What type of CRM system should we be considering in order to make CRM a viable investment?

A CRM is not just for large companies but its for any company who wants to effectively and profitably manage their customer interactions. The type of system you should consider should be determined by your unique needs. What are you goals? Do you want to consolidate customer information into a single database or do you want to leverage the tools that come with a full CRM (account management, sales automation, marketing automation, customer service & support, etc)? What is your IT bandwidth? What does you network/infrastructure look like? Do you have a budget? Do you have a dedicated project team?

There are a lot of different CRM Solutions in the marketplace and probably 90% of them are the same but its the 10% that will make the difference for your business. Also, you want to make sure that you have buy-in from the users. That's the best way to increase user adoption and success.

I would recommend that you first determine your goals and then start your search. Many CRM Solutions have free trials so I would recommend going that route first.

I hope that was helpful.

Joanna,

I agree that a hosted solution is often the best choice for a small company. Make sure you take a good look at the Fuze Suite. www.fuzeds.com.

Our on-demand knowledge sharing and customer care offering: the Fuze Suite, is pivotal in building customer loyalty. Key features include: Self-service, assisted-service, community knowledge sharing, alerts, chat, integration, usage analytics, and much more. Fuze helps both staff and consumers by providing a better customer experience for online support. Contact centers large and small use us, and say we're easier to use/administer at half the cost of similar offerings including those listed in the response above. We walk the talk, too, and you won't find a better support experience from a vendor either!

Please contact me directly to discuss your specific needs and see if there is a fit. 425 747-0786
Best Regards,

Jack Lane

It's almost certain that you do need a CRM system of some kind, even if it's ony to manage the sales pipeline and contacts. You should start with a needs analysis, then find out what CRM systems do, then revisit and refine your needs analysis. A little research involving users and stakeholders in your business will help you refine your needs before you commit, and get buy in to use the system. Then you can begin a more rigorous process of sorting out your long list of wants into must-haves and would-be-nice-to-haves. There's a chapter on this very process in my book "Customer relationship management: concepts and technologies" which you can get direct from the publishers at this link: http://www.elsevierdirect.com/product.jsp?isbn=9781856175227&dmnum=AUQ5
Good luck!

The best CRM system for you is one that significantly improves your company's view of all of you customers. This means that you need to first consider how you interact with customers now, what is it that causes you most frustration and pain in those relationships, what information you current gather and how that can be shared.

CRM is a business solution, NOT a technical one. Way before you worry about what hardware, vendors or products to chose you need to seriously look at how you currently manage information, how you share it between different parts of the business, whether the information you currently capture is actually useful or is riddled with inconsistencies, inaccuracies and/or duplication.

Generally speaking you will spend about 10% of the final spend (not the budget number you initially come up with, because that will be wrong) on hardware, about 20% in software and implementation and the rest simply getting your data in a fit state to use. This is about the relative value of the components.

If you want to maximise the benefits from CRM, you must be sure that the decisions you make are based on good data, if not the value of your management decisions will be significantly negatively impacted.

While this may sound tiresome, complicated and a little scary, the investment in business systems (process, data, people, software) and data will pay off.

Once you understand what you need, then selecting the software products is relatively trivial. Most CRM systems are relatively equivalent in terms of quality and functionality. We have looked into a number of open source products and there are good quality systems out there. I would also look at developing a long term strategy view of all information management within your company and move to international vendor independent data exchange formats (eg XCRL, XNAL, ebXML, etc) as these provide insurance against the future. Seek to build plug and play information backplanes into which you can plug-in products, develop new applications and link into all customer facing touch points.

And make sure that you drive the change and not the other way around, its your business, so you define how you want to relate to your customers, not some third party product maker.

I think making a concrete list of the features you need is a smart idea.

But I think it's necessary to think about why you need those features, and simply compile a generalized wish list of functionalities you may not need or ever use.

In terms of whether to try an on-premise or hosted/SaaS solution, think about how your SF is structured:

- how many people will use this system (# users)?
- where will they operate (call center? Field force?)?
- how are campaigns structured? are they single- or multi-product focused? single- or multi-territorial?
- do you need the system to have analytic capabilities (e.g. sales forecasts)?
- what other systems should it integrate with?
- what type of customer database do you have? Do you buy data or build it?
- etc. etc.

