As businesses delve head first into exciting and ambitious goals of another New Year, it’s crucial to start off on the right foot. Enhancing customer relationship management, sales, and marketing plays a key role to ensure your company has a great 2012. We here at The TM Group have five tips to help you optimize these areas of your business by .
- Seek out the right executive sponsor. Having the right executive sponsor on your implementation project can help drive goals and adoption.
- Define your current sales process, but don’t change it. We find that most companies don’t really follow a formal sales process and are unable to put what they do into an actual workflow. When implementing a new solution, they try to also push a new, standardized process into place although it hasn’t been communicated yet across their departments. This causes a lot of problems and ultimately leads to implementation failure. If you are trying to get a CRM solution up and running fast, you should stcik with the current sales process, and leave it as is. This doesn’t mean you can’t have a long term plan, but if your focus is on a rapid implementation and quick ROI than this is not the time to change your sales process.
- Training. A new customer management solution is not effective unless your people know how to use it and actually do use it to streamline their daily tasks and increase productivity. courses review the important aspects of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, such as customization & configuration, workflows, and extending CRM. We take training seriously because we know the key to adoption with CRM solution is that everyone understands how to use it.
- Get comfortable with the basics before the “WOW” features. CRM functionality can be pretty awesome and most people want the cool stuff right away before focusing on the basics. This can backfire quickly and we know that getting comfortable with CRM’s basic features helps increase user adoption rate and sets the stage to add “WOW” features later on.
- Realistic expectations. Setting timelines that you can actually reach helps set the stage for a more successful implementation. It also keeps the morale high because you’re achieving progress, getting you to the final goal quickly. Decide if you want to hire a consulant to guide you through the implementation process, or if you’ll try a more do it yourself approach like our ReadySetGo for Microsoft Dynamics CRM approach.
These tips should help minimize the main issues during an implementation, such as resistance to change, lack of perceived benefit, and resistance to use technology. If you have any questions on how to successfully deploy CRM, please contact us at [email protected] or 888.482.2864.
By The TM Group,
