Over the years, DSG has implemented hundreds of CRM, Financial Management and ERP solutions and through this experience we have seen several recurring issues that have huge impacts on a customer's solution performance. Here are a few of DSG's Implementation Best Practices that may help you avoid these pitfalls.
CRM Consulting and Implementation Best Practices
DSG's founders and senior CRM consultants have been implementing CRM since it was called SFA and ran on client-server architectures back in the mid-90s. Successful CRM implementations depend on your business achieving a fine balance between meeting the needs of the entire company and ensuring that the sales people get perceived value from the solution and therefore buy-in to the CRM implementation. Here are some other CRM Consulting and Implementation Best Practices that we've learned along the way.
- CRM Doesn’t Exist In A Vacuum - it impacts finance, manufacturing, product fulfillment, service and support, and your partners. Sales people know this and, because most are pragmatists, they understand that whatever is in the business' best interests is in their best interest as well.
- CRM Only Succeeds If Salespeople Use It - remember that salespeople aren't usually early adopters of software and the more of their time that a solution demands, the less successful it will be. Look for a CRM consulting firm that will help you balance capturing the information and enforcing the processes that you need with maximizing your sales team's adoption of the solution.
- CRM Needs to Add Time to the Sales Day - find the best way to help your salespeople do their job more easily—adding value to their day instead of more work. CRM solutions that try to tell people how to do their jobs or require burdensome data entry will fail.
- Don't Over-Engineer Your CRM Solution - many companies try to capture more data than they will use and implement overly rigorous processes thereby compromising user adoption. Automate information capture as much as possible, limit the amount of data entry to expect of your salespeople and keep your processes as flexible as possible.
- Choose a CRM Consulting Partner with Deep Sales Process Experience - not only technical expertise. While every business is unique, those within the same industry have common requirements. With years of experience across a wide range of vertical markets, DSG can deliver the benefits of our knowledge and lessons learned. We can propose alternatives, suggest new approaches, help you avoid common pitfalls, and get the most functionality for your solution spend.
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