Posts Tagged ‘CRM training’

CRM Best Practices…at a glance

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

CRM success isn’t only about technology; rather, it is a successful integration of three critical variables: People, Business Processes and Technology Solutions. Getting everyone in your organization to focus on your customers will drive the adoption of the CRM technology.

CRM, at its core, is an organizational commitment to change. CRM begins and ends with management commitment to introduce a customer-driven culture into a business. Managers leading CRM projects need to recognize that employees are sensitive to change, and need to be included in the transition process.

Managers need to make a convincing argument to employees of the benefits of being able to view all customer data in a single environment. People become attached to doing things a certain way, using the spreadsheets, contact managers, simple databases, and even the paper records they’ve always used. Even though they recognize that their methods may be inefficient, they are often reluctant to move data out of the software they’ve become accustomed to.

That’s why CRM tools need to be intuitive to learn and easy to use. Change is never easy, but easy-to-use CRM tools smooth the transition. If software tools are hard to use, most people give up trying after the first try. Make sure your CRM suite has good data import features so loading data into a new environment won’t undermine the transition to CRM before it gets off the ground.

Choose a flexible CRM solution that is easy to adapt to your business, and that will grow with your company. Lack of customization and personalization options leaves the business operator with few choices. Be sure to choose a CRM solution that is easy to upgrade with new features or other capacity enhancements.

Make sure your data is safe. Your customers are your business, so your CRM solution should provide you with reliable backup features. Hosted CRM solutions archive your critical data for you on their own servers, so your business is protected against any local service outage or hardware failure. CRM solutions need to be secure, as your customer data must be protected against theft or tampering. Verify security and backup features with your CRM vendor.

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3 Simple Steps for Selecting the Right CRM

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

If you are embarking on a CRM software selection process, it can be a daunting task.  With all of the products and partners to choose from, finding a jumping off point can be a struggle.  We’ve compiled a list of tips to guide you through your software selection process and suggestions for “must-have” features and functionality that will ensure that you choose a CRM system that will support your needs now and into the future.

1) Start With a Plan and Ensure You Have Buy-In

  • Gather background information on the benefits, savings, ROI and cost justification of selecting and implementing a CRM solution.  Present this information to your organizational leadership and make sure everyone in your organization is on board with the project to help ensure success. 
  • Determine who the stakeholders in the project are and work with them to establish a common, company-wide goal for the CRM system.  From these stakeholders, put together a project team that is headed by a true CRM evangelist.
  • Determine your budget, while keeping in mind the costs associated with the selection process as well as implementation, integration, training, and ongoing support.
  • Assess your business processes to determine what best practices you have in place and what areas could benefit from improvement through the new system.  Determine the pain points in your existing system, and map your current processes in all areas of the organization.  Then once you define your business requirements, you’re better prepared to select a software solution that meets your business needs.

2) Compare Your Options

  • Consider working with a partner that offers Software Selection Consulting Services to help you through the process.
  • Before you view a demo of any solution, make sure that the partner showing you the solution understands your requirements and is committed to showing you how their system will meet those requirements.  Don’t waste your time being swept away by impressive features that you will never use. 
  • Be sure that your hardware and operating system can support the systems you are considering.  You don’t want to waste time seeing products that aren’t feasible options for you.
  • If you are looking at several options, establish a scoring system that tracks the various benefits and shortcomings of each product.  The scoring needs to reflect not only the features of the products, but the qualitative aspects of the solution and working with the partner.
  • Your internal CRM project team should be present for all demos and meetings with the partner.  They should be encouraged to share their concerns and feedback, as well as ask questions.  Use the partners responsiveness to the team’s concerns and questions as a factor when you are deciding whether or not to work with them, as it will affect your business relationship long-term.
  • Make sure that you are being shown the current version of the software.  Don’t make a purchase based on promises for future technology.   

3) Find a Solution to Grow with Your Business

  • A true CRM solution will provide company-wide benefits  through marketing campaign management, sales force automation, customer care, contact management, task management, and scheduling.  Settling for anything less in the short term will cause you to repeat the software selection process in the long-term and cost you more to implement or integrate disparate products. 
  • Make sure that the CRM solution you are considering integrates with your other business management applications.  It should be able to be deployed on different technologies as you needs change as well as support Web Service, have a strong API for integration and be able integrate with other technologies such as your phone system and website.
  • Your CRM system should support the ways you do business and be accessible from anywhere you do business, that means it should support all standard wireless devices as well as support interactive web chat with your customers and make a wide range of information available to them over robust web sites. 
  • As a technical solution, your CRM software needs to be properly matched to your technical requirements and capabilities.  Therefore, you should look for a CRM solution that provides the capability to seamlessly move from a hosted solution to an on-site systemand vice versa as your technical abilities change. 

