5 crucial steps you don't want to miss before buying a CRM

Are you and your company thinking of acquiring a CRM (Customer relationship management)? If so, you are about to embark on a project that will have a major impact on your business and not least your sales. It is probably also, regardless of the size of your business, a major investment you are planning to make. And of course you will want to ensure that you make the right decisions and that it leads to the desired business value. This post has been produced for you before you buy a CRM with the ambition and intention that after reading it you will have better tools and conditions to ensure that you succeed in the purchase of your CRM. And the equally important subsequent work of implementation, launch and further development.

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5 crucial steps you don't want to miss before buying a CRM:

1. Why should you have a CRM?
2. Ensure that top management understands the value of and supports the work with CRM
3. Create a launch plan for your CRM
4. Sales process
5. APIs and Integrations

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1. Why should you have a CRM?

Being able to answer that question with a clear and well thought-out answer will be critical to your ability to succeed with your CRM implementation. Having a clear why that is communicated and accepted will serve as a common goal. And also ensure that you are in agreement and working towards the same goals. Otherwise you risk people feeling unclear, unmotivated and the organisation working in different directions. Once you sit down to answer why you should have a CRM, you should also include the following questions:

• What is the background to the need for a CRM? And what are the challenges and needs?
• How will a CRM support you in driving your business forward towards your common goals?
• What do you need to do as an organisation to get the most value from the CRM?
• What role do you want the CRM to play? And how central do you want it to be in the daily work of salespeople, sales managers and other leaders?
• And what procedures do we need to put in place for this plan to be feasible? And for it to become part of these people's daily lives?

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2. Ensure that top management understands the value of and supports the work of CRM

The success of your CRM implementation as a company will depend primarily on your ability to transform your organisation and adapt your working methods and practices. In order to succeed in this, it will be crucial to ensure that top management understands why you should implement a CRM. And also what value it creates, what work it requires and what is required of them. Pushing through a major change requires ownership, follow-up from Managers at various levels. "How do I know if Top Management in my organization doesn't understand the value of our CRM?" Classic warning signs to look out for:

• Top management says they don't need to participate in meetings and discussions about CRM.
• They say that CRM is a system issue and that it should be taken with the CTO.
• They think the CRM just costs a lot of money and they don't really see the value of investing more money in a CRM.
• Top management doesn't work anything in your CRM and doesn't understand it.
• They do not use data directly from CRM to measure key KPIs and e.g. forecasting and sales pipeline.

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3. Create a launch plan for your CRM

Don't underestimate the scope and work required of your project team and the plan that needs to be created to drive the launch project. There are many different parameters to be controlled that will affect the outcome of your implementation, so a well-developed plan is important to have in place. Here are some of the different aspects you should keep in mind when creating your launch plan:

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"Super User"

Appoint and train at least one "super user" who knows the system at a very detailed level. This person can act as a coach for the rest of the organisation. Make sure that this person is really given the proper conditions and training by the system. If you are a larger organisation with operations in several business areas and countries, you should also create an ambassador programme where each business area and/or country has an ambassador/"super user" who both acts as a spokesperson to their market to ensure that the information is disseminated properly. It can also act as a good support group to gather feedback and test different hypotheses and features on before you decide to go live with major features and changes.

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Subgoal

It is useful to divide the project into different steps and phases as suggested below. This model has proven successful by acting as a support and clarification of what is expected from the organisation in the different phases. It also makes it easier to measure and define the progress of the project. It also simplifies for the users by allowing them to work with a manageable amount of focus points and new knowledge at a time.

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Leadfront's Roadmap example with 3 phases and the metaphors of learning to crawl, walk and run[/caption]

• Creep (define what is the minimum desirable level and conditions)
• Go (define what is an acceptable and good level and conditions)
• Run (define what is a level and conditions you want to strive towards achieving)

Vanligt Misstag - Like a kid in a candy store

One of the most common mistakes we come across is companies that have attempted to implement their CRM internally and have gone straight to the task of "learning to run". More often than not, this means that in the excitement of all the system features and automation available, they have chosen to run with far too much functionality than they are capable of. So think big BUT start small.

