Although the best CRM software will enhance your day-to-day processes through features like lead generation, contact management, business intelligence, and more, these solutions can also serve in the advancement of particular projects. These broader objectives, which can be short-term or long-term, are fundamental to a CRM’s utility.
A CRM project describes when your solution is geared towards a singular purpose. The project could be to raise awareness around a new project launch or to boost sales figures as you enter a new market. The specific project could revolve any number of topics related to customer relationships and is just as likely to focus on marketing as sales. The important thing is that companies have a clear idea of what they want to achieve and how a CRM could help them get there.
There are plenty of examples of businesses using a CRM solution to carry out a successful CRM project. But first, you need to have a concrete understanding of exactly what a CRM project is. The below article should help.
What is a CRM project?
What industries employ them?
As the benefits that can be derived from using a CRM are many, the industries that launch CRM projects are similarly varied. This includes real estate firms, insurance providers, ecommerce platforms, financial institutions, and more.
Where real estate is concerned, the likes of Freshsales and HubSpot are seen as two of the leading players when it comes to launching a successful CRM project. For instance Freshsales comes with a customizable interface that allows agents to create custom fields for storing data like square footage or density and average cost of a neighborhood. This means that it is easier to personalize your offering depending on customer needs or the market. CRMs can also support property managers, underwriters, lenders, and investors in the real estate space.
With regard to the insurance sector, CRMs can be great for boosting collaboration in an industry where teamwork is essential to boosting productivity and driving revenues. Salesforce is especially good here, enabling insurance providers to digitalize and collate customer records - something that is especially useful if insurers have a large, diverse customer base. Other great tools for CRM projects in this field include Monday.com Sales CRM and Pipedrive.
Any industry that may benefit from improving the connection between business and customer is also likely to launch a CRM project. A retailer, for example, may welcome thousands of individuals through its doors every day but without the right digital tool, any data stemming from these interactions is useless. A CRM can deliver the right analysis and reporting to turn data into insights. This means any project can benefit from the sense of direction that comes from verificable information. Projects aren’t launched on a hunch; they’re backed by data.
Who's involved?
Regardless of your specific industry, there are likely to be a few particular departments or personnel that are going to find your CRM most useful. In addition to your sales and marketing teams, this includes customer service, human resources, and supply chain teams. Of course, you could make your CRM available to all your employees but most subscriptions for cloud CRM software are charged on a per user basis, so it’s unlikely that you’ll want to make your solution available to individuals if they don’t need it.
Sales teams may find that CRMs are great for boosting productivity and managing leads, while marketing departments are likely to find that CRMs can help with customer segmentation and aligning output with sales. For customer service teams, CRM projects are likely to focus on delivering personalised communication, as well as upselling or cross-selling opportunities. HR teams, meanwhile, may find CRMs hugely useful for their latest recruitment project. CRMs can improve the applicant search and onboarding processes, while supply chain teams will appreciate the way CRM software can enhance demand planning and order management.
What are your goals?
Before you launch your CRM project, it’s essential that you know what it is you want to achieve and for that, you need clearly defined goals. Once these have been outlined, businesses can start looking at the various CRM products on the market, comparing features to see which one best suits their aims. Researching different CRMs, from open-source CRMs to small business CRMs, can take a fair deal of time and isn’t the sort of thing you should rush. And don’t forget to sign up for any free trials that are available so you can gain some direct experience of using a CRM before you commit financially.
Some common CRM goals include the creation of a 360-degree view of customer data, improved sales efficiency, or smarter reporting. In addition, goals can be more specific, such as an aim to sell, say, 100,000 units of a new product or achieve so many views across a social media platform. Again, the specifics of your goal are not as important as having clarity before you start your project. If you have this, your objectives should be pretty clear anyway.
Successful implementation
Once you’ve outlined the objective of your CRM project, you’ll then need to carefully consider how your CRM will help you achieve it. Successful implementation of a CRM depends on checking that your employees have the skills to get the most from the solution. If not, you may want to try a more intuitive CRM or invest in some additional training to ensure that any CRM project is implemented in an optimal fashion.
The successful implementation of a CRM project is also likely to depend on how the solution integrates with other business tools. Some CRMs, like Zoho, for example, offer a wide range of seamless integrations. The implementation of a CRM project is sure to depend on other tools, so it’s essential that a good range of integrations is provided.
And you won’t really be sure if your CRM project is going well unless you monitor performance. Collect data about sales, productivity, conversion rates, and other metrics and feed them back into your CRM. This will give you verifiable evidence about your software so you can say with certainty whether your CRM project is a success or not.
