Empower Your Life Sciences Sales Team with Sales Contact Management Software for Life Sciences

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crm implementations have the ability to completely overhaul and improve the way you run your sales organization but it's also fraught with risk and i'm going to talk about the keys to a successful crm implementation here today [Music] my name is eric kimberling i'm the ceo of third stage consulting we're an independent consulting firm that helps clients through their digital transformation journeys and whether you're about to implement salesforce or some other crm system it's important to recognize that there's benefits to implementing crm but there's also risks and ensuring success is by no means guaranteed so what we found is that there's a lot of different nuances to crm implementations that are even different from erp or other types of enterprise software technology projects so what i want to share here today are some of the best practices we found in helping clients through their crm implementations so the first step to a successful crm implementation is to clearly define what your business needs are now this is where it starts to get tricky because we're talking about a sales organization and a sales operations organization that makes its money in its living by selling not trying to figure out how to implement new technology so a lot of times we start to see initial resistance to a crm implementation in the early stages when we're trying to define what our business requirements and what our business needs are so it's very important that we understand what the sales and the sales operations organization's needs are not just in terms of what they're doing today but what's going to ultimately help them sell more and help them sell more effectively in the future now a lot of times this entails a couple of different dimensions that we want to look at we want to look at the individual sales reps or the individual sales team members and understand what tool sets would better enable them to sell more but we also need to look at the things that don't necessarily help them sell more but enables us as an organization to better track customer behavior customer buying behaviors and customer patterns upsell opportunities and all that good stuff and that's not necessarily something that sales reps are thinking about so we need to think outside the box of not just what the sales reps think they need today versus tomorrow but also the things that technology can enable that they may not be thinking about right now so really understanding what those business needs are what you expect from your sales organization what you want it to look like in the future are all things that are important to define early on in your crm implementation so in addition to defining what your business needs are from a business process perspective it's also important to look at your sales organization and the way you're structured today the way roles and responsibilities are outlined and how you want that to look in the future so again this is where we look at not just what you're doing today and what the sales reps and the sales operations team think they need today but also what they think they're going to need in the future and also understanding how roles and responsibilities might be shifted around to optimize our overall sales efforts so the different dimensions we need to look at here include things that are directly related to helping the sales team sell more which generally you're going to be able to get your sales team excited about from an organizational change perspective we also have to look at those nuances and those things that might benefit the organization overall but might not benefit or might actually harm in the perception of the sales team and how the the project would impact them so for example a lot of times sales reps are used to keeping a lot of knowledge in their heads a lot of tribal knowledge related to what prospects want or what they need where they are in the sales pipeline in the sales cycle but it benefits the organization to document that stuff and to make sure that we translate that tribal knowledge into a more scalable set of processes in organization so in those cases though the downside risk is that the sales reps may view that as something that's adding administrative burden to them by having to now document more in a crm system but we still need to define for better for worse so whether or not the sales reps like it what that future state organization is going to look like and once we've clearly defined what the future state organization is going to look like it's going to be a lot easier to implement the crm technology to support whatever that might look like [Music] the biggest key to crm implementation success is organizational change management now this is also the number one key to other types of technology implementations whether it be enterprise resource planning or financial systems or human capital management whatever the case may be but this is especially true for crm implementations and the sales teams that are affected by crm implementations the reason for that is that sales teams often find it more difficult to change because any sort of administrative burden or anything related to the crm implementation in general is inherently taking away from revenue generating commission generating types of activities which the sales individuals generally are measured on paid upon and that sort of thing so change resistance tends to be a bit more severe for sales organizations than other parts of the organization now this is a broad generalization it's not true to all organizations but we find it time and time again for i'd say a majority of organizations that sales reps sales operations teams people that are used to just pounding the pavement and selling don't necessarily think about scalability and repeatable processes and documenting tribal knowledge those are things that are often perceived to be undermining the time that can be spent generating more revenue and more commission so it's really important to manage those changes and help the sales team understand not only what's in it for them but more importantly what's in it for the entire organization how is this going to make us more successful by implementing the crm tool set and generally by addressing both of those components we're able to manage that change more effectively now to learn more about organizational change management i've