How To Implement A CRM System In Your Organisation

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool is an enabler of customer data for business. Conversion, storage, and management of the data build a deep deposit for insight mining, marketing automation, and sales processing and prediction, with the main benefit of enhanced customer relationship administration. It does this by consolidating client information into a centralised database which leverages all of the advantages of CRM such as task automation, sales rapidity and appreciation into how to delight customers.

As marketing, sales and service divisions are distributed across diverse locations and their client networking occurs at different times, it's imperative to keep teams on the same page. The more preparation the better.

With a CRM system, capturing prospect and conversion interaction, contact data with embedded forms on blogs, and positioning keywords for utmost responsiveness is key. Try automated scraping of socials and lead qualification centred on digital user movement and feed that into bespoke marketing drives, and you’re guaranteed boosted ROI and bottom lines.

The software keeps customers feeling they have the sales staff exclusive attention - by prodding sales to reach out to obliterate neglect, and the ability to gauge customer sentiment by exposing metrics not immediately apparent is another plus. Auto dashboard crafting to segment clients according to demographic and other criteria, helps you hone your targeting, improve your service and forecast your sales pipeline. Lead qualification, assigning prospects to reps,  and sales ticket coordination are the icing on the cake.

Covered in this article

Defining The Goals And Objectives For The CRM System
Identifying And Assessing The Available CRM Options
Preparing The Organisation For CRM Implementation
Customising And Configuring The CRM System
Training Employees On How To Use The System
Launching The CRM System And Monitoring Its Performance
HubSpot’s CRM

Defining The Goals And Objectives For The CRM System

Advance The Buyer's Journey

At its core, the ultimate rationale behind a CRM system is to enrich the customer experience (CX). Effecting this goal is an infallible means of getting positive outcomes across all business functions. Once customer satisfaction is isolated as the true end goal of any CRM system, all the other objectives fall into place.

Enhancing customer satisfaction is achieved by differentiating your product or service with the most finessed and nuanced customised and personalised CX you can provide. The deeper your insights into your customer's needs and the more you are able to anticipate their future ones, the better your service offering. These insights are the components in your engine room of product and service generation.

Effortless and glitch-free retrieval of your customers’ historical and contemporary data by every team member increases the rate and strength of your company’s response to their every enquiry, requirement and request, making the CX positive from every angle as you differentiate your product from your competitors.

Rally Operational Efficiency

By automating repetitive administration tasks – invoicing, post-sale workflows, email follow-ups and audience segmentation – a CRM system frees up your time for other, more important tasks and processes. Consolidate customer data assembled throughout your business operations into a unified dashboard – namely, sales, marketing and client service – and all internal stakeholders get to experience streamlined comms and friction-free collaboration.

Enhance Customer Retention

The adage that your best customers are your current ones still rings true. Across industries, it is easier to multiply contracts and push repeat purchases than it is to recruit new prospects. CRM systems spur this on by amplifying the average lifetime value of clients. A CRM system also marks the trajectory of every customer interaction to mint precise knowledge of how to best serve them. Aligning each campaign to encourage loyalty is a CRM forte, letting you cross-sell and reward customers for long-term loyalty to bolster stickiness or offer discounts on previous buys when clients reach important purchase milestones.

Reduce The Cost Of Client Acquisition

Winning over new customers comes with a price. CRMs are designed to make marketing ROI sustainable to lower the average customer acquisition cost (CAC). CRM processes are multi-pronged and comprise:

• Reducing campaign expense by automating manual tasks
• Improving the efficiency of lead and potential targeting by centralising data
• Highlighting the position of prospects in each purchasing process stage.

More Sales For The Win

Focusing your selling activities on the right prospect makes business sense. Not every lead comes up with the goods, and some present a higher value than others. CRM systems stock the sales pipeline with the most qualified prospects and leads. CRM systems also reveal which of your preferred customers share common traits so you can bring them to the fore allowing your team to leverage the biggest contract amounts and deal values.

Quantifying CRM Goals

CRM goals aligned with business objectives provide their own performance metrics: for customer retention, look at churn rate; revenue generation indicates sales increases. If CRM goals remain unreached, tactic adjustment can yield the results you want. Insufficient lead conversion? Swap out email campaigns. Lagging customer retention? Target areas where satisfaction drops.

Identifying And Assessing The Available CRM Options

Cutting through the many CRM options, vendors, products and jargon takes some doing but we have broken it down for you. The first step is finding out all about the benefits, advantages, methodology and best practices of the CRMs you’re considering using. The typology and functionality of the CRM you choose is determined by your business requirements. The criteria include extended sales cycles, challenges with customer retention and managing agent scheduling, rep performance levels and the desire to collate the customer data which best serves you.

Balancing your needs with your budget is the next step. Software affordability is determined by the upgrade and monthly per-user base costs. Mobile functionality is key here for on-the-go customer data retrieval, sales pipeline access and the completion of end-to-end actions, as salespeople rely on more phones than laptops to nurture customer relationships.

The degree to which the CRM prioritises market campaigns and lead tracking, contact management, customer centricity and automation are major considerations. How easy is it to align and scale your existing task management, marketing automation and SaaS platforms with the proposed CRM? Business needs to evolve and your chosen CRM needs to accommodate them.

Test driving the CRM with a live demo is the logical thing to do to measure positives and negatives. First-time CRM purchasers sometimes overestimate what features they actually need for their users, and sales might prioritise a CRM with next-level sales sets over marketing’s need for a lower-tiered functionality. It’s not advisable to go with a “one size fits all” CRM – a customised version is king.

CRM integration with your existing ERP, accounting, HR, website and e-commerce platforms is a major benchmark, as is the CRM’s CX (intuitive and user-friendly, or not), as well as the capacity to import and export data. Referencing recommendations, testimonials, scores and endorsements put you on the path to the right CRM. And GDPR and POPIA readiness seals the deal.

