Top 4 CRM Best Practices for CRM Design and Implementation

Our background as CRM consultants goes back into the mid-90s working with solutions like Clarify and Vantive and even before that with custom sales systems. Our CRM expertise, includes years of experience working with companies of all types of challenges of all sizes and types. From this experience, we’ve developed a set of guiding principles that we use when designing and implementing CRM for our customers. In this blog, we’ll cover these principles similar to how we covered successful ERP implementation practices and design principles in a last week’s blog.

Top 4 CRM Design and Implementation Practices

1. CRM Doesn’t Exist In A Vacuum – it impacts finance, manufacturing, product fulfillment, service and support, and your partners. Sales people know this and, because most are pragmatists, they understand that whatever is in the business’ best interests is in their best interest as well.
2. CRM Only Succeeds If Sales and Support Use It – remember that salespeople especially aren’t usually early adopters of software and the more of their time that a solution demands, the less successful it will be. Look for a CRM consulting firm that will help you balance capturing the information and enforcing the processes that you need with maximizing your sales team’s adoption of the solution.
3. CRM Needs to Add Time to the Sales Day – find the best way to help your salespeople do their job more easily—adding value to their day instead of more work. CRM solutions that try to tell people how to do their jobs or require burdensome data entry will fail.
4. Don’t Over-Engineer Your CRM Solution – many companies try to capture more data than they will use and implement overly rigorous processes thereby compromising user adoption. Automate information capture as much as possible, limit the amount of data entry to expect of your salespeople and keep your processes as flexible as possible.

If you follow these design principles, there’s a good chance that you can avoid some of the most common CRM pitfalls, and get the most functionality for your solution spend. We hope that you have found this CRM best design principles useful. For more information on our best practices and how they can improve your CRM or ERP implementation, contact DSG at 866.486.4064.

Another version of this blog was posted at http://www.demandsolutionsgroup.com/crm-best-practice-design-principles/

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