By Socius, an Ohio Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner

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Dashboard Overload

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Another posting in our ongoing series of salesforce training topics.  Today’s topic – Dashboard Overload.

Hello, my name is the Dashboard Spy and I’m a dashboard-aholic.  Yes, I’ve looked at thousands of dashboards and I think they’re all wonderful.  And, if you’re like most of my readers and involved in the design, implementation or management of business dashboards, I bet you also think that they are the best thing since the pie chart.

BUT, if you are a dashboard USER, there may be times when you think that you’re getting too much of a good thing.  It may be that you are getting overwhelmed by all the enthusiastic dashboarders in your company.

Horrors! I’ve said it. Dashboards are too much of a good thing?   But, Mr. Dashboard Spy, have you lost your mind?

Take a look at the wonderful post titled The Great Dashboard Cleanup Project on the blog Force Monkey by JP Seabury.

salesforce.com dashboard

JP Seabury tells the tale of how he downloaded the Salesforce.com AppExchange Dashboard Pack and created a snowballing dashboard phenomenon at his company.  A good thing, right?  His regret now, however, is that these dashboards have taken over and that there is a misplaced emphasis on the dashboard as a tool rather than the business intelligence they should provide.

Very early in our implementation of Salesforce.com, I wanted to show the power of Dashboards to my users. I downloaded AppExchange Dashboard Pack 1.0. The application is free, and installs all of the many dashboards published by Salesforce Labs. The package had dashboards for every conceivable use: lead flow, marketing campaign metrics, sales forecasting, support KPI, sales / support rep performance tracking, document tab tracking, user adoption, data quality analytics…everything.

I downloaded the app, did a little tweaking (very little), and then published the dashboards to my users. When Summer ‘08 Release gave us the ability to email dashboards (as an HTML page) directly to users, I enabled that functionality for a few key managers and user groups, too.

Soon after, I saw copies of dashboards distributed at various meetings and screenshots of dashboard components included in PowerPoint presentations.  Managers and executives looked forward to their daily, weekly and/or monthly Dashboard emails, and talked animatedly about them in the halls or at company meetings.  I felt good.

Yet something was wrong.  I couldn’t quite place my finger on what it was, but the monster was there, elusive. The users asked for more dashboards, more pretty graphs, charts, tables, and I appeased them. Today, we have more than 50 different dashboards and hundreds of reports feeding those dashboards. It’s an absolute glut of information.  And this monster I created now has a name: Data Admiration.

They come to the CRM tool, very excited about the volumes of data and information captured in our Salesforce Dashboards.  They drink deep from the kool-aid. But none of these dashboards seem to drive any real change in the organization. Why not?

Check out his post to read his reflection on why this mass dashboard adoption seemed hollow.

Interestingly, one of his readers provided a comment on the proliferation of dashboards and the required Dashboard Cleanup Project done at his company:

I’m not really in to reports and dashboards, but I’d just like to share some horrifying numbers with you: Before our large cleanup project started 6 months ago we had roughly 6000 reports feeding little over 1000 dashboards, all thrown out in folders without any naming convention of any kind.

Now we’re a bit better off, especially because the folders have been organized by area and we have a central team handling everything that has to do with reports.

1,000 dashboards at his company?  Wow.

Please share any stories regarding dashboards running amok at your company.

PS. The above screenshot shows a sales performance dashboard. For an interesting look at how to deploy sales metric dashboads using the PC Desktop Widget approach, see: Salesforce dashboard

Regards Hubert Lee, The Dashboard Spy

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What defines social CRM?

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

I don’t think you can call a new solution “Social CRM” until you are connecting new social data sources to the sales data of your customers. CRM is about operationalization and efficiency. And ultimately that can only be judged against real sales data. We are now engaging customers in more and more sophisticated relationship programs meant to promote advocacy and action.I know that the state-of-the-art to monitor sales impact from social programs  on a daily basis just isn’t there yet.

One of our advantages (Ogilvy) in the marketplace is our complete eco-system of disciplines working side-by-side. That means on any given day, I am working with direct marketers, online advertising creatives, retail activation experts, and CRM leaders. We are methodically applying “social” to all traditional disciplines to define and practice next gen solutions to traditional business problems.

Managing Relationships

We have developed a robust Social IRM (Influencer Relationship Management) expertise. We have also developed many of the tools and services necessary to manage long term relationships with customers promoting them to both share some form of Word of Mouth with peers and to actually take an action all the way down to purchasing something. But until we connect all that great data to the actual sales data for said customers, I don’t think its wise to label it ‘Social CRM.’

Altimeter released their framework for Social CRM via a useful pdf of 18 use cases. It’s great stuff and a useful checklist of technology companies who may support one of those use cases.Still, is it really Social CRM? Each of those use cases represents business solutions that we and others have been supporting for years under the titles ’social media marketing and communications’ and ’social business.’

Brent Leary at Inc.compares traditional CRM and Social CRM:

“And with multiple people “touching” the customer for various reasons, it quickly became important to be able to track activities, appointments, potential deals, notes, and other information.  Consequently, traditional CRM grew out of this need to store, track, and report on critical information about customers and prospects.

Social CRM is growing out of a completely different need — the need to attract the attention of those using the Internet to find answers to business challenges they are trying to overcome.”

His POV, like many others, is that there is great value in adding social media strategies to your existing CRM program. He qualifies the contribution of the ’social’ side to qualities we all take for granted yet remain hard to measure -

“social CRM is all about people and community.  It’s about how your company intends to participate in the ongoing conversations taking place in the industry.  How you embrace non-traditional influential people like popular industry bloggers, and social sites on the Web frequented by your audience.  And fully understanding the importance of contributing to discussions, in a transparent manner, will help you build the kind of reputation needed to become a valued member of the online communities important to your business.”

This is all important social media for business. But does it qualify as Social CRM? 

by John Bell at socialmediatoday.com
originally posted on March 8, 2010

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Where CRM Fails

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Between the decision to implement an enterprise-wide software solution and it implementation and acceptance, lies perhaps the most treacherous ground in the corporate IT landscape… 

Research group after research group report that an extraordinarily high percentage of software projects either fail to meet their goals after completion, are delivered over-budget or late, or are simply cancelled outright. 
 
Gartner (News – Alert) says half the projects in their study exceeded their initial budget tolerance by 200 percent. Standish Group suggests fully 1/3 of software projects are scotched before a single user has drawn benefit from the application.
 
CRM – Customer Relationship Management – projects are no different; they are subject to the same torques and tensions that tear other projects apart. In fact, the numbers are higher with CRM projects; studies show up to 70 percent of CRM projects fail. What is the source of so many CRM failures? Are there characteristics of CRM projects that make them especially vulnerable? More important, what are the remedies?
 
Defining Success
 
Ask anyone at your company what CRM is, and you’ll get your first clue about the source of the frequent project failures. Too many people, from staff-level to the corner office, from IT to sales, believe that CRM starts and ends with software.
 
In fact, the core of good CRM is the same as it’s been for decades: the right people executing the right processes, using the best possible tools at their disposal. And these days the ‘best tools’ means software that support the relationships between companies and clients.
 
To get your project off on the right foot, you’ll need to embrace a balanced view of the current situation that accounts for people, process and technology. That starts with some self-analysis covering all three components:
 
•Assess and Benchmark your current team. What does the organization look like? Who has a customer-facing role, and what do they do? A basic organizational map, along with a list of each team’s assigned roles is an essential first step. If you don’t know what you have to start with, it’s nearly impossible to map out next steps and improvement points.
 
•Map out the basic contours of the key customer-centric processes, including those that generate new business, as well as those that work to support existing clients. Who does what and in what order? What tools do they use to accomplish these tasks? Think about supporting processes as well, like prospect generation, lead qualification, or contract writing. The most important rule? Be honest about how it actually works, not how it’s supposed to work.
 
•Create a vision of the future by modeling the way your customer-centric processes ought to be. Now you can set your “AS-IS” information aside and start working through how things should be. For each existing process, you’ll want a corresponding future state.
 
•The difference between your IS and SHOULD processes represents your path for change.
 
While technology is an important piece of CRM, companies that focus solely on buying or building the best IT components will too often become another statistic in another research group’s report. Meanwhile, companies with healthy CRM implementations have inevitably taken into account all three of the primary components for success: people, process, and technology.
By TMCnet Special Guest
Steve Snapp & Swain Scheps

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