Top Tips for Choosing a CRM
Which CRM?
One of the most common questions that I am either asked directly or that I come across in the business groups I am a member of is, “Which CRM should I use?”
It is a very straightforward question, but one without an actual answer. Well at least not without doing some groundwork first. In the business groups that I am in then it seems everyone has an answer. That answer being the CRM that they currently use. This answer, although helpful in general terms, fails by not asking any relevant questions to establish what the CRM is to be used for.
This really is the most critical point of choosing a CRM. What do you actually want to achieve from it?
Unfortunately, CRMs by their nature and acronym tend to get lumped together into one big category. There are hundreds of different CRMs for all types of different uses. Some that suit one business type will be completely irrelevant to the next.
In a business environment you may be looking purely at a CRM for Sales, you might want one for Service, or just one for general contact with clients. You may be B2B or B2C and have different needs. You may have hundreds of small customers or very few large customers. These are all things that need to be taken into consideration. There are CRMs for non-profits and charities. You might need a rich dataset from the CRM. You may want to automate your marketing. In fact, when you think about everything a CRM can do for you then it can become quite daunting.
This is before we have even looked at the costs of these and weighed up the different styles of licence. Some charge per contact, some per user, some per business. Some are free, at least at the basic level and some are very expensive. There really is something for anyone and everyone.
Why choose a CRM anyway?
Let me quote you a text I received from my friend Jim:
“We turned on Active Campaign this afternoon… Holy shit! Amazing piece of software, working with Zapier, Stripe, Xero, Outlook and our Wordpress site. The automation has saved us so many hours. I wish we had done it years ago.”
Not only did it save him hours of work it also led to more sales through automating a lot of the sales and follow up process. Particularly with those that needed more time to decide on his company being the right fit. So whichever CRM you find works for you, you want to be like Jim. You want more time, more sales, more automation, and less hassle.
How do you become like Jim?
Let us start with what a CRM is. The acronym stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is slightly outdated now as a CRM is so much more than that, but at its heart it is your database of your present customers, future customers, and past customers. In the old world, you might have had a Filofax jammed full of business appointments. The back of the holder is full of business cards swapped at meetings. Reminders to call people are written on certain days. You may have also had a rolodex on your desk, maybe a separate diary too. A CRM basically brings all these paper-based systems into a digital system that allows you to see all the information on a single customer in one place. Once this information is held in a central database it is possible to do much more with it than before. And it is how you use this information that is key to what CRM is going to be the right one for you.
Whilst every customer I speak to has different requirements, they all go through the same process when it comes to selecting a CRM. (And if you are smart, you will realise this works for all software).
The process I follow with customers takes in the first three steps of my Be The Five methodology. The methodology works at multiple levels within a business and in this instance, we can use it for software selection.
Be The Five
1. Discuss
Every project should start with a conversation. Most do, but often they are the wrong conversations. Often a CRM conversation will start and end with IT. Sometimes it starts with Marketing, and they speak to Sales. Sometimes they involve IT. Often they forget about Finance or the wider team. And by conversation, I mean a proper conversation about what it is the business wants to achieve with the CRM. I think of these conversations much like I think of a strategy with four key components:
• What is the outcome we want to achieve?
• Where are we today?
• What is stopping us from hitting the outcome?
• How is a CRM going to help us bridge the gap?
By bringing all departments around the table for the initial conversations we can be very clear on what the outcome is that we want to achieve. For Jim this was about giving him more time back in his week. For a customer of mine in the not-for-profit sector it was to increase donations by 10%. Even if you do not have a real figure then you can put a hypothesis together on this. Jim could have said, “I need a CRM that saves me at least ten hours of administrative tasks a week”. This is important as the questions that follow help us to work out exactly what type of CRM it is that Jim needs. For the not-for-profit, it really narrowed down their focus on possible solutions.
The size of your company is also irrelevant at this point. If you are a one-man band or 1,000 strong company it is still these important questions that you need to be asking. It sometimes helps to use a third party to aid in these as long as they are technology agnostic, especially for the smaller businesses.
I would strongly advocate that you only have one outcome that you work towards. You need to decide what is the one outcome that is above all others. The focus is then on that and only that. There will be secondary outcomes and benefits that will come with most projects, like Jim who increased his sales, but his core focus was on time saving.
The key reason we undertake projects in this way is because it gives a different way to approach the market. Gone are the days of writing requirement specifications and sending them out to a tender platform. Sitting and waiting for suppliers to contact you with a proposal. These requirement lists are always very generic and anything mandatory will automatically be ticked by the supplier. Instead, we are going to approach the market by asking them how their system is going to help achieve the outcome and bridge the gap from where we are today to where we want to be. And that leads us nicely into the second phase.
2. Discover
Now we know what we want to achieve, we can start to look at the market. Here is where you may want to ask friends, colleagues, business groups to find out what other people use. Now though, instead of asking which CRM they use as a generic question you can be more detailed with what your outcome needs to be. Your other tool in this phase is Google. Use it to help you identify potential CRM’s. Make your search more specific than just CRM, “best CRM to increase sales” or “best CRM to automate marketing” will bring back lists that are more useful to you. You have a list of problems from the Discuss phase so spend the time to go through these and find solutions. Most CRM websites will have a lot of detail on functionality and will either have a free trial or a demo video. Take a look and start to build a matrix of systems vs problems being solved.
