Before you talk about wanting to adopt a CRM solution for your company, ask yourself a few questions:
1. Is CRM for a small business? How small is small? More importantly, when do you know you are ready?
2. What is that I am looking for that my current combination of Outlook and Excel cannot deliver?
3. What should you look for in a CRM system?
4. What would it take in terms of time, money and manpower to implement a CRM system? How soon will you see the benefits?
Even though the concept of CRM originated in the large enterprises, the underlying concepts are as applicable to small businesses. In fact, there are advantages that a small business has that a big enterprise does not. A small business can be flexible regarding the processes and tools it deploys. It is not burdened with legacy data and faced with difficult decisions on what to keep and what to throw away. And, it can adopt industry best practices as distilled by the CRM vendor rather than having to create the structures and processes that are the most effective.
No size is too small to start. When you have a business trigger, that is your signal. The trigger could be scaling up your sales force, in size and geographical spread. It could be significant addition to your product lines, through merger or acquisition. It could be organic growth, just faster than your original estimates.
Do not however, make the mistake of thinking the CRM system is the answer. However good it is, it will still not sell for you. Your salesmen will need to do that. Irrespective of how good your CRM software is, your marketing team will need to continue to come up with relevant and compelling messages and understand the target audience of the messages. Your CRM software will need to help reaching those messages to the right audience, capture their responses and trigger your salesforce when they need to get involved in pursuing an opportunity. Your CRM software should unburden the salesforce from having to perform activities and logging them as a separate activity.
Before you go shopping for a CRM system, get yourself “CRM ready”.
Understand what you sell (products/ services), what the target markets (industries) are and why they buy (key benefits/ differentiators). Ask yourself if your objective is to grow by entering new market segments or penetrating deeper into existing market segments. Understand who the decision makers in your target segment are; how do they like to be engaged? Once you know this, you will know the desired features of the CRM software that you might want to purchase.
Do however try and invest in a CRM tool which automates the logging and execution most of the tactical customer touch activities and the customer responses. In a previous job, we had a software that required us to write SQL queries to extract the names of contacts we might want to contact, send the mailer from out of the system (we had a vendor), then come back to the system to manually log the responses that happened in the vendor system. Then, only then, could we start running reports (also using SQL queries) to understand if “the needle moved”.
There are a few basic things sales and marketing guys do as part of their daily job; it would be imperative have those done from within the system and capture the response within the system, automatically, so that the sales and marketing people are left free to sell and run campaigns for lead generation. This was my biggest lesson from the struggles we had with the CRM system we used.
One big mistake I have seen many companies make is they let the CRM ownership within the company an either-or problem; it is either sales or marketing which owns it. Both are sub-optimum if not a recipe for disaster. Also, CRM is not a tactical tool but a strategic one; it requires investment of time from the management. Many times, a new tool will come in and force changes (many of them welcome) to the way your sales and marketing people have been used to doing things. You must step in and support the change and be aware of the implications and impact.
