In this episode of CRM Talk, hosts Steve Chipman and Sam Biardo discuss how to prepare an organization for CRM success before implementing a new system. They emphasize the importance of executive sponsorship, precise requirements, and organizational alignment to avoid costly surprises.
Steve introduces a CRM readiness assessment tool generated with Bolt.new, a platform that allows marketers to build engaging apps quickly, which inspired the episode’s readiness statements.
The hosts explore ten statements to assess CRM readiness. Key points include the need for a unified vision across departments, as CRM initiatives often start in one area, like sales or marketing, leading to misaligned goals.
They stress the importance of identifying specific customer data needs and determining a single source of truth between systems like CRM and ERP. Leadership involvement is critical for accountability and funding, yet many companies underestimate implementation and ongoing costs, including add-ons that complicate projects.
They also highlight the importance of detailed, prioritized requirements from key users, not just vague feature lists, and involving all departments to define goals. Senior leadership must see CRM as a long-term strategic tool, with a shared understanding of success metrics like reduced churn or increased cross-sell.
Well-documented sales and marketing processes accelerate projects, while a change management plan, including engaging influential end-users as cheerleaders, fosters adoption.
Transcript
STEVE: Welcome to CRM Talk, the show that brings you the latest in CRM and CRM related news and information. This is Steve Chipman along with my co-host Sam Biardo. And in this episode, we are going to discuss how to prepare your organization for CRM success before you start implementing a new system. And as you may know, success hinges on a number of different things including executive sponsorship, having clearly defined requirements, and having your organization aligned on the new initiative. If you don’t do all these things, you might end up with some surprises that cost you money. So what we’re going to do today is go through a few statements and just talk about these statements. And these are actually derived from a tool that I created using, Sam have you heard of Bolt.new by the way?
SAM: No, not yet. I’m sure I’m sure I am today.
STEVE: So Bolt.new, so let me take a step back. If you are a marketer listening to this podcast, one of the best things you can do, especially in B2B marketing, is to create tools for your website and those provide engagement and they can create conversion actions. So what we did was that we took some of the information we’re going to talk about today and I created an app in an app called Bolt.new, which is one of the new generation of apps where you can just prompt it to build an app for you. And it does take a few iterations, but you basically tell it what you want on the screen and it builds out this app for you. And then you can deploy it to a site called Netlify, which is a hosting site and then you can put your own sub domain on any pages you create. Anyway, it’s a great thing. If you’re a marketer, try to create an app on Bolt.new and and see how it goes. But that’s where that’s where these questions came from. And as we go through these or I should say statements, as we go through these today, we’re going to talk about each one and help you decide whether you strongly agree with it, you guys are there, or whether you’ve got some work to do. So and Sam and I are going to go through each of these objectives and talk about them to put a little flavor on on what they mean. So how’s that sound Sam?
SAM: Sounds like a plan.
STEVE: Plan. Okay. All right, so the first, the first statement, the preparedness or readiness statement is that our organization has a clearly defined vision and a CRM strategy aligned to achieve it. So Sam, do you want to talk a little bit about your vision of visions?
SAM: Well, the challenge we see is that it’s typically CRM is typically kicked off by one department, not by the whole world. So it’s either marketing driven or it’s sales driven. Sometimes it’s driven by the whole organization, but most of the time it’s not. And what we end up seeing is we end up seeing multiple visions. We have a marketer’s view of what they want, and we have an operations view of what they want, you have a sales view of what they want. And a lot of times they’re not exactly aligned. And so it’s, I know it’s real important for those people even before they go out and look for CRMs to sort of align on their vision. But if it’s being driven by one group or one department, that vision is going to be bent towards that group or department.
STEVE: And so what’s the best way to take these disparate visions and mold them into a single vision?
SAM: Well, I think it depends where you’re at in the maturity level, right, as a company. If your company is just starting out, you know, then you’re probably not going to be able to get a solid vision, but that’s okay because as your as a smaller startup companies, those visions tend to change over as as they’re developing product or as they’re growing as an organization. If it’s a large mature organization, they should have strategic goals and plans and they take the vision directly out of that.
STEVE: Yep, that makes makes complete sense. Okay, so the next statement is, we have identified the specific customer data required to support and enhance our CRM strategy. So what are your thoughts on that one?
