What Is your CRM Solution End Game?

After consulting on CRM solutions for the last 12 years, I have come to the conclusion that the best place to start consulting for CRM is at the end, not the beginning. In other words, what are you ultimately trying to achieve with your CRM solution? What's your "end game"? If your CRM consultant is more worried about the "game in play" than the end game result at the beginning of your relationship, it may be time to interview others.

For example, a typical CRM consultant focused on the "game in play" may ask such questions as: How many users do you have? How many Departments would you like to implement? Where is your data stored now? How many training classes should we plan? Do you want a hosted or premise installed solution? What do your IT internal resources look like? These are all important questions, and they must be asked by a good consultant in order to properly implement a CRM solution, but the more important questions are those that affect the end game, for example:

1)    What manual tasks are your sales reps doing monthly? How much time is it taking them? If we could recapture that time, what would it be worth to your company?

2)    Do your sales and marketing teams communicate in "real time" with each other about leads identified from your marketing campaigns? If the answer is no, and we could close that gap, how many more sales do you think you could make? Better yet, how many sales do you think you have lost? What is the value of each sale?

3)    Do your systems talk to each other? For example is your website populating your sales teams with instant leads? Does your sales team have immediate access to year and month-to-date sales? What about the status of the last order that went through? Are your leads automatically or manually assigned?

For Senior Managers, I ask: What is the single most important thing that you would like to see in a report? What information, if you could get access to it, could make you more money faster? What would make your day?

Discussing the questions that are focused on the end game will help you determine whether your CRM solution is going to pay off "big time and over time". When you know at the start what end game results you want to achieve, it becomes much more desirable to allocate time and money on a CRM solution. Keep the end game in mind and success will be yours.