Management Questions

Goal of CRM Implementation

• Is the main goal of the CRM system to guide future behavior of the employees of the organization to shape the future (increase sales, number of satisfied customers, number of new leads generated, reduced turnover of key sales personnel, etc.) or to predict future sales so that the company can position itself appropriately to meet the expected demand? (These two uses of CRM are separate; using CRM in both of these ways at once may even require separate, but integrated planning teams)

Defining Your Customer – The Key Questions

• Who are your ideal customers?
• Who are your ideal prospects?
• How big and numerous are these customers or prospects?
• How many offices do these customers or prospects have?
• What is the management team’s style?
• When were they last in the press?
• Do you get their company newsletter?
• Who are their customers and what products do they offer?
• What are their pain points?
• What are their business goals?
• Who is their ideal customer?
• What does their strategic plan (either written or still stuck in wetware) suggest they will buy from you in the foreseeable future?

Training – The Key Questions

• What training and appreciation for CRM will be required by our sales persons and management in order to maximize the likelihood of a CRM system implementation contributing positively to the organization’s bottom line?
• How will our sales persons, armed with this system, know how to approach a client or potential client and bring back the data we need find to put into the CRM system and at the same time do what it takes to close the sale?
• How will the added duties of putting all potential clients and their data into our CRM system impact our employee’s workload and how can we prevent it from overwhelming them?
• How will the need required by many CRM systems for all of our employees to log all sales and service be met?
• What about related scheduled appointments, impromptu meetings, input written comments on all appointments and the “status” of all clients and potential clients?
• How will all of this new data entry work impact the “real job” of selling and servicing the client or prospect?
• How do we get the “buy in” of all key users of the system?
• How do we insure that the system rapidly dispenses information to all key users that is a 5x or 10x return on the time, energy and pain that a CRM system causes them to deploy in the name of “working for the system”?
• How do we properly train employees to use and benefit from the CRM system and what is the right budget for this training?
• How will the CRM system we deploy compare with the system our competitors will be using in six months or a year?
• How will our customers be impacted if we ask them for significant data for input into our CRM system?
• Will our customers or clients require training and does our company have either the market power or relationship capital to get our customers to comply with our requests rather than merely going to a competitor with less onerous “customer requirements?”

Source:
The Disciplines of CRM
by Herb Rubenstein
The CEO Refresher

Posted by Administrator / Customer Questions