SAM: Yeah, well, it that’s a hard job, is all I’m going to say. You know, typically we see the integrate, you know, first, obviously you got to build the data, but then you have to understand when you’re using the data, how fresh does that data have to be. And I divide the world up into three categories. I don’t need really fresh data, so it’s everything’s done via batch. Or the other extreme is I want everything real time, which requires a lot more effort and a lot more cost in the integration. And then there’s sort of a an immediate an intermediate situation which I call just in time. And just in time works like you batch load every night, but as you’re pulling up a record, you refresh the data for that one record. So people are always seeing the most accurate data, but if you run a report, you may not have looked, you may not have refreshed all that data, so you you get an approximation, which is the downside of that approach.
STEVE: And then in terms of the single source of truth concept, so if you have an ERP system and not much of a CRM system and you’re implementing a new CRM system, let’s say you’re a manufacturer, what should become the single source of truth? So in some cases, obviously for for billing information that’s got to be ERP. But what what do you do when you’ve got two separate data silos that really have to be two separate systems and how do you resolve what the source of truth is?
SAM: Well, the source of truth sometimes changes based on the role of the object you’re looking at. So if I have a an account, but the account is not a customer yet, I might have that single source of truth be the CRM. But the moment they buy from me, I’d probably make the single source of truth the ERP or the accounting system. And I’ve seen companies where they they don’t want to pick a single source of truth. So they say, well, if someone makes a change in the CRM, move it to the ERP and if someone makes a change in the ERP, move it to the CRM. But the reality that really doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work because typically the people who are doing the ERP, the billing, work with different contacts than the sales people do in the organization. So a lot of times there’s a disconnect there between the two. Secondly, you certainly don’t want a salesperson changing an address by mistake and then screwing up a shipment. So and and we all know, although a lot of people won’t admit it, is that the the people running the accounting and operations are a little more rule conscious than sales people in general and and they don’t let the data, they don’t let their data get corrupted unless they triple check it where it’s easy for a salesperson just to overwrite an address. We’ve seen that a lot. We had one situation where someone didn’t understand how to search and he kept typing it in the name field and changing the name of every record. And we found it out by doing a de-duplication test and then we had to forensically go back and figure out who were the real people in the system and maybe this guy needs some training.
STEVE: Right, right. And that’s why you have the concept of history fields when they change, you always have the previous value because as you say, sales people aren’t strangers to making those types of modifications by mistake. So the next one is our leadership team, including the C suite is actively involved in driving accountability, fostering communication, approving funding and aligning the organization to support the CRM strategy. And you and I both know that when someone comes to a company like Technology Advisors about a new CRM system, this may not be the case.
SAM: Yeah, when we have a big big project, we like to get the, what I would call the the the change team or the the executive team together for regular budget and scope review meetings. And we do that because we want to have, we don’t want to have a discussion about scope with non-decision makers. So that’s a real common thing for us to do is to try to put together a management team, executive team, whatever you want to call it that gets involved. They don’t have to be involved in the day-to-day decisions, in fact they probably shouldn’t, but they should be involved in the money and budget and timing decisions.
STEVE: Absolutely. Okay, the next one which ties into the previous one, the statement is, and this is four of 10, so we’re getting through them pretty quickly, sufficient funding has been allocated for CRM licenses and implementation. And one of the things that I don’t think enough companies do, we get a lot of use of our CRM calculator which provides all these different potential CRM expenses, gives you a time horizon and lets you add up everything, but I’m pretty sure that a lot of organizations they think about license costs, they maybe think a little bit about implementation costs, but I don’t know if they really create a long-term budget for a for a CRM system. Is that what you find? Do people under underestimate what you need to invest to get a really good working system?
SAM: I think there’s a couple problems. One is expectation. So we’ll see small companies go to a website for a vendor and see that their product is $100 a month. And they will literally budget $1,200 for every user without understanding there’s an implementation fee. Mid-tier companies get that there’s an implementation fee, but they don’t necessarily budget correctly. There’s a lot of companies talking about, you know, oh, we’ve just turn this on, we’re we’re turnkey, we’re easy to modify, you don’t need a partner, you can do it themselves, and the reality is is that that’s not true.
STEVE: And even if you do do it yourself, that that’s still a cost. It’s just an internal cost. And if you outsource the implementation and you don’t want to outsource ongoing admin, that’s a cost. You’ve got to take an FTE and allocate some or all of their time to administering the system. So there are all these little costs. Now, of course you don’t want to drive yourself crazy adding up every little possible cost, but you don’t want to miss some of the big ones either.
