Deal crm for Planning

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welcome to this pre-act presentation the idea of this presentation is to equip you with some of the knowledge and tools that you will need to prepare your company for a new CRM system the presentation discusses the practical things you will need to think about with your team so that you're in the best possible position when it comes time for you to approach a vendor to help with the implementation a pre-act we've been helping customers to implement CRM projects for nearly 20 years and so I'd like to think that we're in a good position to be able to deliver advice my name is ian wicks and i work as a project manager here at pre-act I've been involved with CRM project since the late 1990s most of the projects were implementing these days of Microsoft Dynamics CRM projects but this video isn't targeted at any particular CRM software a suite it addresses the topics that are relevant to any organization that is considering implementing a CRM system whether you have 10 employees or 10,000 employees getting CRM right is tough and it involves quite a commitment of both time and money an experience shows us that there is a direct correlation between the amount of time invested in preparing for the project versus the amount of money spent on the project also versus perceived ROI for most people being put in charge of a CRM project internally is going to be a pretty daunting task typically an employee can be expected to be involved in a major project like this only once or twice during their career so it's actually quite understandable that a sense of panic might start to kick in and the person charged with leading the project can feel a bit overwhelmed - that we say don't panic all you need to do is put aside some time for planning Winston Churchill coined the phrase he who fails to plan plans to fail even now as CRM technology gets more and more sophisticated and project management gets more and more mature it's still reported by various surveys that between 60 and 80 percent of Syrian projects fail to meet their objectives and it's our belief pre-act the by just sitting down and making a realistic and methodical plan at the outset of any CRM project could easily reduce this figure by half in this presentation we're going to show you 11 simple steps to move you towards starting your Syrian project there's nothing complicated about it most of it is just common sense the 11 steps represent 11 opportunities for you and your team to discuss various aspects of CRM to document them so that by the time you're ready to approach your vendor or supplier you'll be in a very strong position to express clearly your goals and expectations step one the first step is to build your team you can call it the team a coalition or steering group it doesn't really matter but this is the internal group of people who will steer your project the members of this team should include a cross-functional representative of every department who will use or may use the system either initially or ultimately you should include members from the sales marketing customer support customer service management IT finance sometimes other departments too a typical team for a CRM project will have an executive sponsor this is a board level person who is ultimately responsible for the success of the Sirian project a lot of serum projects fail because of insufficient support for the project from a board level having this person on board is crucial to the project the executive sponsor needs to be kept informed at all times of how the project is progressing so they're in a position to make informed decisions throughout the lifecycle of the project you're going to need a project manager too now this role is also crucial this is the one person who acts as the linchpin for all project communication both internally and externally with your CRM suppliers the project manager is responsible for creating all the requirements prior to product or vendor selection for organizing meetings documenting and distributing the findings of these meetings coordinating between team members etc etc the list goes on forever so here I guess what you need to choose is someone who's very good at organizing things and someone is a good communicator and possibly someone who's good at delegating - you're going to need a nominated CRM administrator don't necessarily need to identify this person straight away but CRM administration could be seen as split between the IT side of things and the data side of things so this role often is taken up by two people so from an IT perspective you'd be looking at licensing issues client installs tech support and from the data perspective you'd be looking at things like defining and communicating data entry protocols importing leads global updates to records creating marketing lists you're also going to need representatives of the different functional areas that are going to be using the system your key business users so preferably this is going to be people that are respected and liked by their peers that have a good experience of what's needed in each functional area if you've got different sales teams operating in different ways you may need a person from each team the idea is that the person will have the knowledge that's needed from their area what works what doesn't currently work having people from each business area on the team goes a long way to improving the chances of your user adoption success particularly if the people chosen are influential and you can get them on board as a superuser another the key thing about the CRM steering group don't just have it for the duration of your Syrian project this group of people should be meeting at least quarterly to hold a CRM review and to take your CRM strategies forward step to define your vision and set out your high-level goals once you've got your team together