4 Essential Elements to Selecting a Successful CRM

 
If you are under the impression that all CRM systems are same and that randomly picking one would do your job as all of them are same, you need to think again. Just like your skin and bone business manager’s qualification, experience, and expertise matters, so is your CRM system based more or less on the same parameters but different functions. And since a CRM system is not something that you can replace repeatedly, given the high cost and efforts it involves, much thought goes into the selection of a successful CRM.

But some of you might be wondering “Where do I start?” We try to answer the most important question in this blog by discussing the 4 essential elements to successful CRM implementation.

It should grow with you, not ahead of you.

The ‘one size fits all’ formula doesn’t work for CRM systems as every business is different in its own way and more importantly, the size of businesses vary greatly. The first thing to make a note of is to decide how many people/employees will be using the CRM in your company? It can be one, ten, or hundreds, and the capability of CRM is to be gauged on that. You need to choose CRM system that answers your business’ requirements or is customizable accordingly.

And how do we do that? Let’s see.

Some of the CRMs are to be chosen on the basis of what they have to offer while others let you choose features that you need for your business functions. The latter one is of course the better and more cost-effective one. A more to the point conclusion is that look for a CRM that is customizable as the business progresses, for a small business won’t always be small. You should be easily able to expand the capability of your CRM by using extensions, themes, plug-ins, templates, etc. But you can already have them right? Well, it might sound a bit surprising but having functions prior to their utility can hinder your business growth rather than assisting it.

Simplicity is the key

If you are looking for a CRM that offers every function that has ever been developed to be performed by a CRM system, you need to stop immediately and change your strategy. That’s a totally unfavorable approach to select a CRM. The logic is that with an over qualified CRM, you will also end up having an over complicated one. Result? You will be spending more time getting used to the system and training your executives to use it.

Moreover, as your company executives change from time to time, you will have to incur significant costs and efforts training every new team formed to utilize the system. Also, your executives will escape using a CRM that is too sophisticated and eats up a fair (read unfair) of their service time.

So, even though the decision is taken with the best of intentions, the outcome ultimately is poor. What’s the solution? The only solution is to be careful while selecting your CRM and focus only on the functions you actually need and can utilize best. The fewer the functions, the better it is done.

However that doesn’t suggest compromising with the eminence of the CRM. SugarCRM, SuiteCRM, Vtiger CRM and Dynamics CRM are few of the best options available which offers you an uncomplicated management system without compromising on the functionality and quality.

Review several, before deciding on ‘the one’.

Deciding upon a CRM system can be difficult given that there are so many of them available and within them, numerous one claim to have the same or similar features that you are looking for. We know how that feels. And hence we know the solution. Check several systems to see what features are on offer and in case you are stuck with a few, decide on how easy the systems are to use in comparison to each other. Trust us with this advice as it’s going to matter most with time, promise!

To start with, you can get in touch with organizations similar to you in functioning and size and get some advice on this. You can also scrutinize the reputation of the systems on your shortlist by checking out reviews in popular and relevant magazines and social networks. Online ratings on technical forums are also helpful to a notable extent.

Consider Professional Support

Even though you know what you want, you will end up being clueless at times because of your lack of expertise in the given area. And since you can’t base your choice of CRM on instincts, it’s best to consider taking help from professionals offering CRM development solutions. A professional help by your side ensures that your needs are being looked after and suggests the right CRM for you, knowing well which can offer what.

Executives generally help you choose the right CRM, provides support during the implementation until a pre-decided service period when the contract ends. You can also ask for training sessions for your employees to understand the functioning of a CRM better.

Conclusion

We understand that your business requires a CRM system soon, but don’t rush into it. It has worked till now, a few days more won’t harm but a wrong decision, and you are stuck with it! Employing a CRM is a costly process and a vital decision that affects your business functions greatly. The time and research you spend on selecting it will pay off once it is implemented. Broadly, you need to take note of three things to get optimal results:

    Carefully review your objectives.
    Note down your exact requirements from the CRM system.
    Plan on how to choose your CRM.

