Eric White

CRM Dashboards and Data Visualizations as the keys to unlocking your CRM's value: they can help identify customer trends (lifecycle / retention), market fluctuations (deal size, interest) and team performance (retention, touch points). Frequent analysis of reports likewise gives you unique insight and proprietary data your competitors don't have access to. By leveraging your CRM to it's potential, your team can spot trends in real time and adapt to shifting market conditions and you can spot the gaps in your own pipeline process before they materially impact your business growth.

Effectively navigating expectations requires asking discovery questions and listening skills. Go all the way upstream by asking HOW a boss's goal align with organizational strategy. What is the short term and long term vision of innovation? What are the expected outcomes? How will innovation innovation impact the organizations standing with it's customer base, both existing and future, and how what is the innovation's impact on the greater market? Asking the right questions of your boss will improve clarity, help further flesh out what milestones are important (and why), and give insight into expected outcomes for the innovation.

To avoid CRM project failure, scope creep, sprint delays, and potential internal civil war it's imperative to start out with a week by week plan. Clear objectives that answers who, what, and why need to be prioritized. Equally important is organizational understanding and commitment to the resources required reach said objectives, from both a time and capital perspective. And I strongly recommend a milestone based project plan or roadmap that includes both the milestone as well as those resources required for accomplishment to move to the next phase. A CRM project is a true marathon. There will be fast miles and slow miles. But if you stick to your training plan and identify the resources needed along the way, it's a much smoother run

The best advice I offer companies is to be aggressively realistic about current users, future users, and what features and functions are truly going to accelerate business growth. Cost and budget are obviously factors. You want something that fits now but that you can "grow into" in the future. At the same time, you need to be realistic about things like maintenance, training, who's using it for what, and if the overall cost - not just the per seat cost, but the total cost - is actually accretive. You really don't need an Enterprise solution if you have a sales team of 5 plus a BDR and a CS person. Most important is to make sure you right size your CRM to your specific needs, your team's skillset, and your customer base.

It's way to easy to fall into the trap of what a CRM can be. But before you're compressing purchasing cycles and optimizing renewals and connecting drip campaigns to landing pages, you first need to figure out what defines a contact and how you define a lead. And how many stages encompass your buying process. And who is responsible for the the customer at each stage - and responsible for ensuring timely input of clean customer data that will live on. And "who" needs to know "what", and "why" do they need to know it. Most important to understanding your CRM is understanding WHY each of these is so important. At the beginning, simple is best. Figuring out the who, what, and why will become the framework for customizing your CRM.