How can you assess your organization's maturity for CRM integration?

CRM systems primarily serve sales teams and focus on managing deals. While CRMs support ongoing customer conversations that CSMs do, this alone is insufficient. The system needs to be able to help the CSM proactively manage customers and deliver consistent service. The type of infrastructure a CSM needs to provide good customer relationship management includes playbooks, processes, health scores, and health metrics. If these cannot be added into the CRM, CSMs will need to build and refine them manually. Once these elements are well-established, continue using them until they can be automated within a system. When it is possible to automate the initiation, management, and progress of these processes, take advantage of it.

Just so you know – one thing to take into consideration is your go-to-market strategies. You'll use the CRM differently if you have high transactions with low-value deals or a highly sophisticated B2B process. Simple example: 1. Solar panel installations.Inbound is the main source of traffic. Since you are moving fast, data enrichment is not a priority. You simply want an automation set and a self-serve mechanism for proposals and followups. 2. You are selling enterprise solutions with high ACV. Ensure your CRM has ABM capabilities for targeted accounts, research, and do everything manually. Make sure you have comprehensive data enrichment and all data integrations so you can capture all touch pints with targeted accounts.

For the first step, we usually use the sweet-spot analysis. - Where do we stand? - Where do we want to go? - What are the basic functionalities of our CRM system? The overlapping of where we want to go and what are the basic functionalities can often identify as “low-hanging fruits”. Before we invest a lot of time and money into customization, it makes sense to check which features are available out of the box and start with them if they add value.

Software systems should always be connected and designed in a future-proof way. You should consider the following points: - Enterprise Architecture: Do we connect point to point or is a middleware the go-to way? - Data Quantity: How many data points do we need to sync daily/weekly/monthly/yearly? - Change in Data Quantity: How will the amount of data points change/increase in the next 1, 3, 5, and 10 years? - Direction of Sync: Do we need to sync only in one way (unidirectional) or in two ways (bidirectional) - Sync Frequency: How often should we sync the systems? (automation in near real-time, nightly job, manual on-button click) - Ownership: which system is the system of truth for a record

Puesta en marcha sin planificación, está destinada al fracaso. Aunque la decisión final es de la línea directiva de la empresa, es imprescindible involucrar a los equipos de trabajo tanto para conocer sus puntos de vista ante la necesidad de organizar y adquirir valor con las bases de datos de clientes, así como para involucrar en las etapas de implantación y puesta en marcha. Si bien es cierto en las grandes empresas no se puede involucrar a todo el mundo, contar con elementos puntuales de cada departamento, a?ade valor a la decisión del software más adecuado. En la peque?a empresa, involucrar a todo el equipo es vital, entre otras cosas para entender qué y cómo se están midiendo los resultados y hacia donde se quiere llegar.

Benchmark against Best Practice Whether your integration is state-of-the-art or not, you need to benchmark your as-is or to-be against best practice . Herby a statistical relevant amount of data ( n > 1.000) is required.