5 crucial steps you don't want to miss before buying a CRM:
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Why should you have a CRM?
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Ensure that top management understands the value of and supports the work with CRM
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Create a launch plan for your CRM
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Sales process
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APIs and Integrations
1. Why should you have a CRM?
Being able to answer that question with a clear and well-thought-out answer will be crucial to your chances of success 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 goal. Otherwise, you risk people feeling unclear, unmotivated and the organization working in different directions. When you sit down to answer why you should have a CRM, you should also include the following questions:
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What is the rationale for having a CRM? And what are the challenges and needs behind it?
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How will a CRM support you in driving your business forward towards your goals?
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What do you need to do as an organization to get the most value from the CRM?
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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?
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And what procedures do we need to put in place to make this plan feasible? And for it to become part of their daily work?
2. Ensure that top management understands the value of and supports the work with CRM
How well you as a company will succeed with your implementation of your CRM will primarily be influenced by your ability to transform the organization and adapt working methods and routines. To succeed in this work, it will be crucial that you really ensure that top management understands why you should acquire a CRM. And also what value it creates, what work it requires and what is required of them. Driving through a major change requires ownership, follow-up from Managers at different levels. "How do I know if top management in my organization does not understand the value of our CRM?" Classic warning signs to look out for:
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Top management says they don't need to participate in meetings and discussions about CRM.
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They say that CRM is a system issue and that it should be taken with the CTO.
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They think that the CRM just costs a lot of money and they don't really see the value of investing more money in a CRM.
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Top management doesn't work anything in your CRM and doesn't understand it.
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They don't use data directly from the CRM to measure key KPIs and e.g. forecasting and sales pipeline.
3. Create a launch plan for your CRM
Don't underestimate the scope and work required by 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:
"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 organization. Make sure that this person really gets the right conditions and the right training of the system. If you are a larger organization with operations in several business areas and countries, you should also create an ambassador program where each business area and / or country has an ambassador / "super user" who acts as a spokesperson to their market to ensure that the information spreads in the right way. It can also act as a good support group to gather feedback and test different hypotheses and features before you decide to go live with major features and changes.
Sub-goals
Divide the project into different steps and phases as suggested below. This model has proven to be successful by acting as a support and clarification for what is expected of the organization in the different phases. It also makes it easier to measure and define the progress of the project. It also makes it easier for users to work with a manageable amount of focus points and new knowledge at a time.
Leadfronts Roadmap example with 3 phases and the metaphors of learning to crawl, walk and run
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Crawl (define what is the minimum desirable level and conditions)
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Walk (define what is an accepted and good level and conditions)
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Running (define what is a level and conditions you want to strive to achieve)
Common Mistake - Like a kid in a candy store
One of the most common mistakes we encounter is companies that have tried to implement their CRM internally and have gone straight to the task of "learning to run". This usually means that in the excitement of all the system functions and automation available, they have chosen to start with far too much functionality, far more than they can handle. Therefore think big BUT start small.
Training plan
In order for your organization to be able to adopt the new way of working and the knowledge and skills required for this, you are right to invest time in creating and designing a training manual in advance where your users can go to read up and take part in important information and instructions. Don't assume that everyone in the organization is as excited as you in the project team and don't take for granted that they will access this information on their own. Instead, schedule an opportunity for a joint presentation as part of the introduction. 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.
Just having an onboarding and introduction of your CRM will not be enough. Not if you want to ensure that everyone has the prerequisites and the knowledge needed to work in the CRM in the desired way. Instead, make sure you have a long-term training plan for your CRM. It may be that you book and plan to conduct several recurring briefings. Each of these has a clear knowledge topic and value for the users. A good tip is also to have a document that maps your users' completed training. This is to ensure that everyone has taken part in the information. Next, it can be a good idea to create a simple Google Form as a knowledge test. This way you can make sure that the users actually possess the skills and knowledge you consider necessary.
Incentives/KPIs
For a sales organization, incentives and KPIs are part of everyday life. Most often these are based on pure performance in terms of revenue. But here we need to think again. Ensuring that your salespeople work in your CRM should be business critical. This is to ensure that the information is in the right place and that you help the salespeople to become more effective in their sales work so that your investment in the CRM ultimately provides the right ROI (return on investment). Therefore, look at the possibility of introducing KPIs in particular on work done in the CRM. This can be more creative solutions such as the number of notes created, contact persons added with the right information, but above all that basic sales KPIs are only measured from the CRM and not from any other place.
4. Sales process
A common challenge when launching a CRM is that salespeople don't think the CRM helps them but only limits them. This frustration, common among salespeople and/or combined with a lack of clear instructions, risks leading salespeople to create their own workflows and routines.
To create a CRM that really adds value and supports the organization, you should have designed a sales process in advance. This should be anchored and accepted by representatives from or the entire sales organization. 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 the different steps mean and what should be in which step. Another recommendation is that each step in the sales process should have different milestones. The milestones must be achieved in order to move the business opportunity forward in the sales process. Most modern CRM solutions support this by, for example, setting up checklists or similar that require various actions to be completed in order for the deal to be moved on.
5. APIs and Integrations
When implementing a CRM, an important question to ask yourself is "Is your CRM going to be the system that acts as the Master Data or is it another system that will do it?".
The answer will in turn affect the other important question which is "What other systems do we have that may need to integrate and synchronize data to/from our CRM? This may be based on the need to mirror important data, for example, or to ensure that data is synchronized between different systems. A simpler tool for doing this is, for example, to use a whiteboard and paint the different system solutions you have. Go through your customer journey and sales process and map out different work steps that will generate data or that need other data. Then you will get a better overall picture of data flows and then be able to prioritize what is business critical at this stage.
Of course, all this can be perceived as a large and tedious work to carry out before you can get started and procure and implement a CRM. You are right and it is really the case that it will require a lot of you as an organization to give you the right conditions to succeed with your implementation of your CRM.
According to the organization CIO, 1/3 of CRM implementations fail. This is a result of, among other things, companies not doing their preparatory work and lacking a well-developed plan in place.
What you risk doing without a similar plan in place is that you become another company in the statistics that fails with your implementation. It risks becoming a very costly project for you that does not generate the ROI you had hoped for. In the worst case scenario, but all too common, especially if you do not take external help from experts in procurement and implementation, you may have chosen the wrong CRM for you and need to redo the whole process of procuring a new CRM.
How we can help you:
Are you and your company thinking of procuring a CRM or want to ensure that you better utilize the CRM you have? If so, we at Leadfront are happy to help you. 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 you need. 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 to us.
Some examples of the most common projects we help our customers with are:
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Defining and creating a digital strategy.
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Conduct feasibility study and procurement of CRM, MA and CDP.
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Drive through implementation of existing or new CRM, MA and CDP.
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Understand, propose and implement the right work processes to support your organization and your objectives.
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And ensure you have the right resources and skills to support your needs and objectives.
