In the ever-changing business world, a strong CRM is key to successfully managing your relationships and having a clear overview of what is going on within your business. However, what happens when you have chosen your system? How can you ensure you get the best out of it? What are the best ways to implement it?
We take a look at some of the best ways to ensure you get off to a great start when using your CRM system.
Determine What You Want From Your System
A key starting point is to ensure that you have a clear understanding of what you want to use your CRM for. A way to do this effectively is to understand what your business goals are. There are many common requirements for using your CRM system but depending on your business offering you will have different levels of priority.
Here are a few examples of potential primary goals to consider. Do you want to:
- establish sales management processes and mechanisms
- improve the quality of customer service and make sure important information is stored
- ensure sales is more efficient and centralised
- increase cross sales, collaboration and team work
- increase transparency between different teams internally
- create more efficient processes for all employees in order to simplify work
- reduce the risk of customer data loss or general data loss
Depending on your business service some of these factors will be more important than others, however, as a rule of thumb these are the major considerations.
In order to arrive at that point of understanding what the key things you want to use your CRM System for, you can ask questions such as:
How do we currently go about getting our sales?
Is there more data we can put in about our customers?
How are we tracking our marketing efforts?
What is stopping us being more efficient at the moment?
These questions should help you come to a conclusion on what the most important factors for you to consider in the use of your CRM are.
Top Level Managment Buy-In
Another key factor in your CRM implementation is getting real buy in from your line managers and C- suite leadership. Changing systems can sometimes be a lengthy task and requires full commitment from your workforce. Depending on the size of your company there can be multiple decision makers that need to ok a CRM implementation. In addition to this, their individual teams will have to be convinced that this is going to benefit everyone. Present a business case to your top line management outlining how this CRM will help them, as well as the other teams based on the main business use you have determined earlier.
Will it increase sales collaboration meaning that the managing director will have less internal meetings and save time?
Make sure you clearly outline these solutions to your management team to ensure everyone is onboard for a seamless transition. This should be something everyone can get behind.
A Delegated Advocate Specialist
When selecting a CRM there should be a chosen “CRM Champion” within your workforce. They will by no means be a specialist like one of our support consultants, but they will be someone who’s main objective is to get to know the CRM system in depth.
This will be someone that can be a main point of contact should problems arise, as well as someone that can help people after the onboarding process has been implemented.
As the CRM system is built around the individual business needs and not a one-stop solution it is important that this internal “CRM Champion” works closely with their partner. The “CRM Champion” of course will not be alone, your partner will take away a lot of the difficulty migrating and getting accustomed to the different tools.
Advantage post helpful content to help manage your CRM system here and offer in-depth support as a Microsoft Gold Partner.
Processes and Guidelines
Create specific processes and guidelines that relate to the main business problems you are trying to solve and inefficiencies you are trying to address. Not every tool will need to be used by every team within your company. It may even be advantageous for certain features to not be used by certain teams or you may want to limit access to certain areas. A technology partner will help consult with you to best understand what processes and guidelines need to be put in place, that are specific to your business processes. Take time to speak to the rest of the team and those who will be using it most. Ask questions such as:
Does the whole team need access to leads?
What problems are our team facing, that can be helped by a more efficient process?
Work collaboratively with both your partner and your team to come up with a unified way that you will agree to use the processes within your CRM. It is best to do this at the very beginning in order to make sure everyone is on the same page, as you begin to migrate from the old way of doing things. This is a key opportunity for you to fix the way you do things from the ground up and improve efficiency, allowing your colleagues to have their say and improving morale.
Continued Upskilling And Training
Once you have successfully implemented your CRM system there is still much for you to do. CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics CRM are consistently upgrading their systems in order to better solve their customers needs with new upgrades and features.
In order to best utilise these features it is important to stay in close contact with your technology partner as well as keep an eye out for any updates. As your business evolves and your teams grow there will be different things you require from your CRM system. Make sure you schedule in times to upskill your team to further strengthen efficiency for these processes as you find better ways of doing things. Often the upgraded features are based on what users most want to see from the system, so it is always advisable to take advantage of these tools.
Take Your Time And Gather Feedback
Implementing a new CRM system takes time to adapt to for you and your team. There may be some teething pains in the beginning as data is migrated and the workforce begin to come to terms with an unfamiliar way of doing things, however, it will be made a smoother process by your partner. Make sure you implement feedback systems such as surveys or feedback sessions for people to give insights into how they have found using the system and suggestions for ways to make things more efficient.
Advantage Business Systems are an official Microsoft Gold Partner. We help businesses implement Microsoft Dynamics and other solutions according to your own individual business needs.
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