Preparing your CRM Project
Follow best practice project management when choosing the most appropriate CRM software for your business.
For you to decide on the ideal solution to meet your business requirements you need to have established and considered selection criteria before you can proceed.
This site helps users with CRM projects – to ask the right questions, be specific when briefing in functional requirements and be equipped with as much information as possible about CRM technology possibilities.
Managing your CRM project
Our best practice tips when selecting the right CRM for you
This CRM comparison site helps visitors to prepare for their CRM project, whether it involves taking the questionnaire or exploring our other CRM resources and articles.
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Step 1
Research CRM technology
- Review the scope and benefits pages of this site to prepare for shortlisting your CRM solution
- Download relevant whitepapers in order to undertake research into CRM technology and best practice
- Read selected CRM articles to ensure your conversations with CRM providers are relevant and forward-thinking
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Step 2
Get ready for a CRM project
- Look into CRM providers who offer more than the technology integration, ask for pre-project services such as Customer Experience Workshops to surface your current state in order to map future state ambitions
- Start auditing your existing customer data and its sources. For instance, what are the applications you use to manage relationships with customers and prospects. How unified and structured are these, do they operate in silos and provide a reliable customer view? Do you need support in this exercise from a CRM consultant?
- Start thinking about the various CRM users across the business, what their roles are (e.g. Senior Management, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Field Service, Customer Insights and CX teams), how they currently work, what changes they want to see, what are the challenges they face, what are their current performance levels, where do they keep their data? Does each team want to play an active role in the project to select and implement the new tool?
- Consider your project expectations, agile task management within a phased approach is best practice in order to focus on the must-haves of features and functions in the expected time to get you started in order to build from, see quick ROI and better user adoption
- Read more on Criteria when selecting a CRM
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Step 3
Complete our survey to pinpoint your perfect CRM solution
- In order for us to suggest the best CRM application for your needs, tell us about your organization, your focus and your existing infrastructure and capabilities
- With a few questions around timescales, specific functionality you need, you now have the outline of a CRM project brief
- Download a fully personalized report with a breakdown of the best CRM tools for your business
Take the CRM survey now
CRM project management methodology
Follow these simple steps on how to choose the best CRM for you
Identify your current and future CRM needs
In CRM projects, analyzing your current needs is important, but as you will be using the CRM software for some time, it is essential to consider the needs you are likely to have in the future as the business grows and develops.
When trying to find the right solution, and the right CRM software partner, it is important to ask the right questions, for today and tomorrow, so that the software solution can effectively meet the ongoing demands of your business. Make sure that the solution is scalable, both in terms of adding users or additional functionality.
Prepare a business case for CRM
You will need to place these business needs in a commercial context in order to put forward a robust business case for CRM investment. Set some parameters for measurements in your business plan (which you can reflect back to throughout your implementation via data analysis) – these can be aligned to:
- Company growth (increasing your customer base, revenue increase, improving your win rate, maximizing cross and upsell opportunities)
- Operational efficiencies (streamlining and automating, improvement of processes, cost control, system integration)
- Your customer relationship strategy – the strategy comes before the CRM tool
- Customer satisfaction (better targeting, consistency of customer experience, visibility, recognition and adapting to the needs of your customers, flexible go-to-market of new products and services)
- Objectively qualify the benefits (and validate the ROI backed up by data) gained by addressing these business needs and prioritize and include accordingly (this is a must within any business case)
- Competitor analysis – quantify the benefits in terms of differentiating against competitors to provide optimal experiences for your customers and deepen customer relationships
- Set out a change management strategy in order to lessen risks of project failure; this should include strategies for people, processes and technologies with clear responsibilities and timings defined
Accountability is key in successful CRM projects. Each project task within the plan should have an owner and within each project there should be an overall project manager. Each team should nominate at least one CRM champion who can speak on behalf of their role and seniority in terms of expectations and in turn ensure the user adoption once the CRM is in place.
Discover more about CRM deployment best practices to help plan your work.
