CRM - January 2009 - (Page BPS4)

4 January 2009 Sponsored Content feature control through configuration of the core application. And when your needs demand custom components, look for vendors that have a track record of quickly and cost effectively delivering customizations and not bolt-on products that only partly deliver on your requirements. Recognizing the realities of your implementation environment sets the stage for open and candid discussion where scope and effort are quantitatively identified and pricing risk is reduced for both parties. BEST PRACTICE: STACK YOUR TEAM WITH A-PLAYERS sales, marketing, and service business processes are ideal. Implementing new software does not in and of itself upgrade existing business process effectiveness. The industry’s best CRM systems embed an enormous number of best practices that you can extend to your customer-facing operations. Be willing to revisit and upgrade your business processes where it makes sense to do so and resist the urge to change the software to accommodate business processes that could benefit from reengineering. BEST PRACTICE: DEMAND RELIABILITY AND SECURITY WORST PRACTICE: BELIEVING THAT SAAS CRM SYSTEMS ADMINISTER THEMSELVES There are few things more important than making sure your best and brightest people are directly involved in the SaaS CRM deployment. CRM provides the foundation for all customer interactions and imposes a degree of process discipline on sales, marketing, and service staff so that customer facing processes occur with consistency and predictable quality. If the CRM strategy and supporting software is the front line for customer acquisition and retention, it warrants the design and engineering of your most talented staff. While there’s a clear role for IT staff in both on premise and SaaS CRM projects, executive sponsorship should normally come from the business side and the design team must be stacked with business people. Look for people who think systemically and understand the need for process. The sales rep who hits quota every year through the depth of his relationships with clients may not be someone who will see the need for CRM and may therefore not be much help in process design. That’s not to say we circumvent this rep, instead we use him in a highly leveraged model where we get his input on the practices that make him effective and embed those techniques in the CRM. WORST PRACTICE: AUTOMATING INEFFICIENT BUSINESS PROCESSES Let’s face it – few are satisfied that their There are material differences among the methods and IT infrastructures used by SaaS CRM vendors which directly translate to varying levels of security and reliability. Many legacy client-server vendors have ported their products to pseudo web-based delivery platforms. While this approach may achieve some level of virtual operation in terms of delivering CRM software over the Internet, it does not promote reasonable performance via a browser, a multi-tenant underlying architecture or the advantages of a native SaaS solution. While pure-play SaaS vendors have built their systems from the ground-up for web-based delivery, some products were built to maximize economy for the vendor by requiring upgrades and security patches to be applied at inconvenient times. Demand the same or better level of security and reliability as you would demand from an on premise CRM system. Insist upon proven assurances and SLA guarantees which avoid system downtime or the unpleasant surprise from an audit report or a security breach. Leading SaaS manufacturers offer fully redundant data centers, high availability fail-over safeguards, proven business continuity preparedness and separation of your data from other customers. The set it and forget it hype suggests that once your SaaS CRM is enabled, you put your feet up on the desk and look at a dashboard that summarizes your entire sales and service operation. SaaS CRM is like any other business application in that it requires continuous process improvement to achieve sustained business results. No CRM application offers a magical solution when companies are reorganized, territories are realigned, sales reps are reassigned, new products are introduced, business processes are reengineered or new information is required by the executive team. Similarly, as more data is loaded in the CRM, you can further leverage powerful business intelligence (BI) tools that are built into leading CRM systems to better analyze your operations. BEST PRACTICE: BACK OFFICE INTEGRATION Most CRM systems “stop” when a sale opportunity is closed. What a shame as the closure of the initial sale is where customer relationships begin to excel. Startlingly few on-demand CRM systems offer built-in sales order management, which is a natural connection to the ERP or accounting software system. Clients are faced with incremental expenses to buy more “add on” software or to incur the time and cost of system integration. Still other CRM systems offer robust order management and visibility to sales history as part of their core offerings. While back office integration may be a must-have, ensure that the product you select offers flexibility in configuration and a wide range of views to your customer data so you integrate only what is essential for seamless process flow. Whatever approach you choose, ensuring you extend the sales loop from sale opportunity to sale order processing will be appreciated by customers and sales reps alike.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2009

CRM - January 2009 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Shots Heard ’Round the World 30,000-Foot Views Of the Cloud Stuffing the Ballot Box— With Complaints The Marketing Line for ’09 CRM on Twitter Technology Helps Insurance Weather the Storm Required Reading The Google-ization of CRM The Feedback Funnel Email: What’s Inside? Shake Your Moneymakers Lead Sweet Lead Incentives at the Speed of Lightpath Sales Contentment for Content Management A Worthwhile Excursion Into Call Recording Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - January 2009

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