Tips for Maximizing CRM Investments

An open and communicative culture is also important here. Estrada says the goal is to move from having people refer to CRM as the system to where they call it our system. He proposes fostering an environment that welcomes honest opinions through feedback loops and steering committees.

Many business users who care about doing well will have valuable feedback to offer. A challenge is getting the feedback into the hands of management and allowing it to be acted on. Feedback loops are especially useful to smaller or midsize companies that don’t have business analysts on site to figure out what technologies are needed, develop a strong business case, and secure budgets. These companies can, for instance, set up separate email addresses and distribution lists for users to submit feedback that is then reviewed quarterly or semiannually by a committee that can vet the ideas and carry out the changes.

CUTTING WHAT’S UNNECESSARY

Estrada urges companies to conduct “CRM forensics.” This involves studying worker habits and challenging established ways of doing things, especially when they lead to wasted time. This is a great way to figure out which technologies should take priority and which ones will have the most immediate and noticeable impact.

In working with one of his clients, he found that approximately a third of the firm’s employees’ time was spent going back and forth to get information from other employees. This certainly wasn’t generating revenue; in fact, it was taking away from their selling time. When Estrada brought it to the attention of managers, they conceded. In cutting out one unnecessary step, they were able to give back 30 percent to 40 percent more time for employees to do their jobs.

In another organization, Estrada discovered that reps were taking between two and three hours every week to fill out expense reports. With an expense management tool, they were able to add a significant chunk of time back to the 40-hour workweek.

Estrada cites another client, a car parts sales organization consisting of 500 sales reps. According to Estrada, the firm hadn’t seen double-digit revenue growth in 20 years. While it had solved one problem by digitizing records and making them more current, leading to slight growth, the greater challenge was helping salespeople increase the number of dealerships they could visit on a typical workday. By installing an intelligent routing system, the company increased the number of appointments from 10 or 11 per day to 13. This increased revenue by 20 percent.

LEVERAGING VENDOR RELATIONSHIPS

Just as companies must work within their own walls to keep CRM rolling, they should not neglect their relationships with system vendors.

“Each vendor has its nuances,” Pozil says.

To better understand those nuances, Estrada calls for regular conversations. It can involve calling a contact once a quarter to check in, see what’s in the pipeline, and present new ideas. And this doesn’t cost the organization any money.

The problem is, though, that at many smaller technology companies, sales reps tend to turn over more quickly, leading to less consistency in their dialogues. In those cases, it’s good to move higher on the contact list. This can be done by knowing not just who the sales contact is at the company, but who his boss is, and going as high up the corporate ladder as possible, Pozil suggests.

It’s also important to stay on top of contract terms, understanding the tiers of service and potential hidden costs. Pozil recommends that companies, especially the vast majority that are now investing in cloud deployments, really understand who has access to the data, where it is being stored, and what it means in relation to other applications they might be using now or in the future.

Des Cahill, a vice president and head CX evangelist at Oracle, notes that successful Oracle customers work with vendors to identify where they are and where they want to be. They have a vision for procedural improvement. Importantly, they “are not just looking to buy software, they’re looking for a trusted partner to help them with this business transformation,” Cahill says. The goal, he says, is to help companies “simplify, innovate, and deliver.”

Some companies are likely to want to switch CRM systems altogether and work with entirely new vendors. Sometimes there is a good reason to do this. Take, for instance, HP, which in September moved off of Oracle and Salesforce.com and signed a six-year deal with Microsoft.

When contemplating such a switch, it’s good to know what any new technology can do before deciding to abandon one CRM system for a new one, Estrada advises.

And while the appeal of new tools might be great, Pozil warns against being lured by shiny new toys. “Buying new pieces of the puzzle is not necessarily the fix,” he says. If a company is not doing well, “and it thinks that an add-on is going to fix it, chances are, it’s not. They still need to get the adoption up first, and if they solve that, then they can roll out new features.”

In other words, though the future of CRM is promising, companies can only reach nirvana once they have mastered the basics.

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Associate Editor Oren Smilansky can be reached at osmilansky@infotoday.com.

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