also included a link below that's a guide to organizational change management on a digital transformation and that'll provide a number of best practices and tips on how to manage organizational change throughout your crm project but in general just know that organizational change management is going to be the number one key to your crm success one of the benefits of crm technology is that it's software that's specific to sales and customer service organizations it generally is going to do business processes and sales functions better than say an erp system or other types of technology that might just secondarily address crm so that's the good news the bad news is that even though we've got these standalone crm systems that do sales very well now we've got to figure out how to tie that data and those processes back to the back office financial system so when we start thinking about things like customer master data or commissions and tracking commissions for what the sales team is selling or if you are a manufacturer of a make to order engineer type of product how do we capture the product master data in a way that the sales reps can figure out how to configure your product in a way that they can provide an accurate estimate for the sales or the for the proposals so those are the types of things we need to think about is not just how we can implement the crm technology itself but how are we going to link that crm system back to our back office systems as well as the data that goes along with that so really having a clear vision for what that integration is going to look like and what the overall architecture is going to look like is an important component of a crm implementation so if you're a sales leader or a cio or whoever you might be that's leading the crm implementation or part of the crm implementation for your organization it can be awfully easy to say you know what we're busy we have a lot of work to do just day to day to do our day jobs we don't necessarily have the time to implement new crm technology so let's just outsource this to a third party to figure out how we're going to implement this and let them deal with the pains that go along with that and that's a recipe for disaster we want to make sure we don't do that because the companies that outsource their initiatives completely are the ones that typically struggle the most and end up with a product and a transformation that doesn't align with what it is they wanted to get out of the system in the implementation in the first place so making sure that we have complete control of the project and we haven't delegated too much to our system integrator is very important now this is a lot easier said than done it's easier for me to say this as a consultant than it is for you as the organization that's actually got to live with the results but despite the short-term pain of getting more people from your sales organization your customer service organization involved in the project yes that is painful and it's difficult and it may seem impossible but the difficulty of not doing that longer term is a lot more severe and a lot more painful so it's important to really make sure that you have control of the project you have ownership you have involvement and buy-in from key stakeholders and business process owners those are ultimately the people that should be defining what this implementation and what this transformation means to you you shouldn't be relying on a system integrator or a software vendor to do that for you as part of our implementation in the business case for our implementation we should be defining what is it that we want crm to do for our organization what are those measurable results and outcomes and objectives we expect that crm implementation to deliver to us and that business case will allow us to not only justify the initial investment in the crm technology and the implementation but it'll also allow us to measure actual results after the implementation and this is where a lot of companies fall short they struggle so much just to get to the go live and to get the software implemented that they don't take the time to then go back and measure and see where did we get the benefits we expected and where did we fail to get the benefits and now how do we optimize those benefits that we didn't get and part of it's because the implementations are so grueling and take longer than most people expect that they just want to move on and go back to their day jobs once it's over but it's also a function of team members being afraid to look at the actual results because they know they're probably going to fall short from what they projected in the initial business case so if you can get past those two things and focus on what benefits did we achieve what didn't we achieve and how do we actually optimize those results you're generally going to find that you're going to be a lot happier with the implementation you're going to get a lot more business value out of the implementation and you're going to find that it's a better longer term fit for your organization longer term as you optimize how that implementation supports your organization longer term so the key takeaways here for any crm implementation are to let your business needs your sales organization your sales operations organization and your customer service organization let all the affected departments within your implementation let those departments and team members and individuals drive the implementation rather than deferring too much to the technology or deferring too much to the system integrator to drive what your organization is going to look like going forward so having that clear vision and blueprint and roadmap for what it is you want to be as an organization going forward is going to give you a lot more direction and a lot more governance over your project and a lot more business value in the implementation longer term so whether you're implementing salesforce or microsoft crm or any other sort of crm solution these are all things that will help you through your transformation i've also included a link below which is our 2020 erp and crm report and that link in that download will provide other best practices and tips to help you through your transformation and your crm implementation so i encourage you to check out those links in this description below and i also encourage you to check out some of the other resources i've included in this video so i hope you found this information useful and hope you have a great day you