Personally, I ignore most CRM websites that do not tell me the price, I find this an unnecessary hassle to request quotes when many are very transparent. If you are a not-for-profit, then look to see if they offer discounts. Many do, but they may also lack the functionality you require. Do not make price the key differentiator. It is important but only to a point.
To give an example, then we can say we want the outcome to be that we increase donations by 10%. This takes donations of £1m a year to £1.1m a year. If the CRM costs £10,000 a year, then you have increased donations by a net £90,000. If you choose CRM that costs £1,000 a year but it does not have the functionality you require to get the 10% and you only increase by 5% then donations have only increased by a net £49,000. This is why we focus on outcomes. The cost is semi-irrelevant if it delivers the outcomes required, and even less so if it surpasses them.
On a side note here, the success of a CRM project is not that the CRM is live. The success of a CRM project is hitting the outcomes. If you want to undertake a benefits assessment of the system, then you must have been using the CRM in a live environment for at least six months. The project does not end at go live.
There is an element here that I often hear of, “Can’t you just tell us the answer?”. And I could, it is my job to understand the market. But this approach does not benefit you in the long term. You need to see what the options are. You need to have a demo or free trial to see how easy you can use it or navigate around it. Ultimately though, you need to take ownership that the CRM you have chosen is the right one for you and that you are fully invested in it. Having a consultant tell you to use a certain CRM does not give you that. I may point you in the direction of several systems, but I will never choose one for you.
You may find that you now have staff that are excited to be moving forwards with a new system that they believe will help you unblock the problems that have stopped you achieving your desired outcomes previously. I’ve seen companies, who have scored CRMs, award nearly double the number of points to a new system having gone through this process than their current supplier (yes, I always make you assess your current supplier if there is one). Imagine knowing that the system that has been holding you back all these years is being replaced with a modern system that has been chosen by you to achieve your outcome. You have got to be excited by that!
3. Decide
The third step is probably now the most important. Deciding which system to go ahead with. Hopefully, you have built up a good matrix of systems and can easily apply a scoring methodology to it. It really is as simple as that. The hard work is completed in the Discuss and Discover phases.
Guiding Principles – ICE
To help steer you in the right direction I work to a set of Guiding Principles that are designed to help you achieve the best outcome from your system. It is useful to be able to test your choices against these principles as well as your outcomes.
Integrated
Integration relates to not only the integration of software tools, but also of teams and working practices. When looking at CRM’s you should consider what levels of integration are needed. Are two different teams going to be using the data in the CRM? It is important that integration is considered, and that it is the right level and type of integration is approved. In some cases, this may be only a small amount of data, in some cases a full record. Where you can start to integrate systems and data, you will also be able to look to automate repetitive tasks. The purpose of this principle is to ensure that integration has been considered, not that there is integration.
Let us go back to Jim and his quote, “We turned on Active Campaign this afternoon… Holy shit! Amazing piece of software, working with Zapier, Stripe, Xero, Outlook and our Wordpress site. The automation has saved us so many hours. I wish we had done it years ago.”
The CRM, Active Campaign, is integrated with Stripe, Xero, Outlook, and his website. This is what has given him his time back and helped increase sales. Not everyone will need the CRM to be integrated into a workflow or another system, at least not initially, but understanding what is possible is a key principle.
Cloud
Cloud First, is a relatively common policy in digital strategies, although many incorrectly think that it is the strategy itself and not a policy. Cloud First does not mean that all systems must be cloud based (or Software as a Service - SaaS) but that the first calling point should be cloud. I am a big advocate of cloud software and with the sheer amount of cloud CRM’s available then there is very little requirement for an on-premise solution. There may be some use cases where this is the case, but this is in the minority. By using cloud-based CRMs then not only are you making the most of new technologies to deliver better outcomes, but you are removing the overhead of having to manage and maintain the systems themselves. This also gives you the flexibility of accessing cloud systems from any location on any device. There needs to be a very good reason for not choosing a cloud-based CRM.
Ecosystem
The final principle relates to Ecosystems. A digital ecosystem relates to a set of systems functioning as a unit. In most cases this is where CRM providers work with other software providers to enhance the functionality of the system they offer.
A good example of this is the Salesforce AppExchange. Here there are hundreds of solutions designed to work alongside and enhance the Salesforce CRM. Alternatively, a good not-for-profit CRM, Donorfy, has an ecosystem of additional tools such as JustGiving, Gift Aid, Mailchimp, GoCardless and more. All of these will help improve efficiency of your processes.
When looking at CRM’s it is important to consider the wider ecosystem of tools rather than just the core CRM. There is a huge market of value-add software designed to work together. In some cases, the Ecosystem will remove the need to integrate systems yourself.
Use these Guiding Principles to help you navigate through all the options available to you. You may not need the Ecosystem today, but as you grow and improve processes then it may prove invaluable. If you look at your software estate and you end up with an Integrated Cloud Ecosystem of software, then you won’t go far wrong.
The Final two steps in my methodology are Design and Deliver. Now you have decided which CRM to buy then you need to plan out the project (Design) and then you need to Deliver success - success that you have achieved the outcome, not that the CRM is live!
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