Training plan

In order for your organisation to embrace the new way of working and the knowledge and skills required to do so, you are right to invest time in creating and designing a training manual in advance where your users can go to learn and access key information and instructions. Don't assume that everyone in the organisation is as excited as you are in the project team and don't assume that they will take this information on board on their own. Instead, as part of the introduction, schedule a time for a joint presentation. Where you have a review of this information. Then have a mandatory test that everyone needs to pass in order to be certified. This is to ensure that they have sufficient knowledge to use your CRM properly.

Simply having an onboarding and introduction of your CRM will not be enough. Not if you want to ensure that everyone has the prerequisites and knowledge to work in the CRM in the desired way. Instead, make sure you have a long-term training plan for your CRM. This could be, for example, that you schedule and plan to carry out several recurring briefings. These will each have a clear knowledge topic and value to the users. A good tip is also to have a document that maps your users' completed trainings. This will ensure that everyone has received the information. Next, it might be a good idea to create a simple Google Form as a knowledge test. This way you can ensure that your users actually possess the skills and knowledge you consider necessary.

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Incentives/KPI's

For a sales organisation, incentives and KPIs are part of everyday life. Often these are based on pure performance in terms of revenue. But here we need to think differently. Ensuring your sales people are working in your CRM should be business critical. This is to ensure that the information is in the right place and that you are helping your salespeople to become more effective in their sales work so that your investment in the CRM will ultimately deliver the right ROI (return on investment). So look at the possibility of introducing KPIs in particular on work done in the CRM. This could be more creative solutions such as the number of notes created, contacts added with the right information but above all that basic sales KPIs are measured only from the CRM and not from anywhere else.

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4. Sales process

A common challenge when launching a CRM is that sellers don't think the CRM is helping them, but only limiting them. This frustration, which is common among salespeople, combined with a lack of clear instructions, can lead to salespeople creating their own workflows and routines.

To create a CRM that is truly value-adding and supportive of your organisation, you should have designed a sales process in advance. This should be embedded and accepted by representatives from or across the sales organisation. Avoid having only a few main steps and standard terms in your sales process. Instead, work to understand the entire process. Both from your internal processes and not least your prospective customers.

Then try to take the process to the next level. This is done by breaking down each defined step into an explanation so that it is clear what each step means and what should be in each step. It is also recommended that each step in the sales process should have different sub-goals. The sub-objectives should have been achieved in order to move the business opportunity forward in the sales process. Most modern CRM solutions support this by allowing you to set up checklists or similar that require various actions to be completed in order for the deal to move forward.

5. APIs and Integrations

In implementing a CRM, an important question to ask yourself is "Will your CRM be the system that acts as Master Data or will another system do it?".

The answer will in turn influence the second important question which is "What other systems do we have that may need integration and syncing of data to/from our CRM? This could be based on the need to mirror important data, for example, or to ensure that data is synchronised between different systems. A simpler tool to do this is to use a whiteboard, for example, and map out the different system solutions you have. Go through your customer journey and sales process and map out the different work streams that will generate data or that need other data. This will give you a better overall picture of data flows and then enable you to prioritise what is business-critical at this stage.

All of this can of course be perceived as a lot of slow work to do before you can get started and procure and implement a CRM. You are right and it is certainly the case that a lot will be required of you as an organisation to put you in the right position to succeed with your CRM implementation.

According to the CIO, 1/3 of CRM implementations fail. This is the result of companies not doing their homework and not having a well-developed plan in place.

What you risk doing without a similar plan in place is becoming another company in the statistics that fails with your implementation. You risk becoming a very costly project that does not generate the ROI you would have liked. In the worst case scenario, but all too common, especially if you don't take external help from experts in procurement and implementation, you may have chosen the completely wrong CRM for you and need to redo the whole process of procuring a new CRM.

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How we can help you:

Are you and your company thinking of acquiring CRM or ensuring that you make better use of the CRM you have? If so, we at Leadfront would love to help. At Leadfront, we are system-independent experts in digital transformation in sales and marketing. We help you get the right conditions to succeed with your digital transformation wherever you are in the process and wherever your needs are. In a close and transparent collaboration, we support you through your project to give you the right conditions to succeed and become another reference customer for us.

Some examples of the most common projects we help our clients with are:

• Define and create a digital strategy.
• Carry out feasibility study and procurement of CRM, MA and CDP.
• Drive through the implementation of existing or new CRM, MA and CDP.
• Understand, propose and implement the right work processes to support your organisation and its objectives.
• As well as ensuring that you have the right resources and skills to support the needs and objectives you have.