4 Things You Need to Know Before Implementing CRM
Ever wondered, implementing a CRM could streamline your business? The answer is yes, but only if CRM is utilized to its maximum capacity. Businesses who don’t know how to use CRM to its fullest might result in a heavy investment to implement a CRM rather than CRM resulting as a helpful tool.
To avoid making mistakes, carefully planning to implement a CRM, clear business goals and objectives is a mandatory task. So, therefore, before making any major change in your business operations, check these four things:
Identify Business Requirements & CRM Feature Trade-offs
Millions of software products are available online and you can easily get caught up in the carnival of features. It might get difficult for you to avoid these extra features but instead organize your thoughts and evaluate how different features will add value and impact your investment. Write down your company’s needs, analyze what functionality is more beneficial to achieve your goals, what positive change would the new system bring in the future, which features should be must-haves and how long will it take the people to switch to this model.
This framework can help your business to narrow down the basics and requirements. By easily listing out requirements, you’ll have more clarity on the most important things.
Understand your current processes
It’s very important to identify your business requirements before choosing a system, for example; identifying the lead generation process, when does a lead become an opportunity, and how the CRM you’re considering is a good fit. CRM usually automates a lot of business processes. However, the main objective of CRM is to improve current working processes. Thus, this is the reason how important it is to understand how your current processes will align with the new system.
Cleanse your data
Just like you wouldn’t shove your dirty laundry into the closet with your clean clothes, you wouldn’t want to throw all your unwanted data into your fresh new CRM. It might seem annoying but cleaning your data before importing it to your new system is a must. You might think to do this later but ever thought about how much time will you waste trying to pick out the dirty pair of socks mixed in with the clean pairs? Shuffling through useless data in the search for useful data can be time consuming and hectic.
For this process, you can get the whole team on board and, make each person responsible for their own data accuracy. Having a CRM with clean data will help you to start using the software at its maximum potential right away. Don’t skip this important step.
Define the why and where for your organization
Since everyone from the organization would be using the system so it’s important to consider what levels of authorization they’ll need. Certain people have limited access while others can see everything. For this instance discuss it with your implementation partner about setting data rules inside your CRM. Also, consider thinking about where these individuals will be accessing the CRM. In the case of the outside sales teams, does the CRM support mobile apps? What information will your team require out in the field? Do they need offline mobile access too? Simplify the interaction with the CRM as best you can to promote user adoption and facilitate better use for each department.
