6 things to consider before getting a CRM for your small business
What is CRM?
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a digital solution for managing a firm’s interactions and relationships with all of the potential and existing customers.
The mission is to boost business relationships.
The solution helps companies stay connected and engage with the customers, colleagues, and suppliers throughout the life-cycle and help them by providing services all through the relationship.
It is useful to business as it helps increase the chances of cross-selling, up-selling, and improving all modes of customer communication by coordinating sales and marketing campaigns.
Why is a strategic approach necessary?
Up until recently, the implementations of CRM were notably problematic because there was a lack of focus and no clear strategy to adopt the technology.
In 2017 based on a report from the CIO, which took the average of at least 12 research projects, found around 33% of CRM implementations had failed with a host of reasons like technology limitations, going over budget, etc.
The core issue is that people don’t take advantage of CRM systems to generate revenue for the company. Still, instead, they are used for inspection — for identifying progress, providing visibility, making accurate forecasts, and so on.
All these features are helpful, but they should be adopted to improve the sales process helping front-line salespeople to bring in more revenue to the company.
A structured CRM strategy
The common fallacy of when trying to deploy the CRM is to jump headfirst into implementation without a strategy.
By matching the company goals with customer expectations, a strategy can be crafted to maximize the extent that a CRM system can contribute to the business objectives.
A good CRM strategy will include overall communication goals and determine how CRM will support those goals.
An advanced version of the strategy would encompass finance and customer service apart from sales or marketing activities.
A CRM strategy will typically cover:
- How will it support business goals
- Implementation time-frame.
- Key stakeholders.
- CRM selection.
- CRM feature requirements.
- CRM implementation success metrics.
- Budgetary considerations.
- Training and onboarding for staff.
Any small business’ CRM strategy would use a structured framework for assuring success. The framework formulates how business goals can be achieved by interacting with CRM and add value to the end customer.
Without further ado, here are the 6 things to consider before getting a CRM
1. Set a destination.
The business must keep the key goal in mind and frame steps to determine how the objectives will be met.
The goals should be made into smaller targets, and then the time frame in which these are to be met should also be planned out.
The road map must be flexible, allowing for changes along the way.
2. Customers are to be prioritized.
It is only fair that every business wants to treat all their customers as equal. But the company must be willing to prioritize customers based on how profitable or how likely they would become profitable.
The organization may have its definition of what makes a customer value, such as traits that must be looked for in a buyer so that they can segment accounts to increase metric-effectiveness.
3. Communicate with employees.
The CRM strategy could be designed to handle large amounts of data and to facilitate communication between various groups. Still, it is the company’s employees that will determine if the planned goals are met.
Including the employees in its plans would greatly help in incorporating the goals and give them the accountability to take the company in the right direction.
4. To keep it simple
Working on a new CRM software may pressurize the team, with the day to day activities of the job, when combined with added learning, will create stress.
There are a few simple steps that can help integrate a CRM seamlessly into the working system.
- Run a beta test: A small subset of users can be chosen and made to undergo beta testing. ON doing so, information can be captured on what pain points the user faces while using the system and thereby creating changes while rolling out the plan to a broader team.
- Stagger the roll-out: Everyone on the team must be made familiar with the basics of the system before covering advanced features. Doing so in manageable parts help the teams feel in control while working with new methods.
- Provide support: After providing training, it is sensible also to support teams, so that any unforeseen questions can be clarified, and the system is mastered to yield faster results.
5. Sync everything to CRM
Most of the CRMs would possess their in-built application that imitates other popular applications. If this is the scenario, then it becomes straightforward to automatically track and sync your data throughout the CRM.
At times when external applications are necessary, CRM must be synced with other programs that are utilized.
The best CRMs do this automatically, as they import client-related appointments from the calendar, updating cancellations and other changes, while also sending reminders when appropriate. Syncing ensures that the CRM is exploited to its full extent.
6. Evaluate and Improve
A program or technology may come with its unique challenges, and the same goes for the CRM strategy.
It is nigh impossible to plan for every eventuality possible; therefore, revaluation of the set approach should be considered if it comes to attention that something isn’t working as well as it should be.
A sensible schedule may look like:
Every year: Providing staff training and refresher sessions.
Every six months: Review the success metrics and reflect on the long term CRM road-map
Every three months: review the effectiveness of the operations team
Every two weeks: update on new projects, if any.
Ongoing: an all-day help-desk to support queries
Now you have the strategy, let’s help you out with getting the right CRM for your business. Check out Deskera Sales right here.
