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Tag: crm selection

CRM Customization is the Key to Success
Sales leaders searching for CRM and sales management solutions typically have Dashboards and Reports high on their shopping list. Unfortunately, they’re often misled by the sexy demos they see and only learn about key limitations after they’ve made a commitment and it’s too late.

Imagine two car sales people traveling to the Amazon to sell cars.

One sells Kias and the other sells Cadillacs. Deep in the Amazon where the

natives have scarcely seen a car, they’re not likely to appreciate the depth of features and quality that the Cadillac salesperson can point out.

It’s only after driving a Kia for a while that you can really appreciate a Cadillac.

It’s the same with sales management reports and CRM customization.

Most CRM vendors will show you dashboards that do generic things like measure leads by source or by vertical market or sales opportunities by product or territory. And if you’ve never been able to get that type of report without putting your accounting department, marketing department and your assistant through torture for weeks, then those reports look like game changers.

But, it’s only after looking at a report of sales opportunities by product each week for a few weeks that it begins to dawn on you…. You need something slightly different. Your business is unique and even your direct competitors probably want to measure their sales pipeline in different ways.

CRM Customization Breakdown Example:

A standard report or dashboard in most CRM systems is Calls made by sales person. Again, if you’ve never been able to get that data easily, then it is a very nice report! But, can you look at that report and know which sales person on your team needs some attention regarding their call volume? Probably not. Sally might have logged on 50 calls today but, that’s been the case for a few months and her sales keep coming in under quota. On the other hand, Sam only logs 10 or 15 calls in the CRM but, he kills his quota consistently. There’s something missing. It could be the potential size of the accounts Sally and Sam are calling on. Maybe Sally is very comfortable calling on customers in the industry she used to work in but, those accounts are typically smaller. Sam on the other hand is always focused on big fish.

The solution is that your call dashboard needs to clearly show calls logged for large accounts vs. small account. Or perhaps its certain vertical markets that need to be highlighted in your reporting.

The point is that it’s this simple little bit of detail that always does two things:
1. It makes the information actionable – you can look at the dashboard and know which sales person needs some training or some praise and take action immediately.
2. It breaks most CRMs
Most CRM solutions are built to do all sorts of need things with the default structure of their system and the fields built into their system. But, when you create custom fields to track unique bits of information that are crucial to your business, taking those pre-built, ready to go, great looking reports and adding that additional information in leads to one of these road blocks:
- It just can’t be done in the basic product – purchase and configuration of add-ons or upgrades required.
- It can be done but, it takes a skilled technician – start spending time and money with consultants.
Here are some conversations from the Salesforce.com support site:

Interpretation: “Yes, it can be done but, I’m probably going to need to do it for you.”

Interpretation: “Yes, it can be done but, you’ll need to purchase additional products or add-ons.”

This is why SalesNexus offers a far lower risk decision for sales managers:
1. All features are built to work seamlessly with your customizations. Custom fields can be the basis of your reports, dashboards, campaigns, etc.
2. SalesNexus provides unlimited support and consulting itself. If you can’t do something with SalesNexus that’s important to you, we work with you to create it rather than referring you to outside consultants and vendors. This keeps things simple and affordable as your needs grow and change
December 2, 2017
How to Write a CRM RFP
Deciding to write a CRM RFP is a tough decision for most organizations. (Acronym Disambiguation: CRM = Customer Relationship Management; RFP = Request for Proposal).

Typical businesses decide to implement a new CRM solution, for the first time or to replace an existing solution, and go through a “selection process” that is loosely structured. Typically the process goes something like this:
- Browse the marketplace for possible CRM vendors.
- Select a “short list” of vendors to begin indepth demos and discussions with.
- Put together a list of “must have” and “nice to have” features based upon the features you’ve seen from vendors.
- Bring together a group of users and managers to compare the vendors against your must and nice to haves.
- Make the selection and plan the implementation based upon the vendors available services and recommended processes.
Of course, this approach is upside down. The primary risks that this approach leads to are:
- Lack of executive and staff buy-in, leading to poor adoption.
- Misfit of features to real business needs.
- Inefficient implementation and under-utilized solution due to poorly planned implementation and lack of resources.
Writing a CRM RFP inverts the order of the process and provides a framework for managing the selection and implementation process to ensure the best fit CRM solution is chosen and the implementation leads to a well used solution and maximum business value.

It’s a big job but, well worth the investment. Consider this: Even today, 50% of CRM Implementations fail to meet management expectations. What is the cost of CRM failure for your business?

How to Write a CRM RFP

Build a Selection Committee

Identify representatives of each group that will use the solution and just as importantly, be sure to include at least one or two executives with the influence to ensure processes are followed and staff requirements are enforced.

