1. Plan Your Architecture
In evaluating solutions and your implementation plan, teams should inquire about code bases, extension frameworks, and ease of customization. These factors will affect development opportunities and costs.
2. Map Your Business Process
In addition to identifying essential processes that the CRM system will manage, use the CRM deployment as an opportunity to fix internalprocesses that don’t work well. A CRM solution can help optimize customer-facing processes end-to-end, but it can’t fix broken ones on its own.
3. Map the Customer Journey
The planning process should include an agreed-upon definition of the optimal customer experience. A comprehensive customer journey map will help you to identify gaps and opportunities to re-work existing processes and add new workflows.
4. Prioritize Opportunities
Work with department heads to develop revenue and productivity opportunities at every stage of your implementation timeline. Once opportunities are flagged, study them for the ROI potential, compare them, and prioritize CRM expansion accordingly.
5. Align Sales and Marketing
Align your marketing and sales team around lead qualification definitions. With these definitions in place, the CRM system can help you to reduce pipeline waste by automating certain lead scoring and tracking activities in addition to custom reports.
6. Define the User Experience
Work with department heads and front-line workers to discover the insights, prompts, and functionality that they need for a successful implementation based on their role. A CRM system can integrate endless functionality and data across sales processes and service functions, so the project team must guard against overloading users.