You thought you could choose your CRM tool on your own, but now you're faced with reality:
- A (too?) wide choice of solutions on the market
- Paid comparison guides
- Limited tool demonstrations
- Features that are difficult to understand
Result? You don't know which CRM solution is best suited to your business!
With over fifteen years' experience in CRM selection, Nicolas Boissard reveals 5 key questions to ask yourself when choosing your CRM tool.
Choosing your CRM: How important is CRM to you?
Level of company involvement
When embarking on a CRM project, it's important to ask which parts of the company are involved. Is it just a project for the sales team, or is it a genuine corporate project involving management's desire to improve the company's strategy?
Allocated budget
To choose the right CRM, you need to start by establishing a budget. There are two budgets to consider
The first is the deployment budget. During project development, you'll need to establish a budget for implementation and user training. This will be a one-off budget.
Then there's the "run" budget. This will need to be the same every month/year to pay for access to the solution.
To give you a rough idea of your budget, you can assume that a solution will cost you between around €20 and €70 per month, per user.
Measured impact
When choosing a CRM solution, it's important to measure the project's impact on the organization. Launching a CRM project within a company is a major change! That's why you need to consider the project's impact on the various players and collaborators involved, as well as on costs, resources and general processes.
These factors need to be taken into account, because if they aren't, your project could be in jeopardy. If you are experiencing difficulties and your CRM project is failing, please refer to Nicolas Boissard's webinar: How to relaunch a failed CRM project?
What do your employees gain from choosing the right CRM?
The real success of a CRM project lies in whether or not it is used by employees. Indeed, the main risk in a project like this is resistance to its use and to its appropriation by employees.
However, once the project is well integrated within the company, employees will gain a great deal in terms of personalized customer experience and follow-up.
Let's take the example of a car fleet management software publisher. For them, the CRM project is a subject that affects the whole company: sales, marketing and, more specifically, customer service.
Their main problem is that today they have no visibility for customer service on the historical commercial relationship (how long has the company been in contact with the customer? friction?). This means they lack the information they need to personalize the customer journey, a problem that will be solved with the deployment of CRM.
Who's in charge of CRM?
Within a company, the ideal situation would be to have at least one CRM referent, who can use his or her skills to help employees make progress with the solution. This person must have a business vision, which means he or she must be familiar with the users' business.
The person in charge must also have a minimum level of technical expertise in order to take care of the solution's configuration (user creation).
Finally, the person in charge should be able to devote the majority of his or her time to CRM, and to resolving any incidents. If the person doesn't have enough time, he or she runs the risk of missing out on important problems, which can in some cases lead to the failure of the CRM project.
It is therefore preferable to choose an in-house person as a referent.
For more tips, watch the Webinar above presented by Nicolas Boissard, Marketing Director at KESTIO.