Point 3 is where the above elements come to the picture, and quite justly the most important one. So, are you all buckled up to start the hunt?

Social CRM: Answer to Brand Marketing

Today social media and content marketing are the major driving forces promoting business branding and lead generation initiatives. Social media is becoming an extremely controllable and cost effective platform for B2B and B2C companies – especially small businesses, due to affordable content marketing promoting brand engagement, client and even customer service.

Stretching Paradigm of Content Marketing

All the major customer engaging component like blogging, webinars, buyer engagement, white papers, videos, strategic landing pages, email newsletters and other related and supportive web content are driven by content marketing that shares the philosophy, methodology, mission and services of an enterprise. Effective content marketing is not limited to blogging or social media presence. Creating high end webinars is not enough. Today, business – of all sizes and nature – needs to explore diverse content platforms hitting on all cylinders to boost marketing campaigns, lead generation and the showcasing market-leading expertise.

Today’s Social Media

Simply updating published pieces and news capsules to social media platforms is not enough for getting the desired results. You need to have a well defined marketing structure to your social sharing – or else it will end up in social freakiness. It requires a consistent and concentrated content effort to design, strategize, and promote effective, timely, consistent and worthwhile social sharing. This has led to Social CRM for several start-ups to mid-sized enterprises particularly when it comes to social media efforts.

Social CRM enables you engage with your customers and other associates simultaneously across several core social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. In fact social media is using traditional CRM software, which is meant to offer single central location to garner, store, process and evaluate present and historical customer data, and giving it a new look.

By deploying social media into your sales, marketing and customer service campaigns you can understand more about your customers’ interests and preferences. By leveraging the huge information available on social media platforms in a meaningful and organized manner, you can unearth several lead and enjoy an improved interaction with your customers and prospects, propelling the overall customer experience, adding to the bottom line business.

Businesses everywhere are leveraging the advantages of social media channels to stay connected more effectively with their prospects and associates. Combining social media activity with Social CRM can help connect and develop long-lasting, mutually-beneficial customer and brand follower associations.

You can also manage your social media initiatives to trigger brand engagement – and content marketing.

In addition, you can also streamline your social media campaigns to stimulate brand engagement – and content marketing.

How Social CRM Triggers Content & Brand Marketing

Social Media Optimization: Social Customer Relationship Management will give your social media campaigns a firm structure – real social media management. Social platforms should be organized like other vital marketing campaign of a business. This platform should be considered as an added bonus to marketing efforts. With Social CRM, your social efforts can collaborate flawlessly with other key enterprise initiatives, like marketing, sales, and customer service, what industry experts consider as a holistic approach to social branding – offering an extensive view of social media campaign successes and failures.

Delivering Customer Care: Social CRM unleash value in every social media interaction with clients, associates and brand fans. It helps a business readily engage with customers in a synergistic manner in order to drive sales, leads, nurture loyalty and catapult revenue. It catapults the overall customer engagement experience, adding value to your business – and trigger related marketing and sales drive.

Tracking Brand Coherence: Social CRM helps you ensure to keep track of your brand’s image across multiple social media channels. By mapping, scheduling and analyzing your social media content, you can make sure your brand’s message has been dispersed appropriately. Retaining brand consistency through social platform supports the branding efforts of marketing tricks and sales strategies – offering a closed loop approach to a centralized, synergetic branding initiative.

Social CRM is not going to fade away anytime soon. Leveraging its productivity and redefining your marketing and other related business efforts can propel your businesses to next stage of global ecosystem.

Innovative Change & Learning Initiative Supports ERP Implementation

Is your focus on the technical side of your enterprise systems implementation is so much that you’re neglecting to help your enterprise to adapt to the changes that the system brings into the way people work? IT sector is undergoing dynamic and dramatic change today, mostly by the evolution of cloud-based platforms and SaaS solution. Despite such ongoing developments, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems retain its relevance of being one of the crucial enablers of most of the world’s commerce and public-sector task. The most neglected aspect in this is dealing with the human and organizational implications of system and process change.