Preparing The Organisation For CRM Implementation

Formulate An Implementation Plan

Each adoption stage needs you and your team to prepare for it. The first part of migration involves ensuring there is enough data backup for pre-launch. Hard and cloud copies, with USB and external drive storage of data, software specs and customised programming, safeguard against info loss during transition. Action plans should include a stringent timeline and budget guidelines so that implementation is staggered and not an overwhelming data dump that leads to errors and extended learning curves.

Get Feedback During Training

Start a continuous feedback loop as soon as training commences to let you know how employees are doing with the new system. The CRM platform will become the staple of staff members' standard workday so make them as conversant, familiar and confident about using the system as soon as possible. Finding out what’s working and what isn’t lets your CRM provider tweak and finesse the CRM for maximal user integration and satisfaction.

Measure To Make Adjustments

As you pre-pilot the CRM, define explicit analytics and metrics to quantify its uptake and progress and align CRM goals with the CRM itself. By netting and scrutinising measurable CRM data and activity, you should be able to take deeper dives than ever before into the currents which direct the relationships with prospects and customers. These dives are the insights you need to fine-tune business efficiency.

Choose Department Champions For A CRM Team

To prepare the organisation for your CRM choice, assemble a CRM creation and implementation team of highly regarded staff members to mitigate against employee reluctance, predict pain points and act as CRM advocates and champions to promote adoption. Team members may include a

• Project manager (leader)
• Systems developer (installation)
• Data analyst (data migration)
• QA engineer (testing)
• Champions (representatives)
• End-of-the-line salespersons (primary and secondary users).

Customising And Configuring The CRM System

Customising the CRM just means inserting or modifying existing CRM features to better fit your business needs, which eliminates the need for SaaS system use for every action. No two businesses have the same ops or workflows, so there is no such thing as a cookie-cutter CRM. Best-fit functionalities unique to your CRM allow you to investigate the market, harvest industry-specific data, and niche user interfaces and enliven customer relationship management.

The benefits of CRM customisation include minimum expense, quick implementation, inactive customer identification, increased responsiveness to customers, resource savings, improved sales forecasting, a better product mix, automation overhaul, timely vendor or product delivery, and best-fit need scenarios.

Employee buy-in depends on whether or not they believe the CRM will increase their productivity. When configuring the CRM system, make sure not to over-custom the software in case it slows down processes and adds complexity. Types of CRM customisation levels include basic (dashboard or widget configuration); mid-level (workflow creation, light coding); and advanced (QA testing, regression and analysis).

Training Employees On How To Use The System

Prior to planning the CRM training programme, identify the staff members/trainees involved, and determine how to conduct training and the scope to be covered. Onboard end-users: marketing, sales and customer service teams for training, as well as the heads of departments. Consult your champion team for advice on choosing a training leader and CRM project manager, who can then work with the department heads to roll out the training.  

Next, prioritise the resources to use in the training; the decision is influenced by your company’s budget and CRM tools. Considerations include individual/group training; a hands-on or lecture-type strategy, job-specific or generalised training; online or on-premise. Consider in-house or external vendor or consultant-provided training.

Then, think about what comprises the CRM training strategy: objectives for specific training areas, trainee assignments and segmented timeframes. Choose the date by which the team needs to be fully conversant with the CRM. Reverse engineer the sectioning and scheduling of exact modules accordingly, and stagger rather than doing the training in one large chunk to boost comprehension and attention spans.

After the previous step, set the CRM use standards and best practices by defining and upholding the way in which lead and customer data is entered, permissions are set and the way the system is sustained. For example, insisting on every lead entry having source data and setting up system check intervals, as well as selecting which staff have access to which data.  

Now is the best time to run the training sessions, and the use of a trainee persona or fictional customer is good for practising contact recording and deal tracking. Finding the best times in advance for live training to suit the various stakeholders is optimised with business calendar apps, and sessions should last no longer than two hours. Offer a recording afterwards together with a training guide that staff can refer back to. 

Launching The CRM System And Monitoring Its Performance

With the training over, the results should be measured to guarantee total staff immersion and adoption by getting feedback in the form of individual meetings, group discussions and surveys. Metrics to measure include user logins and data entries. Early monitoring of training effects indicates which modules were easily grasped and which presented challenges. Future training and retraining focus can be directed with this information. Finding out which features are the most and least useful can further optimise customisation and adjustments.

As CRMs are updated, continuous learning and refresher courses allow staff to keep on top of things. And using the expertise of the champion team throughout the training procedure smooths the process. Creating a change management plan (CMP) helps maintain high employee engagement. Rounds of vertical testing of the CRM can occur when it is live to gather internal and external effectiveness and reduce the division between the employee and customer-centricity of the software. When going live, it’s best to begin with one company area in order to share feedback with the implementation team.

As long as the CRM operates it is imperative to perpetually evaluate and maintain records. The criteria to determine the success of the CRM system include customer renewal rates, retention and turnover; net promoter scoring; resolution times; follow-up figures per issue; and referrals.

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM offering spans small, medium and large-size business, and boast state-of-the-art reporting tools and performance insights. Its no-charge option comes with more than 90 report templates from which to choose customisable and personalised dashboards. Report options range from sales activity insights and sales funnel data to deal projections and everything in between.

HubSpot doesn’t stop in giving you the best CRM experience imaginable, with reports on team inbox chat, and email interaction ecosystems to indicate response times, as well as the promptness variable of message resolution and the efficacy of message distribution between team members. 

As a platinum HubSpot partner, Velocity will be able to assist you and your business in implementing a CRM that works. Contact us today.