Great Articale from my colleague Scott Nicol @ Collier Pickard
 
If you want long term sustainable ROI from CRM, then the answer to this question is absolutely yes – but more importantly, why is that the case, and in the world of extremely busy business owners and an ever changing competitive environment, how on earth do you make it happen?

So that we can picture more clearly why this is important, let us take a scenario – a typical conundrum. You have a small or medium business, perhaps even a recent start-up. You realise that CRM can deliver huge value in many areas of the business and you want to take advantage of that value in the fastest time possible. You have a basic business strategy in place, but this may well need to change in the future as you continue to find better ways of working with your prospects, customers and suppliers. So here’s the conundrum: You know that CRM needs to be carefully mapped to your business strategy if you are to reach those goals, but with this lack of a proven, formalised strategy, how do you even begin to take advantage of the value that CRM is proven to deliver? At the same time, how do you continue devoting your time and effort to what you do best, rather than being weighed down by an extensive CRM project?

CRM alignment with business strategy requires flexibility
As with any challenge of such a size, it must be tackled by taking one small chunk at a time to keep everything in motion, and work towards the end goal. Many businesses try to deliver too much too quickly and as a result, the business suffers during CRM implementation or worse still, the entire CRM project fails – which isn’t what we want. In almost all cases, the best thing you can do is get yourself a CRM subscription for a product which is flexible.

Why do I say this? Simple – flexibility will be required as your business strategy evolves, and CRM must be able to shift with you rather than be stuck as it is today, especially if you are to keep up with (or even outdo) the pace at which businesses operate these days – otherwise you’ll very quickly be left in the dark. In addition to this, subscription CRM has the fastest time-to-delivery way of implementing CRM and means you aren’t lumbered with sorting out servers and IT resource to manage the CRM project. Something I heard recently which made me smile – “You go to the shops to buy milk, but you don’t come home with a cow, do you?”

Use it or lose it
Once you’ve got a CRM system in place, the only way to get any value from it is to start using it. This can be a huge obstacle for some businesses since people are so used to working with other, more familiar tools – Outlook being the main culprit. So how do you get people to use it? Well, the same way you get customers to buy from you! Make sure each person understands what benefits they will get from using CRM (which will vary from role to role), be genuinely interested in their feedback on an ongoing basis and make them feel valued – and tell them why it was put in, what you hope to achievefrom it. This way everyone feels like an essential, valuable part of a machine with a real purpose and is much more likely to engage with the CRM system than if you were to say “I’ve bought this bit of software, you need to use it so I don’t waste the money”.

When people start using the CRM system, you can begin to reap the rewards of basic data capture – for example, which customers are you spending too much time with but getting little return from them? Which customers are worth looking after to maintain a strong and prosperous relationship? What can your sales team learn from each other to become more effective? Who is struggling to keep on top of their workload, and who doesn’t have enough work to keep them busy? What products or services are well received by different types of customers in different industries or different geographical regions? Which competitors are you consistently losing to, and how can you change to become better against them? These are all questions that can be answered just by using one of many standard CRM systems – and we haven’t even talked about aligning it to your strategy yet.

It’s an organic process
When you have used CRM for a while, it becomes much easier to identify areas where it is misaligned from your dynamic, evolving strategy and tweak those one by one to add even more value. For example, once you have a CRM system with a solid foundation of data in it, you can look into adding visibility of information from other systems so that, from one screen, you can enrich your understanding of any aspect of your relationship with your customers (which, really, is what CRM is all about). Need to know whether a customer has paid for a product or service? Whether a shipment has been made to a customer and if so, when? When a customer’s contract is due to expire? These are all areas you can gain valuable insight from simply by continually tweaking how your CRM system is aligned with your business strategy.

What about other key information that will form your understanding of how and why your customers buy from you? Do you understand your customer’s needs, or are you pitching cold? Are you going into deals knowing that the customers have sufficient budget, or are you taking the risk because they look good on paper? Can you deliver real value to your customers, or are you just part of a beauty parade? These are, for the most part, pieces of information that your business development team will identify during the life cycle of a potential deal – and as with everything else in life, this cycle can change over time. So allowing your business development team to enter this information into your CRM system quickly and easily as an aide memoire allows you to perform valuable reporting on it to drive effective business change, which is absolutely invaluable when it comes to business growth. In turn, these tweaks and enhancements only encourage CRM users to use the system even more, because it’s the only place they need to go to find any information about a customer, and it actually helps them do their jobs better.

Avoiding CRM failure
One other important thing that’s worth mentioning is that time and availability is one of the biggest killers of CRM success – not because people who buy CRM don’t want it to succeed, but because they need to keep the wheels turning as I mentioned at the start. So when subscribing to a CRM platform, be sure to work with a CRM partner who will put the effort into understanding your business, do the heavy groundwork for you and continue to work with you, evolving your CRM system evolve as your business grows – rather than sell you the software and leave you in the dark.

So, to revisit the question of whether CRM needs to be aligned to your business strategy – we know the answer is yes, but we now also understand that if we don’t have a mapped out, proven and documented strategy, then getting to a point of CRM maturity is not something that will happen. Reaping the benefits of CRM requires evolution over time. To summarise:

Take advantage of the “quick wins” by subscribing to a flexible CRM platform
Work towards a solid data foundation to get those valuable insights and identify strategic misalignments.
Work with a reputable CRM partner with a solid track record who will help you create a CRM system that evolves with your strategy as your business grows going forward.