Business Process Documentation

List business processes from the standpoint of the customer’s experience and map out how your staff will use the CRM to manage that process.

Business Analytics Design

What reports and analytics will be needed by executives, marketing and end users? How will those reports be used to make decisions?

List and Prioritize Required Capabilities and Features

Each team and every user will have their own list of important CRM features. Add them all to a list. Be inclusive. This is a key part of making sure each group is on-board when it comes time to use the CRM system. Invite outside of the box thinking! Include features that might not be considered typical CRM features like marketing automation, integration with accounting systems or ERPs, etc. As an example, here’s are several lists of CRM Requirements provided to us by various clients.

Obviously, this list of “wants” is going to be long. So, of course, the 2nd step here is to prioritize. And this is where executive involvement is crucial. A handful of members of the committee that have a firm grasp of how the business really works, where profits come from and why customers choose your company over competitors should go through the entire list of features you’ve built and assign a business value to them. This should not be an exhaustive process that involves lots of research or cost analysis. It’s soley for the purpose of prioritizing the requirements that will be the basis of your CRM RFP. Just put each feature in a “ballpark” in terms of the cost savings or additional revenue that should result. If it saves time, estimate the cost per hour and the number of hours.

Again, don’t agonize over the math here. You’ll quickly realize that there are a short list of requirements that should deliver the lion’s share of the business value and the rest of minor contributors. As your CRM selection and implementation project unfolds, some in the organization may reach a point of fatigue or just get distracted. Keeping your eyes on the expected overall value to your business will help keep the team focused and motivated.

Write Your CRM Requirements

Reorganize the list into Must Have CRM features and Nice to Have CRM features. The Nice to Have list might need to be organized into 2 or 3 groups based on needs of particular groups, etc. Share this prioritized list of CRM requirements, with the associated estimates of derived business value, with the entire team for feedback. Be sure that executive management is on-board with your estimates and will support decisions that may leave “nice to have” CRM features out for constiuencies that report to them, so long as the Must Haves are achieved by the chosen CRM solution.

Plan the CRM Implementation

Take a look at the resources available to help with implementing the CRM solution including sales and marketing staff, IT staff, executives and consultants you’re already working with. What is their primary function? How much of their time can you afford to devote to the CRM implementation and for how long? Take a look at our “Ideal CRM Implementation Plan” for a more indepth look at what works.

No matter your industry or the CRM system you choose, there are a few crucial steps that will be required for someone to invest time in:
- Field design – what specific data elements will be captured in the CRM? What are the possible “answers” or valid input in these fields?
- Data mapping and loading – mapping the customer information you have (accounting software, sales people’s contacts, marketing lists, etc.) to the newly designed fields in your CRM solution.
- Process Documentation and Set Up – each CRM user role should be defined clearly in terms of what that user is required to input into the CRM system, when and how, framed by your Business Processes defined earlier on.
- Analytics and Report Design and Setup – customizing the chosen CRM solution to provide the needed metrics and reports.
- Template Design and Setup – email templates, proposal templates, customer service response templates, etc.
Really Write the CRM RFP
1. List the Business Processes to be managed by the CRM system.
2. List the Must Have CRM requirements and clearly mark them as such.
3. List the Nice to Have requirements and provide some ranking of importance based on your business value analysis. It’s a good idea to provide your own table of features and requirements that vendors can answer yes or no to, line by line, so that you can easily take all the RFP responses and compare side by side.
4. Define Expected Deliverables – Will your team load data and set up fields, reports, dashboards, templates, processes, integrations, etc.? Or will you require the vendor to do some or all of this? Clearly define which parts you plan to manage internally and which you need the vendor to handle.
5. Described the Desired “Acceptance Testing” – Clearly, there are a lot of variable in a CRM implementation project and your vendor’s definition of “ready” and yours will not be the same. Consider planning a small “beta test” of the solution once its set up and ready to use. A small group of users can quickly try the primary business processes in the CRM and find oustanding issue quickly. This avoids disrupting the entire team and creating a negative impression when the system isn’t quite ready for prime time.
6. Describe the Planned Training – Is there a national sales meeting planned where you’re expecting to train the team on the new CRM? Will there need to be separate training programs for various types of users?
7. Describe Documentation Required – One of the great benefits of going through the process to write a CRM RFP is that key business processes often get defined and clearly documented for the first time. Do you expect the vendor to provide documentation of your specific business processes or will your team do that?
June 19, 2017
CRM Training Success

Effective CRM training is the key to getting your sales team onboard and off to a fast start, without disrupting their sales efforts.

Lack of user adoption is the #1 killer of CRM rollouts. However, typical training approaches can err on both sides of the equation, too much information as well as not enough.

