
to campaign type?
Keep the communication channels open after rollout and keep your
CRM solution rolling along.
Equally important, never overlook the power of CRM to self-monitor.
Set up metrics that the system can track and always be sure that
you are, in fact, increasing customer satisfaction, shortening sales
cycles, improving efficiency, winning customers from the competition,
increasing profitability per customer and boosting bottom-line sales.
About Sage (UK) CRM Solutions
Sage provides CRM solutions to mid sized enterprises.
With 16 years experience in the development of products
that provide businesses with the ability to manage and report
on all customer centred activity. There are over four million
users of our CRM solutions, which can either stand alone or
be fully integrated into existing systems, to give a single view
of all customer and contact activity.
ACT! for Workgroups
Sage ACT! Professional for Workgroups is part of the best-selling
global ACT! brand, and provides powerful contact and customer
management solutions for small/medium sized businesses.
Easy to set up and use it has all the features needed to get
your sales and marketing in order - organising you, your contacts
and your business.
Sage CRM MME
Sage CRM MME is an easy to use, fast to deploy, feature rich
low cost of ownership CRM solution designed to introduce
the real benefits of CRM to middle sized companies.
Sage CRM MME aggregates individual and group efforts
across sales, marketing and support teams making people
and companies more efficient at their roles. Sage CRM MME
delivers the tools entirely through a browser to take advantage
of the huge efficiencies that the Internet offers in delivering
business applications.
SalesLogix
SalesLogix is the Customer Relationship Management solution
that enables small to medium-sized businesses to cultivate
profitable customer relationships by increasing sales and
marketing performance and maximising customer satisfaction
and loyalty.
Designed to meet the distinct needs of small to medium-sized
businesses, SalesLogix delivers integrated Sales, Marketing,
Customer Service and Support automation solutions that adapt
to your unique customer acquisition, retention and development
processes.
SalesLogix provides a complete CRM solution with low cost
of ownership, rapid time to productivity and high return on
investment. Flexible and easy to use, SalesLogix readily
accommodates growth and changing business requirements.
SalesLogix, the SMB CRM leader with more than 7000
customers worldwide, is part of the Sage family of integrated
business management solutions.
Sage (UK) Limited, CRM Solutions,
Sage House, Wharfedale Road, Winnersh,
Wokingham, Berkshire RG41 5RD
Tel: 0845 111 9988
E-mail: crm@sage.com
Web: www.sage.co.uk
© Sage (UK) Limited 2005 T&C 03/05 8908M
To talk to us about how Sage CRM Solutions
might help your company, call us on the
dedicated CRM number
0845 111 99 88
or for ACT! call
0845 245 0276
Loading...