Are you making this common CRM implementation mistake?

CRM projects must be driven by your business processes - or you may end up feeling like our friend above.

CRM and Business Processes

 A CRM solution – whether it is based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 or another technology – if it is successful - will support your users in performing their roles.  If it is not successful - and too many fall into this category - it will simply get in the way, or be sidestepped.

Whether those roles are directly helping a customer in a support environment, guiding a prospect to make a purchase (sales), informing potential customers about your value (marketing) or making key decisions based on information from any of the above – and more – these roles are a key part of your business processes.

A business process is how you accomplish an organisational goal. So, your business process document should be far more than a book languishing on a shelf. Your business processes are the fabric or structure of your business.

Even if you do not believe that you have business processes, you do. Without business processes, you do not have a business. Without business processes you do not have links between your business goals and how your team members are spending their time. This means that you probably have something between anarchy and chaos.

Business processes sit at the interface of your business goals, your process stakeholders - your users, other employers and directors - and the steps required to complete the tasks.

Business processes sit at the interface of business goals, process stakeholders, and the actual steps required to do the tasks

So, your CRM solution must, therefore, be based on your business processes.

Here’s why your business processes should lead your CRM implementation

Your business processes and ensuring that they are sufficiently streamlined is an essential first step in any CRM implementation.

Before you embark on the solution design, or worse still hiring a ‘developer’ to start the implementation, I would advise that you invest some time in confirming and documenting your processes. These processes then form the groundwork for scoping your CRM project. Our scoping workshop methodology relies on the processes that you want your CRM implementation to support.

When you scope your project, I would advise using these steps:

An additional benefit of this approach is that the processes form the basis of your testing and your end user training – two other steps that often get forgotten. Having process documentation that feeds directly into your testing and end user training makes these steps easier and the entire project more likely to succeed.

Some more benefits – beyond your CRM project – of having formal processes

Business processes that are consolidated, documented and communicated ensure that:

• All members of all teams work together (so balls do not get dropped) and individuals understand where and how their efforts contribute to the overall goals of the business;
• the tasks performed do contribute to the end goals – which saves the organisation time - and money;
• people achieve their results in a consistent way;
• there is a standard way of training a new staff member on how to do a task;
• you have a procedure which is hugely beneficial when you decide to automate a process or introduce a new technology such as a CRM solution.

This means that everyone in the team knows what they can expect from other team members, which in turn means that your customers get better service. This is good for business.

Business processes are not carved in stone – they will evolve over time, as will the organisation. Equally, everyone does not have rigidly follow the procedure and do everything identically. I encourage my clients to think of business processes as a dance, where there is overall co-ordination, with considerable scope for personal variations although there are definite limits.

If you are not basing your CRM implementation on your processes - what are you doing?

Rather than focus on the business processes, many of the failed, or failing, implementations that I now work with, have focussed almost totally on either data entry or reporting. I am not saying that data entry and reporting are not important – they certainly are important. Data entry and the necessary outputs – which include reports and dashboards – form key parts of the business process. But data entry and reporting are contextualised by their place in the business process. So, process is where the focus of the implementation should be.

Clearly, you can't do that smoothly and effectively without coupling an understanding of the organisation’s business processes with product knowledge of the selected CRM technology. Then, you require the knowledge of how to get from a business process to an implementation.

This means that you need more knowledge of your chosen technology than is often found in these projects. It is this lack of knowledge that leads to many of the project failures. The two main places where more knowledge would be hugely beneficial are:

• Key decision makers who are involved in deciding what should be in and out of scope for the project. This enables true leadership rather than the blind leading the blind;
• The people doing the technical development and particularly the solution design – surprisingly, too many of the technical team members do not know the out of the box functionality -= which leads to unnecessary development.
  This leads to poor design decisions and too often unnecessary customisation.

CRM is simple, but not easy

However, if you invest in Envisioning Education prior to your scoping of your CRM project and then ensure that your solution design is undertaken by a solution architect experienced in your selected technology, you stand a good chance of achieving CRM success.

CRM Implementation is Simple

CRM is simple in that it involves taking an existing technology, that probably meets 80% of your needs and adding the missing pieces.  The implementation only needs to create that final 20% - the icing on the pre-bought cake. If this is to be achieved, it requires that all the implementation team know the functionality of the technology. Unfortunately, this is too often not the case.

I am currently working with a client who has been charged a large amount of money for the Dynamics 365 activities to be redeveloped.
The wheels have now come off the project because this custom development will not support the standard integration with Outlook – which is essential for how this client wants to manage their stakeholder interactions.

Envisioning education shows you, and the other key decision makers, how much of your business needs are met before any changes at all are made to your selected technology. Good quality envisioning education shows you, in a reasonable amount of detail, not only the functionality in your selected technology, but teaches you how it is designed to work. While I expect that you will only use a (small) selection of this technology, and changes will be made to meet your needs, garnering an understanding of what you have already, is hugely beneficial.

This is like when learning to read, a child starts with carefully structured simple books – not a technical tome or Shakespeare!.

CRM Implementation is not easy

CRM is not easy - because it involves changing how people work.

Prior to the CRM project, users had a way of getting their work completed that worked for them. The arrival of the CRM project involves change from that process. If the user feel that the new process is less effective for them, they are unlikely to embrace it.

If the way that the CRM solution has been implemented does not obviously follow the process that the user is asked to follow it is unlikely to be adopted. This happens because the CRM will be seen as hindering, rather than helping, the tasks that the user has to achieve to meet their targets

What is particularly frightening to me, is that many of my clients who engage me to deliver the success that they expected to get from their implementation partner (sometimes partners, because of the partner-swapping that some have experienced), realise that taking a process-first approach would have avoided most of the grief and angst that they have endured. However, by the time that this has been realised, there is already a usually poorly designed platform that needs to be modified, coerced and manhandled to deliver a result to disappointed and doubting users.

To increase your chance of CRM success....do this

• Ensure that your key people have the knowledge and understanding to make the best decisions about the scope of the project – invest in Envisioning Education to ensure that this is achieved;
• Scope your project based on your business processes;
• Ensure that your solution design is done by someone who has a broad knowledge of the existing functionality of your selected technology.

With these three steps in place, you have a good chance of being in the minority of people who achieve a CRM solution that meets everyone’s needs and expectations, within time and budget.

This is not as hard as it sounds - ask me how!