Alcohol: like CRM, good for you in moderation.

Alcohol, in moderation is good for you, but too much fixes nothing. Equally Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are fantastic at solving specific business issues, just don’t expect them to fix everything. 

Certainly don’t fall for the line that XYZ CRM solution from ABC Ltd will increase your business by 25% and reduce your marketing costs by half.

The CRM promise

CRM solutions are built around one single premise: grow your business by winning new customers or selling more to existing customers. 

Every CRM solution that I have looked at in the last five years – be it a hosted ASP solution like Salesforce.com or an in-house solution like SalesLogix – has the promise ‘Win more customers and grow your business’ at the centre of what it does. But, if that’s what CRM does for business, you’d expect adoption rates to be much higher than the current 5% take up to date in the UK B2B market place.

So why is this the case? It’s down to the fact that CRM companies market their products on functionality and brand alone and often rely on their business partner channel to translate their software functionality into business needs. And it’s getting to the bottom of these business needs that is absolutely essential when deciding whether CRM can be used to solve your company’s issues today.

Start by understanding your business needs

We now have a starting point for a CRM project. Define the needs of your business first, don’t go out searching for products yet. If you do, you’ll suddenly find that your business needs match exactly the product functionality being touted by the best CRM product salesman you see – funny that!

Business needs: look at each department.

How do you define needs? It’s pretty straight forward, but you have to be methodical about it. Look at all the areas of your business that touch your customers and prospects and build your needs around those. 

Take each department or function in turn and take time to understand how your processes work and information flows from department to department today. Once you start looking you’ll quickly realise that you’ve probably been doing day-to-day tasks in a way that can really be improved upon.  Here’s a situation I faced back in 2001.

Tracking marketing ROI

As marketers we all need to give a credible answer to the question: ‘What revenue does marketing activity bring to the business?’. We know that we can only give this if we can create a reliable link between campaign responses and closed business. Ideally we need to maintain a link in the business systems between an initial response to a marketing activity and the value of a closed order.

How many of you can do this today, at the touch of a button without trawling through different company systems?

Old-skool lead-tracking

When I joined my last company as the marketing manager my process went something like this:

• do an exhibition;
• fill in a lead enquiry form;
• record it on Excel;
• email it to the sales manager;
• allocate it to an account manager; and then?
• nothing! 

It was like the lights went out; the lead would fall into the account manager’s bag; maybe a call would be made to follow it up; maybe it wouldn’t – I’d have no way of knowing. There was precious little mechanism in place to manage opportunities, let alone feed information back to the marketing function.

I identified marketing returns by trawling through the accounting system, matching invoices up against enquiries. It took a day a month and, believe me, it was a heartless task.

Don’t approach CRM like a bull at a gate.

View company as a whole

But again, before you come in steam roller-style, declaring that CRM is going to sort out your falling sales, take a step back and identify how improvements can be made to the way these functions work today.

By understanding the needs of the company as a whole and applying those to the CRM implementation, you will find yourself well on the road to realising the benefits you need from day one of the system go-live.

14 steps to CRM heaven

Action plan for choosing the right CRM solution for your business:

1. Build your in-house CRM team with key sponsors for each department;
2. Identify areas of your business that are critical to success;
3. Understand all your customer touch points, relate these to your current systems and processes;
4. Identify how CRM can support these process – this gives you your CRM needs;
5. Audit in house IT skills;
6. Audit technology platform;
7. Consider hosted or in-house solution;
8. Short list three possible CRM solutions;
9. Short list three providers of each solution;
10. Get each to present on the product, how they gather your needs, customise, implement and support the solution;
11. Choose your best-fit product and supplier;
12. Allocate resource;
13. Schedule the project; and
14. Install it!

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