you can start to look at some high-level goals for the new CRM system this might be things like helping salespeople to easily manage and close opportunities giving sales managers a complete view of the pipeline providing a complete picture of every customer to those that need it within your organization or running and tracking the effectiveness of marketing campaigns or to provide better service for your customers each of these will represent the key objectives for your CRM system everything you do will be in the context of these objectives it's important to remember you don't have to do it all at once after all you're not doing it all now right each of these steps represents an opportunity to run a workshop on that particular aspect now sometimes this session can start off a little bit wooly but you can come back to this list throughout your preparation for your Syrian projects and you'll be able to define it a little bit more clearly as you go along another key thing to think about on this step is how you're going to measure whether or when you have met these goals for example if I said I wanted to provide better service to my customers how will I know when we're doing that so one way to address this might be to use that provide a better service to my customers as a heading and underneath it lists some specific and measurable goals the feeding to the overall goal such as for example 90% of service calls to be responded to within a two hour SLA or automate monthly customer review meetings for level one customers for examples it's important to know that your goals can actually be measured so that you know when you've achieved success step 3 prioritize your goals so in step two we defined a list of high-level goals and measurable objectives for your new CRM project so in this step we'll take that list and we'll prioritize it sure we want to do everything and that's okay but where possible let's do these things one at a time this creates a much more structured and orderly approach and allows you to focus on one area at a time and give it your full attention in most cases it starts with implementing the sales processes there are various reasons for this including the fact that salespeople are just about the hardest ones to get on board usually so if we can get these guys on board we're over halfway there you tend to find that because marketing people and service and support people are much more logical and practical kind of people you tend to have much less user adoption issues where people try to implement everything in one go we call this the Big Bang approach and this approach can work on very small CRM projects but obviously it still makes sense to try and roll out in some kind of logical order so when deciding on your phasing think about quick wins that you can build upon also think about your resources if you're trying to go live for example with your sales team and your service team and they've all got new processes as well and try and do all on the same day think about how overwhelming that's going to be so the result from this step would be to prioritize the goals that you defined in step 2 step 4 identify your processes and pinpoint current pain points the next thing is to draw out your current processes now this can seem kind of alien to a lot of companies because they've never formally analyzed or documented their processes before but if you think every organization runs on processes so simple sales process a lead might come in from the web or it might come in from a phone call the first question to ask then is do we treat phone leads any different to web leads if the answer is yes then we need to draw the two different leads methods in two boxes web leads and phone leads and then show the paths that each one travels it might be that after one or two steps they merge back again as an opportunity so then you would have both boxes pointing into a single box called create opportunity for example also when drawing out the process Maps think about exceptions and make sure you have accommodated them for example faux leads always go to team a unless the person is interested in our premium range when it goes into team B so we have to put a little decision box off to the incoming lead that says premium interest with two lines leading off yes and no the yes line leads to team B makes a call and the no line leads to team a making a call once you've drawn out these process Maps go through them with all the stakeholders and then determine which bits work well and which bits could be improved or even automated from these discussions you can draw out a second set of processes which will be your intended process so you end up with a set of diagrams for the current processes and a set for the to be processes there are many benefits to actually drawing out these process Maps aside from any CRM projects the act of drawing out the process removes any ambiguity over what happens during your sales process for example or during a customer service issue it provides absolute clarity also when you communicate with your chosen vendor or supplier therefore saving time and consequently saving you money if you're still not sure how to draw out a process map there's plenty of good info on the web about how to draw one out just make sure you consult all the stakeholders who are involved afterwards to make sure that you've validated it and you know it's correct step 5 think about report outputs before we decide which field to put onto the various forms of our CRM system we need to have a think about the reporting output nowadays many of the CRM systems available negate the old traditional need for customized reports by providing easily created dashboards charts and dynamic views such as the sales pipeline dashboard in Microsoft Dynamics CRM but it's well worth deciding from the outset what output the various departments will need from the system because that's