Congratulations, your organization believes in CRM as a strategy!
You’ve paid the fees and licenses are turned on. Now what?
There are literally hundreds of things to consider.
Here at App Solve, we always recommend and work with a Pre-Business Process Review (BPR) Document that we send to our customers ahead of project kick-off. This way our customers can take the time with their team and stakeholders, to clearly document the details of their business processes. This ensures that customers know what to expect, and we know exactly what we’re building.
Some of the primary considerations are: What product did you buy and what are its capabilities? How many licenses will be used? Were there any additional services purchased or license variations? In the case of Salesforce.com, did you buy Data.com? Premier Success Plus? Or possibly Platform licenses? Who will be using the system? Is it Sales? Purchasing? Customer service?
We like our customers to put into their own words their primary objectives for implementing the CRM, that way we can always revert back to their initial goals to ensure we’re delivering a successful project. We also like customers to put into their own words – critical success factors and any potential challenges that they may see arise as we move through the implementation process.
When it comes to user setup, we ask to receive a view of the user’s titles, reporting structure and geographical locations so that we can set hierarchy and regional differences if necessary. Next we ask to document any viewing, access and permission restrictions that you need to have set up in your business. Typically when setting up a sales team for instance, we arrange it so that a sales rep can see their colleagues’ account and contact information, but not their colleagues’ detailed opportunity information. This creates an environment of information sharing that is competitive but cultivates a helpful team as well. Another team member might have a relationship with a contact in a colleague’s patch, and they can quickly and easily leverage each other’s relationships, using that visibility into each other’s business.
Are there different kinds of users like Channel Partners that will also be selling into your customers? If so, they will likely need different type of access than that of a core Sales Manager, for example.
How is your business marketing today? How do you find leads and manage your lead routing? Can we set leads to route to the appropriate sales rep, just at the right time? What are the steps that need to take place in order for a qualified lead to become a closed sale?
We’ll demonstrate during the project the information our customers typically capture at each stage of their process and within each object. For example below – what is important to this customer when a lead becomes a potential sales opportunity?
- Account Name
- Opportunity Name
- Close Date
- Opportunity Owner
- Stage
- Amount
- Type Forecast
- Category
- Primary Campaign Source
- Probability %
- Lead Source
- Win Reason(s)
- Loss Reason(s)
- Lead Description
- Primary Competitor
- Next Steps
- Description
We’ll remove any information that isn’t required and we’ll add what’s missing. We will go through this process for every major object and information page that is key to this customer – Accounts, Contacts, Finance, Projects, Knowledge Base, Marketing Automation, etc.
One of the last questions we’ll ask, which is often the most important – what other information do you feel we need to know prior to the start of our initial BPR session(s)? We’ve learned that this one question is the most important way of avoiding ‘gotchas’ given that when we ask if there is anything we’ve missed, it typically brings out information that may have otherwise been overlooked.