On premise systems with thick client platforms are better for large sales forces or sales forces that operate in the field because they can carry their part of the customer database with them.

Hosted or web-based systems work fine when sales people are selling over the phone from the office.

If Reps go into the field, you also want to think about the availability of mobile CRM (PDA/smart phone clients) so that users have the information they need in the palm of their hands - and as always, the solution you choose should work with the technology platform you work on - windows, linux, mac.

In terms of ROI, on-premise is more expensive due to SW & HW investment than hosted (e.g. do you have your own servers? - you should ask the vendor if they provide them) but the advantages are greater customization to your unique business model, more flexibility, and better service from the vendor (in most cases). In many cases it's a smarter long-term investment.

Likewise the quality of data will be higher (and you'll get more of it) if field reps are filling out information in the field and not waiting till they get back to the office to make their contact/call reports. Having reps take the system with them means greater compliance with between sales and marketing (message recall will certainly be higher if reps consistently deliver the right information) and more possibilities for structuring and managing campaigns.

I have friends who've tried both Salesforce.com and SugarCRM in their small companies and weren't satisfied - what seemed cheap and ideal on paper turned out to be an expensive hassle in reality. More functionalities than they could process and not enough support figuring out which the modules they really needed.

Configuration is another issue. Unless you know how to set up a database or buy a customer DB that works with the system architecture, you'll have to pay expensive consulting fees to get it done.

The other thing to think about it the CRM strategy that the technology will support. Ultimately, the strategy is in your hands that the technology should help guide users to follow it - not the other way around.

A lot of the questions you should be asking relate to Sales Force Effectiveness (SFE) and not just how to handle the technology:

- do you know the proper frequency of customer interactions? does it vary?
- how do you segment your customers?
- how do you set proper targeting so that reps don't waste time with low value or low potential customers?
- do users need to make contracts with customers?
- what types of expenses do they have to record?
- etc. etc.

Your answers to these questions will give you a set of business rules that will help you evaluate the technology.

But aside from all of that, the most important thing is the buy-in. Make sure your sales people are on board. Have them test and use the system and approve it. If they don't like it, they'll find ways not to use it - if they don't use it, you won't just waste your investment, you'll lose all that customer data and interaction history you need to fully understand your position in the market and to create reliable strategies for growth.

Trevor, Agreement with all of the above.

As for small companies I think the biggest success I have seen is a small property management company that tripled the number of properties it could managed without any additional staff just through getting a CRM system that was customised for their business, an incredible payback and big contribution to the bottom line, this was an on premise Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment.

As for which way to go, a lot of the options will be dictated by the complexity of the business, the demands that the system must meet, and the technology that is available. As well as cloud there are cost effective option that add CRM functionality to Outlook (SalesOutlook), Open Source (SugarCRM) and of course full commercial packages (Microsoft Dynamics CRM).

All of these system link to office suite and some better than others and al offer Sales/Marketing and Service modules that should cover most business requirements and can be customised to deliver specific business needs such as client profiling etc.

All of the different options require different back office systems and levels of investment, but there are definitely options out there for every sized business.

Hi Trevor,

Agree with all here above. One suggestion have a look to www.crm-care.be. it's a small company taking the crm approach the other way round - starting with helping to identify your business processes and (maybe) to improve them (if necessary).
When this clear and aligned in each Cpy's stakeholders minds, then going to find the best possible "technical"solution on the market.
By the way they don't sell/represent any hard/soft solution .....
That makes the difference with most of the other ones ...

BR,

JOEL

All of what you want to do CRM systems can do, the problem is often that the CEO has given the order to implement a CRM system with the direction of "You all know what I want!" and then has nothing more to do with the process until it is live and the CEO then says "This does not do what I want!" and calls the project a failure.

The solution, Participate all the way through, do not assume that people know what you want, state what you want during the discovery and ensure that it is included in the project, possibly not phase one since it is often necessary to lay the foundation first, but perhaps in phase 2 or 3.

With this proactive and participation the CEO and the rest of the business will get what they want, without the same old story will continue.

Roland has it exactly right.

It less about the tools you use than the level of understanding and commitment to significantly change the way you manage and operate the business.