going to affect what we decide we need to have as an input and even think about what sort of things the users would like to see on a useful dashboard for example whenever you're designing reports for managers or for departments a really good tip is to always draw out the report on a piece of paper this will help later when adding fields because you'll know then what fields need to be added to the CRM in order to produce the reporting requirements and these diagrams are also very useful for anyone who has to write these custom reports for your system step 6 fields and data capture so by now we know what our goals are and we should now be very familiar with them and we pretty much know the processes that are to be mapped into CRM now it's time to think about the CRM system design and data capture don't forget all the time you spend on this upfront planning you will be saving your company money by shortening the amount of time your vendor or supplier needs to spend conducting requirements gathering workshops and scoping meetings and alike even though you may not have extensive knowledge about your chosen CRM products yet you can still have a think about the various forms and fields that you'll need to be working on with your new system for example you're going to have to have a record for an organization or a company you're also going to have records for context leads opportunities possibly service cases and quotes to take each one of these entities in turn and decide what's the minimum amount of data you need to capture on each one and there's a difference between want and need so maybe prioritize as well here on a sales opportunity for example you might need the following product range line items a time frame so a start dating an end date you might want to allocate a salesperson you might want to set a probability and an amount and a sale stage for example a word of warning don't get too carried away because the more fields and forms and customizations that you create the more user adoption hurdles you're putting up but it can also end up being quite costly to maintain and support if you overrate the pudding to albert einstein summed it up very concisely when he said everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler in other words decide what's the minimum required to meet your goals and then implement that step seven identify your data sources in our experience by far and away the biggest cause of project delays is to do with our customers consolidating data ready to go into the new CRM system it's very common for people to underestimate how long this exercise can take there are various ways in which this can be approached and this depends upon how much the customer wants to do themselves and how much they want to pay a provider like us to do for them probably the most accost effective way to deal with data imports is to ask your CRM provider to give you a template or templates that you just populate with your data and then they are ready to go straight into CRM sometimes that's not always possible and you may have data sitting in an existing CRM system and in people's Outlook contacts folders and in spreadsheets so in various different places once you've located the data you need to ask a few questions how clean is the data how old or how relevant is the data how much do we want to import we just want to take all this junk from one old system and put it all into our new CRM system if we're importing history for example how far do we want to go back one year two years seven years have we got a budget for data cleansing if not who's taking on that responsibility and what are we doing about duplicates usually the initial importing of data can be quite challenging so be prepared to work with your vendor or supplier to create a trial import for validation purposes before the actual live import step 8 what about integration integrating CRM with other back office systems is quite common nowadays and can offer a huge return on investment by providing a one-stop shop for the entire customer view so imagine the scenario your customer phones up and he asks about his delivery so you have to transfer him to the shipping department and he wants to talk about his invoice so they have to transfer him to the accounts team and etcetera etc whereas if you had some kind of integration setup with the order management system with the accounting system you'd have been able to look at his record and answer his questions with one phone call creating integrations can also provide useful insights to salespeople so a salesperson looks at a company record and they can see what a person's been buying they can then deduce what they're likely to buy increasing their chances of sales success and thereby increasing company profits and frankly anything you can do to create value for salespeople is going to work in your favor making them more inclined to want to use the system so as well as providing views of data from other systems the integrations can also be used to push data from CRM elsewhere around the company for example the creation of a customer record in the accounting package when a CRM sales opportunity record is one or syncing of your tasks in your appointments from Outlook to CRM and vice versa or you might also be considering integrating with a third party email marketing solution provider such as Doc mailer for example so make a list of possible integrations make a list of what are the benefits on each one then you can decide if it's worth it step 9 organizational structure users and security so do you have regional divisions within your company or is it made up of various business units that work fairly independently of each other if it is then do you want some or all of the data to be shared amongst these business units how is it currently set up do you have teams maybe that work across the business units if you work in a smaller organizations