SAM: Right. And and the the big costs are really, the initial implementation cost, which is depending on how many people in the organization, because the the cost per user is pretty constant for the first 40 or 50 users and then the cost per user starts to drop the bigger the implementation. Um, and the other big driver for cost is the number of operational units that you’re building the CRM across, right? Because each one will have its own set of requirements and there possibly its own integrations. But I tell customers to expect, you know, the the first year cost will probably be equal to what you’re paying in the software. But then you have to think about ongoing cost, whether you do that yourself, because your business model doesn’t just freeze in time for the next five years, it changes, and you need to apply those changes to your sales and marketing system. In the last five years, marketing approaches have changed a couple different times, right, on what your how you approach the market. And so you need to budget in some time for that and and typically we see that to be about 20% of the initial implementation is probably a good budget. Or if you want to think about it in hours, I would take the hours of the initial implementation and take 20% of those and think about that that’s going to be either going to the implementation partner or internal people. And if it’s going to internal people, you might want to add another 20% to that because they’re not use they’re not doing implementations day after day after day after day, so they’re not as fluent in how to approach a problem.
STEVE: Yep, and then the other variable without going into too many too many tangents are add-on products. So sometimes there are certain things that you want, you expect from the CRM system which may not be native to the system. And a lot of these CRM vendors have large ecosystems of third parties. So depending on your requirements, you might have some license costs on top of just the vendor’s licenses. Not necessarily, but in some cases you might have an extra per user per month, maybe not for all your users because you might have an add-on product that only 10 of 50 users need, but in some cases you might have an add-on that everybody needs.
SAM: Yeah, and the challenge with add-ons is every new, every additional add-on you bring into the system increases the overall risk and complexity of the implementation. So we had a situation recently where this company had so many add-ons that when we were we were trying to build out an integration, we couldn’t figure out, we were getting errors caused because the add-ons actually changed the meaning of the internal fields and how they were organized and there was zero documentation. So we we knew that we’d have an exhaustive process of trying to figure out how to complete this integration without getting this data error. We were using some pretty sophisticated tools and after spending possibly 100 hours of debugging, we walked away because our answer was you really need to get control of all these third party add-ons that you put in before we can solve your integration problem where you’re going to have to take a simpler integration approach. And it was literally because they had eight or nine different add-on products doing different things and all competing against one another for different components of the system.
STEVE: So that really compounded the cost of the add-ons, not just the license price but all the all the problems they caused. That’s that’s hopefully that’s an edge case that won’t happen to most people, but these things happen.
SAM: Well, we tried not to work with that CRM and ERP system. There was a combination of CRM ERPs. So we’re probably not going to touch those again if they have add-ons.
STEVE: Now that you know what they are.
SAM: Yeah.
STEVE: Okay, the next one number five is input and requirements have been collected from the key business users. Now this is an interesting one because a lot of times we’ll ask the question when we do our CRM selection services, we’ll say, what have you guys done for CRM requirements? And they’ll come back and they’ll say, oh, you know, we we went through this big session last year and we we gathered all the requirements and we look at the requirements and it’s really just a list of features. So what you really need is pretty detailed and prioritized requirements, not just a a short checklist, but do you see the same thing where people have different perceptions of what requirements really are?
SAM: Oh yeah, requirements are all over the place. I mean and and requirements will be like one set of things that are really hard to do. you know, like calculate calculate international taxes on all purchases bigger than 100,000.
STEVE: Exactly. And that’s where the prioritization comes into play.
SAM: Right. And that’s probably like, you know, 30, 40 use cases right there, you know? Exactly. Yeah, we send people don’t give detailed requirements. They they think they are, but they’re really not. They they provide epics more than anything else. You know, they’ll say we need forecasting.
STEVE: Yeah, it’s almost it’s almost the what used to be the RFP level stuff.
SAM: Right. We want a we want a quote on a CRM system and it must have forecasting how much. Right. I’m like, what kind of forecasting? You know, there’s so many different ways to forecast.
STEVE: What do you sell? How do you sell it? Who do you sell it to? Yeah.
SAM: Yeah, the the the and I do still do a lot of RFIs and RFPs, but the reality is no one sees an RFP that says we don’t do it anymore. Because pretty much all of them do almost everything and everything you everything everyone asks for is usually so vague that they can check that box off and say included, whether it really is or not. And that’s because they’re providing requirements at an epic level as opposed to talking about a detailed level.
