You thought you could choose your CRM tool on your own, but you're facing reality:
· Too many solutions on the market?
· Paid comparison guides
· Limited tool demonstrations
· Difficult to understand functionalities
Result? You don't know which CRM solution is best suited to your company!
With over fifteen years of experience helping people choose a CRM, Nicolas Boissard reveals 5 key questions to ask yourself in order to choose the right CRM tool.
Choosing your CRM: How important is CRM to you?
Level of company involvement
When embarking on a CRM project, it is important to ask which parts of the company are involved. Is it just a project for the sales team, or is it a true company-wide project involving a willingness from management to improve the company's strategy?
Allocated budget
To choose your CRM wisely, you must start by establishing a budget. Indeed, there are two budgets to plan for
The first is the deployment budget. During the project development, you will need to establish a budget for the implementation and user training. This budget will therefore be unique.
Next, there will be the "run" budget. This should be the same each month/year to pay for access to the solution.
To get an idea of the budget, you can estimate that a solution will cost you between 20 and 70 euros per month, per user.
Measured impact
When you start choosing your CRM, it is important to measure the impact of the project on the organization. Launching a CRM project within a company is a significant change! That's why it's necessary to anticipate the project's impact on the various stakeholders and employees, but also in terms of costs, resources, and overall processes.
These factors must be taken into account because if they are not considered during the implementation of the project, it may be jeopardized. If you encounter difficulties and your CRM project fails, refer to Nicolas Boissard's webinar: How to revive a failed CRM project?
What do your employees gain from choosing the right CRM?
The true success of a CRM project lies in whether or not employees use it. Indeed, the primary risk in a project like this is resistance to using and adopting the project by employees.
However, once the project is well integrated within the company, employees will gain a lot in terms of personalization of the customer experience and follow-up.
Let's take, for example, a software vendor specializing in automotive fleet management. For them, the CRM project is a subject that affects the entire company; sales, marketing, and particularly customer service.
Their main problem is that today they have no visibility into customer service regarding the historical commercial relationship (how long has the company been in contact with the customer? what frictions have occurred?). Therefore, a piece of information was missing to personalize the customer journey, which will be a problem solved thanks to the deployment of the CRM.
Who will take care of the CRM?
Ideally, a company should have at least one CRM expert who can use their skills to help colleagues improve with the solution. This expert should have a business vision, meaning they should be familiar with the users' business.
The reference person must also have a minimum technical understanding in order to handle the solution's configuration (user creation).
Finally, the referent should be able to devote the majority of their time to the CRM, to resolving any incident. If the person does not have enough time, they may miss important problems which in some cases can lead to the failure of the CRM project.
Therefore, it is preferable to choose someone within the company as a reference person.
For more advice, watch the Webinar above presented by Nicolas Boissard, Marketing Director at KESTIO.