Today’s guest blogger is Andy Reising, an Account Executive at Sonoma Partners.
In part 1 of this blog post, we explained the factors that you should consider when planning your CRM program. It’s of the utmost importance that you coordinate a unified strategy across all of your constituents before embarking down this journey.
Plan the work, then work the plan
When investing in a CRM platform, companies are always focused on return on investment, and rightly so! The order in which initiatives are carried out directly affects the ROI of your overall program. In general, we see the best return on investment when companies follow the “crawl, walk, run” approach. Each phase, and each project, should be driven by specific and measurable outcomes. Here is an example of a crawl, walk, run CRM program:
| Phase | Scope | Example Outcomes | Recommended Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Phase 1 - Initial Rollout, or Pilot |
Single business unit (i.e. Sales only). For larger enterprises this can also be a pilot rollout coordinated with similar teams around the company. The key is to keep it small. |
|
|
|
Phase 2 - Expansion |
Expand CRM to the teams or business units that are “next in line.” As necessary, invest in integrations with back-end systems, or design CRM to replace them. Truly multi-channel interactions and “360 view of the customer” is the overarching goal of this phase. |
|
|
|
Phase 3 - Optimization |
Once CRM is in place across the business and used to manage customer processes, it can be leveraged to provide leading capabilities like predictive analytics, automation, and truly integrated customer experiences. |
|
|
Other natural breaks
Aside from the overarching phases described above, also look for any other natural opportunities to break up your CRM deployment. Such natural phases include:
-
Brands: if your enterprise handles multiple brands, or has acquired additional brands, it may make sense to bring them onto the same CRM separately. We frequently help migrate brands into a consistent system.
-
Integrations: today’s CRM systems make great integration points, and can serve as customer data hubs. However, unless you are a brand-new startup with an IT infrastructure yet to be designed, the effort to integrate systems is going to be somewhat complex. These integration points should be identified early on, and they can be used to match up your lines of business and will provide natural separations in the phasing of the project.
- Multi-lingual, or multi-geography deployments: each location or team should be handled separately, with a phased rollout across individual locations. Your CRM consultant can likely deliver some of these in parallel, but the actual release and go-live schedule should be staggered to allow your internal resources to focus on each one.
Project Wrappers – Requirements Gathering and Change Management
Of course, each and every CRM project should begin with an initial requirements gathering and design, and each rollout will conclude with a well planned “go live.” In multi-phase projects, we recommend taking a “broad first, specific later” approach to the initial design. Designing every last detail by committee is going to be slow going and frequently becomes a larger effort than it needs to be. When starting out, shoot for about 60% of all future requirements. For the remaining 40%, focus on the user group immediately affected in that phase. Then revisit each specific constituent at the outset of their individual projects or phases.
If you can’t tell by now, our project approach involves balancing looking ahead with focusing on the short-term pragmatism of simply getting things done. We believe the key to successful go-lives involves setting the right place to start. Once getting the project underway, change management should become a continually present consideration. Throughout the entire project, we will make considerations for data migration (where will we get the data that we put into the CRM?), any back-end system integrations, and of course training and user adoption. These items will be considered as early as system design, and revisited continually through delivery of the project.