STEVE: So people still send out RFPs?
SAM: Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen more.
STEVE: I haven’t seen one for a while, I was curious.
SAM: Yeah. So, but again, they’re, if I was to, if I was a customer, I might send out an RFI, but it would be a lot more detailed and it more it may be more like, here is my customer onboarding process, show me how that works in your CRM. This is how this is our standard sales process for this class of products, show me how that would look in your CRM. We need, you know, forecasting for opportunities for three months and six months by product, you know, get really specific and then ask them to show it to you. That’s probably the best way of of evaluating a CRM these days.
STEVE: For sure. All right, now that we’re halfway through the list, I’m going to give a little plug and that is if you want to use the tool that’s behind these statements, go to crmswitch.com and above the fold on the homepage, there’s a button to go to this, we’re calling it the CRM requirements questionnaire. So there’s a button there and you can you can go through this on your own and you can rate how strong you how how strongly or un-strongly you agree with each one and at the end it’ll give you a readiness score and you can use that as a general guide as to whether you’re ready to jump into spending a lot of money on a new CRM system. So number six is each department, and this some of these have overlap, we’ve talked about this one a little bit already, but each department has outlined specific goals and expected outcomes for the CRM system. And I think that really comes down to making sure you’re involving all the departments. A lot of times someone will come to us and they’ll say, well, sales needs this and marketing needs this. And then we’ll say, well, let’s talk about XRM, are there any extended pieces of functionality you need for other departments for for shipping, for finance, for operations? And once you start asking those questions, people say, well, you know, we really haven’t talked too much to to customer ops yet. And so we say, well, let’s let’s find out if there’s a need there. So I think that part of the answer to that question is making sure you involve as many departments as possible. Some may not naturally fit into a CRM system, but it’s better to start from a a wider scope of departmental involvement and narrow it than it is to completely leave people out of the process.
SAM: Right. And and frankly, many business processes are no longer siloed within a department, they’re multi-department. And so you you need to when you document those business processes, you need to get signed off on every every department that’s involved.
STEVE: The next one is, and this is a broader vision, senior senior leadership recognizes CRM as essential for achieving future objectives. So as opposed to just seeing this as a technology that’s going to solve some short term issue term issues, does senior leadership, are they tying this into where they want the company to be three, five years down the line? is is really the gist of this one.
SAM: And I actually, I actually think that when I talk to senior leadership, they’re usually bought in for for CRM to be not a silo but a multi-functional solution where in the past it was just a sales or marketing component. It was not multi-functional. But I think in the last five years that that changes happened and they look at it as not only a multi a multi-department or multi-functional tool, but they also see it as a tool that can provide them information to manage the company a lot better.
STEVE: And also take them to a level of growth. So if you’re a $100 million company today and you want to be a $500 million company in three years, is the CRM going to help support that? Right. So the next one is there is a shared understanding across the organization of what success with CRM looks like. And that’s an interesting metric. Success is a little bit fuzzy, but I think partly it’s in terms of thinking about what success means and that might be achieving OKRs, that might be having some some specific financial targets that you’re aiming for and determining whether CRM has helped you succeed in those targets. Now obviously CRM is not going to do everything for you, but you want to make sure that CRM is doing its part in in achieving some of those those key objectives.
SAM: When we implement a project, that’s probably the first question we ask. We we have we do executive meetings and we ask them what what has to happen for this project to be successful? What is the outcome that you’re looking for? And it’d be it’d be amazed that sometimes that isn’t what you thought it would have been when you went into the project or before you asked that question. And so it becomes critical and it also focuses the executive to think about, yeah, what is success? Because a lot of times they don’t, they they look at it as we need to implement a CRM.
STEVE: Right. And success success might be over a two-year period, we reduced customer churn from 10% to 3%. That might be a success metric.
SAM: We we’ve we’ve increased our cross sell by 20%.
STEVE: Right. Okay, this is this is a fun one. Number nine, our sales and marketing teams have established repeatable, well-documented, measurable processes. Now,
SAM: Well, you have the question mark after that, which describes describes that. I don’t need to comment anymore than the question mark.
STEVE: Yeah. Yeah, so if so if you’re a marketer, marketing, you know, I will give marketers a break because the marketing world changes so rapidly that you’re almost reacting to how you need to create demand more than you’re you can’t follow the same playbook this year that you followed five years ago or even more recently. So things are changing so fast in the marketing world, but at least you want to make sure that you’ve got whatever your current process is, your current marketing campaigns, some of the vertical markets you’re going after, you want to make sure that at least you’ve got that documented and you’ve got certain targets. If you’re going to sell into a vertical, you want to make sure that you are putting together all the right assets, that you are, you have certain targets for how many new customers you want within that vertical. Even if, you know, even if the number is going to be difficult to achieve, at least you have something on paper. So that’s marketing. As far as sales goes, that that’s that’s a much tougher one. Um, sales targets tend to meander that also they they change in reaction to market conditions, they change in reaction to whether new competitors have entered the market. A lot of a lot of variables in that question.
SAM: Yeah, I will just say that it’s the number one thing that slows down a project. So if the company knows their processes and they’re well-founded, the serum projects go rather quickly, they stay on schedule. But when we see a project slow down, it’s because they have to come up with a marketing process or a sales process or a customer onboarding process. And sitting in a workshop that we’re running is the first time they thought about it. And so all of a sudden your project has an immediate pause while they go out and figure out what the missing processes should be.
STEVE: Yeah, and what and what you’re saying, so a company like Technology Advisors, I think there’s a tendency to look at a company like yours as a CRM, a tech technology implementation company, but that’s that’s just a part of it. Really, it’s going in there and making sure that you get everybody aligned, you bring up things as you just mentioned that people haven’t even thought about. That’s that’s the real job of a CRM implementation company, not just, you know, pulling some levers and turning some dials.
SAM: Right, it’s we know what questions to ask. Is what it gets down to and we have a process around asking those questions. And if you you can follow the process and everything will go well or you can, you know, fight against the riptide and let the project take longer and potentially drown.
STEVE: So I think you’re saying don’t question you.
SAM: No, you can question us, but it works better if you don’t. Feel free.
STEVE: Okay, so the last one is number 10, we have a, this is a this is a pretty broad one. We have a change management plan to address resistance to change and foster adoption at all levels. So let me talk about that one from the perspective of going back earlier in the process, which is getting people involved in the early on in the process so they have pride of ownership because a lot of times if you just foist a CRM system on a bunch of users, they’re going to be naturally resistant to the change. So part of my part of my answer to that question if we look at it as a as a question is, you know, how do you get more people involved and make them bought in before, you know, the login screen lands on their desktop.
SAM: Yeah, that that’s a key question. I’m trying to find the name of a book, Steve, that I think everyone should read because it is on transition and I can never remember the name, but I have it saved in my, we can always put it I’ve got to find out to say we can always drop it in the show notes. We’ll drop in the show. Oh, here it’s called managing, the the book is actually called managing transition, very simple. Oh, okay. And and one it has techniques for how to do change management, but also how to do user experience management, how to get your users to use a product. And they have some techniques in there that I love. And we’ve been using them for a few years. This book’s probably eight years old. We’ve been using it for the last five or six years on bigger projects. And I frankly, they work. And the the the sauce is secret. I mean it’s not the sorry, the secret sauce is not really secret. It it’s really about making sure that that the you have a group of end users who may not be in the decision process at all, who can get, who have, are the social people in the organizations, the people who speak out. And you make sure you include them in every step of the process so that their comments are heard and they will then promote it for you within the organization.
STEVE: So they’re they’re a level of cheerleader.
SAM: They become cheerleaders, right. They’re not part of the executive team, they’re not probably part of the decision-making team, but these are the people that everyone goes to when they have a problem in the organization. And they’re therefore the social people of the organization. If you win their hearts and minds, they will be your cheerleaders across the whole organization.
STEVE: Yeah, that that sounds like one of those evergreen books. It’ll probably still be relevant in 20 years. To the AIs. The the AIs will be studying.
SAM: Yeah, you’ll have the AI do it for you.
STEVE: All right, well with that, and again, if you want to go through this exercise in a in a tool, go to crmswitch.com and click on CRM, I said it wrong last time, it’s CRM readiness calculator. There’s a button on the homepage. You can now that you’ve listened to us talk about this, so you can go through and decide how strong you agree with each of those readiness statements and then make a good choice as to how ready you are. Now, ultimately what this is going to do is just going to make you more ready because you realize what your gaps are and you can address those gaps and the ultimately you’ll be more successful with your CRM system if you’re if you’re more prepared organizationally with all the things we’ve talked about. So hopefully that was helpful. And Sam, thanks a bunch for your for your input today.
SAM: Steve, always fun.