Common CRM Training Mistakes

Probably the most common mistake made by leadership in rolling out their new CRM especially in smaller organizations, is lack of structure combined with lack of training. The mistake that leaders make is assuming that the team will invest good faith efforts in learning the new CRM tool. This may be true of new cool tools for account research or other sales and marketing functions but never forget, the CRM is perceived by most sales people as management playing big brother. So, they will use lack of training and slow, inefficient software for their lack of use of the CRM but, as often as not, it’s their own resistance to the concept that is the culprit. If you leave it up to the sales person, some will learn it and some won’t but, most will blame the system when they fail to use it.

Conversely, the leadership team and the support staff that were involved in selecting the CRM solution often are very excited about all its capabilities and anxious to rollout the solution to the team so they’ll learn and use all the bells and whistles. But for all the reasons above, the sales people are not as likely to be excited by the technology. Often leadership is misled by a few tech savvy sales people that are very enthusiastic into believing that the entire team will utilize a tremendous amount of the CRM capabilities. And so, the CRM training is a blizzard of bells and whistles, too much information and most of the sales people leave completely overwhelmed.

There is no over estimating the disparity between the appitudes and willingness of individual sales people to adobt and learn CRMs. Countless times I’ve trained entire sales teams in a big banquet room or conference room and seen it happen before my eyes. It seems that no matter the pace and structure of the training, there are always a few team members that begin to get that glazed over look within the first few minutes.

To be clear, this is NOT all the sales person’s fault. We all know folks that just don’t get tech quickly. Often, these people are team players that see the value of the CRM but, just don’t learn technology well in a classroom setting.

In addition to the challenges of training a varied and often resistent team, leadership lacks the experience to see how certain things are aboslutely required of the sales people in order to drive the reporting, analytics and dashboards that management is expecting.

Based on 25 years of experience teaching sales people to use CRMs, I’ve found that the path of least resistance and highest probability of success in CRM training and adoption is this…

Identify Sales Leader Champion

There’s got to be one or more sales people that are going to act as an example to the rest of the team and encourage them. “Hey guys, I did it and it helped me this and that way. You can do it too!” Ideally, these champions are involved in the selection process early on and therefore understand all the trade offs that are wrestled with along the way. They’ll also serve as a reality check as you begin to map out the required input from sales people. What’s realistic to expect? What will really be helpful to the sales person? What will really aggrivate them?

Identify Expected Analytics & Reporting

In the end, the point of the CRM is to manage customers and manage sales people and enable marketing automation, etc. So, management has to decide what analytics and reporting are essential and which are nice to have. Each manager that expects to have a dashboard to help them serve clients and manage their team should spell out exactly what is on that dashboard early on, ideally prior to the selection process. “I want to see how many customer service issues we have each week.” is not quite good enough. You have to spell out exactly what defines a customer service issue. Does it include a customer calling in to change their bililng address? What about calling to praise a team member?

Map Analytics to Bare Minimum Sales Input

With all the required analytics mapped out, then you’ll know exactly what information has to be input in the CRM by each user. Users have to be trained to know that changing the billing address is officially a “customer support” case but, praising a team member is not. Sales people need to be trained that calling a customer and having an actual conversation with the customer should be logged as an official “sales call”. Dialing the phone, getting the secretary and asking how her weekend was is not an official “sales call”… or maybe it is for you. Either way, your dashboard is worthless if you don’t know what sales people are calling a sales call. In addition, marketing may feel it would useful to be able to segment prospects and customers based on several very specific pieces of data about their company. Each of these items need to be collected by the sales people consistently or marketing’s segmenting and targeting objectives can’t be met. Is it reasonable to ask sales people to obtain all of this information in all cases? Is it onnerous to ask them to document it all after every sales call?

Build a Focused CRM Training Program

The CRM training for the sales people should focus only on the data entry that is essential to driving the analytics and reporting that are required by management and marketing. Get very specific and very clear about exactly how to enter each piece of information and play out real world scenarios so that sales people can be confident about how to make judgement calls. After a sales presentation, which fields have to be updated? What are the scenarios that apply to each value in each field? What is expected in terms of documenting deal size, follow up tasks, etc.?

The intial CRM training should be very focused and limited. This avoids the overwhelmed, glazed over feeling by being very clear and very specific and providing lots of examples and practice. Managers and marketers will be frustrated by this process. They’ll see it as underutilization of the CRM solution. But, be patient! The greatest risk is that the CRM investment will be a complete wash because the sales team didn’t adopt it consistently. Take this diliberate approach and when you and the sales team feel you’re ready for it, add new requirements for the sales people that provide greater value for management and the company. But do it carefully in small bites.

April 10, 2017