and some of these questions might not be so relevant but this next part is think about the various different user groups and what levels of access you want them to have in your CRM system for example are you happy for your entire workforce to use the export to excel function or do you want to limit this only to certain users or use groups or do you want all the salespeople to have access to all the customer records or do they maybe just have access only to those records that are assigned to them so when you're running this session think about everything to do with security users and user groups step 10 assess the risks facts every project has risks it's often said that CRM projects are made up of three components people process and technology and in order to have a successful CRM project all three components need to be a success the largest cog in this wheel is the people component now a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that a CRM project is just a technical project when in fact the technical component is very often the smallest of the three cogs so for this step assess the risks you need to think about or brainstorm all and every single possible risk to your project all the people risks the technology risks and the process risks list them and then for each risk examine it and work out how likely is it to happen you might decide you're going to use a scoring system where one is the least likely to happen and five is very likely and then to develop this further you might even add a second scoring system to assess the impact on the project if that risk does happen so for example one doesn't have a big impact - five has a massive impact and all the way along the scale there this scoring system will highlight the most dangerous risks for you and for these you will need to come up with a workable strategy to deal with the risk if it should happen or to mitigate it or lessen the chances of it actually happening but you know in its simplest form you could just make a list of all the possible risks and then come up with a strategy for each one so a few examples might be that the risk might be the system design is too complicated to use so that equals a low user adoption so our strategy would be to make sure that we keep the design simple make sure the users are consulted we might have another risk where the users don't fill in records properly so we end up with bad and inconsistent data so our strategy to deal with that would be to make certain filled to mandatory maybe create a data entry manual for users as well we might have a risk that says that users are not motivated to use the system so again low user adoption as strategy make sure we sell the benefits prior to go live make sure that we create incentives for people to use the system I should stress that these just examples that I've just thought of you will need to spend some time brainstorming with your project team what are the possible risks and then for each one identify a strategy to deal with that risk step 11 create a user adoption strategy now this step really follows on from step 10 which was assessing the risks because one of the major risks in any Syrian project is the risk of low user adoption 47% of CRM vendors that's people like us at pre-act recognize user adoption as the biggest obstacle to project success and customers recognize that user adoption is the number one cause of CRM project pain now there are several theories as to where this is and here's what I think is the main reason and it goes back to what I was saying earlier about the project being mostly about people rather than technology because a lot of companies fail to recognize the people side of the project they fail to engage with people at all the different stages of the project the key to increase user adoption is to involve as many users as possible throughout the project from the very early stages where you can consult people and ask them what would they want from a system if it's going to create efficiencies and benefits to them right through to consulting them for you through your user testing prior to go live so that each and every process is tested by the person who knows the most about it the key is getting the balance right because you don't want a CRM designed by a committee where it just is over engineered completely but that you do need to consult users as well so I mean simply put people have a fear of change and if you involve them from the start you tend to remove some of that fear and having the board level support for CRM is also critical for your user adoption strategy make sure that the directors are on board and excited about CRM you don't want your users to think of the CRM system as optional so carrots are always better than sticks but sometimes the stick is necessary for example your KPIs are now going to be measured from within the CRM system in other words if it's not in CRM it hasn't happened other things you can do are to create super users who become the go-to person in each department for anything CRM and make sure when you're investing in training give the users more than one just generic training session where possible training should be roll specific make a documented plan from this session about how you intend to maximize user adoption of your new CRM system and assign someone the responsibility for user adoption so there you have it 11 steps to prepare for a new CRM implementation I mean it's a fair amount of work but having said that if you manage to completely steps prior to implementing your CRM you stand a very good chance of being one of those CRM project success stories it's all about managing the risk of course we'll happily answer your questions and discuss your CRM requirements so please do contact any of the team here at pre-act if you'd like to find out more meanwhile can I take this opportunity to wish you every success with your CRM project