An ERP adoption almost always entails sweeping changes to the way work is done across any organization. It simplifies business processes, reporting relationships, roles, how customers are served, how data is stored and used, and much more. The organization also deploys some number of resources to train employees as part of the implementation, but such initiatives are often insufficient for several reasons. Training needs evaluation is often superficial. Training may be provided too late to pace with the workforce performance and is not reinforced at the right time.

Nonetheless, if deployed and implemented properly, an enterprise learning and organizational change program can entail a crucial impact on the success of the overall ERP implementation. Here are eight most prominent insights into how organization can make it work best by deploying a learning and change management program.

1. Deploy a Right Fusion of Skills to the Training Team: Enterprise learning requires a specialized skill set; not anyone can do it. Just ensure to deploy experienced learning professionals on board. In addition, have a combination of business function abilities and technology. Maintain a right balance of qualified and knowledgeable colleagues amongst the design, build, test and training team. Keep rotating systems and business function members in and out of the training and rotate initiative for stretch of time, while retaining a good team of skilled instructional designers.
2. Deploy the Training Team Early: Systems training is not a generic, off-the-shelf program. Each implementation process is unique given the unique needs of each organization. Deploy a training team since inception as an integral part of the development team. Start with small team whose members can become the experts for each functional area later on and stay with the project till the end. You should also have a mix of roles, like subject matter experts, testers, system developers to actively participate.
3. Initiate Training within a Wider Change Management Program: Apart from developing specific training program or web-based learning initiatives, organizations should think of enabling new behaviors, working associations and organizational structures. It should have a threefold initiated - training, change management and organizational alignment. This approach will ensure that specific learning programs are in harmony with the wider organizational change and that everyone gains right information and support.
4. Make an Iterative Approach to Training-needs Evaluation: Having the training-needs evaluation correct is necessary to the success of the project. The focus should be on the end-user’s performance needs and not just on the technical details of the program. It can be created during workshops with the design-and-build teams; their insights into technical details should be in alignment with the insights of others who understand the wider influence on the overall behaviors of users. Training is about learning the new program that the system supports. Iterative approach is required to define training needs rather defining it all at once. Keep changing the strategy to refresh the needs analysis with every release update of the program to keep it aligned with the system and business functioning.
5. Entail Innovative and Engaging Learning Initiative: Engage in more innovative approaches like online learning, collaboration systems, simulations, and social media. Dedicated intranet sites can be developed to publish news and support literatures, share information and to receive feedback from users. You can also use social media platforms to help everyone to contribute timely information along with user-generated content in text, audio or video form. You can use knowledge databases in wiki formats to standardize ways to accumulate very current perspectives from across the enterprise.
6. Assess Progress and Outcomes Rigorously: Do not limit your training evaluation programs to point-in-time temperature checks and understanding whether a few employees are satisfied with a particular program. Evaluate if the training actually has impacted the business. Engage in producing a more agile and extensive training analysis that assesses user analysis of relevance and impact on individual performance. It should also be assessed for user adoption, process performance and the effectiveness of the change initiative.
7. Align Cost-saving Practices with Value-adding Localization: Customized standardized training approach can be affordable and can enhance the positive impact on users within particular regional geographies. You need to maintain the right balance. Start collecting the crucial part of the training that can be reused. Once you are done, add the local specifics needed or business-driven sub processes. Training in local languages is also necessary. You may also rely on a trainer that can speak the local language and can translate instruction from the master documents, instead of translating complete project.
8. Make Sustainable Training Investment: Often the organizational changes and new ways of working are not sustainable after the initial training period. Data are not updated, accountability gets muddled and budgets dry up. Responsibilities are not well defined for workforce enablement and support, as time goes on. It is ideal to deploy an entity having the incentive and allocated budget to maintain the training programs and change initiative over time.

Gaining More from your ERP Program

ERP is a huge investment, with gigantic impacts on the performance of individuals and the overall organization. Deploying the right training and change programs, people can adapt to the new processes effectively. Organizations can expect to experience improved productivity on the system being turned on, and they can be quicker in exploring and grabbing marketplace opportunities.