How to Choose a CRM System

As the world of business and industry becomes ever more competitive, choosing the correct CRM software will not only help your business get ahead of your competitors but allow you to become more efficient. Regardless of the size or scope of your business or scope, CRM software can do a vast amount of work, from understanding and nurturing your current customers to building new client relationships and automating time-consuming processes.

Ideally, companies implementing a CRM would aim to remove all ambiguity in the needs and expectations before implementing, or even before choosing a CRM provider.

So first and foremost, it’s vital to establish a clear business case, defining specific and measurable goals. These may include areas like streamlining sales and marketing or automating tasks and workflows to increase productivity.

If you’re unsure, these 3 questions may help in ensuring you get the right CRM for your business;

1. What are your pain points?
2. What problems would you like your CRM to solve?
3. What value do you want it to add? (monetary, time-saving, client engagement, all?)

CRM implementation can help your business increase sales efficiency, drive customer satisfaction, streamline business processes, and identify and resolve bottlenecks – all of which directly contributes towards the bottom line revenue as well as assurance of repeat business.

CRM solutions are not just a nice-to-have but a necessity in a world where customer retention is of prime importance.

Before selecting your CRM, here are 3 areas to first focus on;

1. Defining Clear Objectives:

An organization must define a clear set of objectives that need to be achieved through customer relationship management implementation. Ensure the objectives are measurable. By doing so, you can assess the benefits and challenges of CRM while tracking the return on investment.

2. Appointing a Responsible Person(s) for Implementation:

One of the major problems in implementing CRM is that many organizations assume it to be an IT project. Better off asking those who’ll be using it the most to provide you with their needs. What are the pain points for the sales team? What features do the Marketing or Customer Success team need?

A CRM that can meet the majority of your business requirements, will likely mean a greater user adoption and ultimately, a better ROI.

– If it’s not in the CRM, it doesn’t exist –

3. Defining the Processes:

The process of implementing a CRM should be clearly defined, in order to ensure the success of your CRM project. Key processes that you need to define from the start can include change management process and feature re-evaluation processes. Also, the security measures with adequate access and authorization rights should be in place to prevent unauthorized access to data and security attacks.

And of course, a clearly defined marketing, sales & customer success process – your customer journey.

This is why it’s important to have answers (no matter how loosely), to the 3 questions above, so that you can mould the CRM around your business processes rather than having to adapt to a system that’s not quite right.

Now that you have a clear implementation and roll-out plan, you can begin looking at some of the features and key areas you want from your platform. Good practise is to prepare a feature list of;

• Must Haves
• Nice to Have’s
• a Wish List

Once you have those defined, you can narrow the field based on UX, intuitiveness, cost etc. Also important to check, can the CRM platform you choose scale with you as your business grows or will it suddenly become much more expensive as you add users or features? Free options may be great to get started with, but may suddenly become that much more expensive as you & your business grows.

Here are just a few key areas to look for in your CRM system: