All too often, CRM implementation gets de-railed because the scope of the project grows. This is hardly surprising, given the wealth of capability offered by a platform like Microsoft Dynamics 365.
However, for your CRM implementation to be a success, it’s absolutely critical to ensure your project does not get side-tracked. You need to keep control of the launch date, features and capabilities and, perhaps most importantly, budget. That means properly scoping your CRM implementation from the outset.
With more than 20 years’ experience in CRM implementation, we can guide you every step of the way. We appreciate that scoping a CRM implementation can be daunting but in this article, we provide some clear guidance to help you understand what’s involved.
Decide which areas of your business will be impacted by your CRM solution
It’s a question of range, depth and detail.
- Do you need to include every department or just one team ie sales, service or marketing?
- Do you need to consider all functional areas of the business, or just a few?
- What depth of features and functionality do you need from the outset, or can your CRM implementation be undertaken in staged phases?
Understand the business pains
It’s important to be clear about what issues led you to review your CRM requirements in the first place. This understanding will give your CRM implementation the focus and momentum it needs.
- Appoint champions in relevant departments and enlist their support to document what’s not working across different business functions. It’s a good idea to agree these issues at end user and director level.
- These ‘pains’ will enable you to define your company-wide goal for implementing CRM and the ultimate benefits you are trying to realise.
- Keep these ‘pains’ central to your CRM implementation by making them visible to team members. These reminders will help to ensure everyone can see the benefit in the programme, so that it remains a priority when other business issues arise.
View our Scoping Assessment which gives you important questions to ask your teams when defining what needs to be achieved from your CRM implementation.
Look to the future
As your CRM implementation progresses you should expect to uncover new ‘pains’ which Microsoft Dynamics 365 can solve. This is just part and parcel of the process. We always advise customers to stay flexible. It may be possible to bring some unplanned feature into scope, but set parameters to minimise any impact on your timescales and budget.
Factor in the future development of your CRM from the outset by setting expectations that the initial implementation is just the beginning.
As your CRM champions to share their processes and KPIs. Ask for visionary input – what would the processes look like in an ‘ideal world’ and how would this impact their KPIs? This will help you understand the benefit of bringing additional features into scope for the initial implementation vs recording the requirement for a future phase.
Consider your current infrastructure, processes and company-wide performance indicators and how they are likely to change in future.
Remember that CRM is an evolutionary process
Your CRM solution should be seen as something which grows and evolves as your organisation changes, not something you implement once and forget about. Getting a new CRM solution launched and fully utilised is never easy. However, once it is in place and your teams start to see the benefits, it’s much easier to enlist the support you need to build on the functionality and improve the capability.
To find out more about our proven, trusted approach to CRM implementation, please get in touch on 01924 507280.
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