Considerations For CRM Selection And Adoption

Blog: Are you using or planning to invest in a new CRM?

This tool needs to be the most flexible and capable one in your company.  The lifeblood of any business is customer service.  A competitor who can exceed your customers’ expectations with the right investment makes it even more important that you invest first, and often.

A successful CRM tool will fuse with every vital part of your internal processes so all interactions between your business, prospects, and existing customers are smooth and traceable for a positive outcome at all stages of the relationship.

Winning repeat business requires the proper tools.  If your team cannot market, build and maintain leads, track sales and orders, or ship and invoice efficiently, you could lose the race. CRM software isn’t just about tracking and maintaining contact information. It’s moved well beyond that space.

Where do you begin?  First, get your primary users to help design the workflow for your new solution? Stakeholders at all levels should be involved in such a large decision — ask them to think about the tools currently used and processes that are followed.  Considering the most common tasks and procedures performed today will give you a baseline for the new CRM configuration.

Companies that do not involve enough of the team risk low adoption or the possibility of complicating their jobs instead of simplifying them. Any tool that makes key tasks more complex might gain accuracy, but the net result might be fewer users following the new procedure or slowing down your workforce.

Your solution must be easy enough to use that your team will want to use it every day. Once you have that acceptance and buy-in from the team, you can begin to explore additional features to hook into all parts of your business.

Salesforce.com is a good example of a tool that offers a solid CRM solution with many add-on features to grow with your business.

Salesforce.com – An Industry Leader:

As a cloud-based CRM platform, Salesforce is comprehensive, scalable, and can streamline collaboration both inside and outside an organization.  Improving accuracy, generating more data sharing, and giving sales and marketing key communication reminders and search features are just some of the improvements from which you will benefit. When you can help your customers quickly and efficiently, they will have more confidence in your company and send more business your way.

Let’s look at one of the best neutral sources for solution choices:

2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation*

CRM can be a low-cost solution at first, and if you seek the lowest level of user ability you can find savings and functionality.

Like most solutions, the more you pay, the better the functionality. Carefully evaluate your needs against these offerings – many companies find it easier to start with the initial licenses and increase functionality as adoption grows.

For thirteen years running, Salesforce has been named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation.  2019 was no different, as you can see above.

Salesforce has been in the marketplace for a very long time, and they recreated the industry with their cloud introduction in 1999.  The continual effort to improve the solution has led to new developments in Artificial Intelligence. The newest features will help predictively focus your sales and marketing efforts on successful strategies because the software already has all the data about your customers’ purchase cycles, existing sales and solutions, analytics on successful sales, and closing statistics that can improve your team’s actions for future success.

It’s important to make the right investment of time, money, and resources when choosing and implementing a CRM tool. Be sure to do your research and get all the right people involved. You’ll be glad you did.