Before you dive headlong into your CRM project, it’s essential to clearly define your expectations. The goal is to draft a needs statement for the sales team that can be incorporated into the project specifications.
Start by looking at your business strategy over the short, medium and long term. It’s crucial to keep these elements in mind when you go on to define your requirements for managing sales activity, key sales and marketing indicators, sales force management, and more (to help you, you can also download our checklist for B2B CRM projects). Depending on the future direction of your department, you may decide it makes sense to add certain features.
When you prepare this document to organize sales department requirements, be sure to capture any information from other departments that you may also need. Identify these in detail, in the way they should appear in the CRM.
Don’t forget to specify the various usage restrictions you want to put in place. What information should be accessible to sales reps? Sales managers? Senior management? Another key point: you also need to plan ahead for the alert workflows to be configured (or not) in the future CRM.
Finally, keep in mind that a CRM is a long‑term, forward‑looking project. This new software will become part of your day‑to‑day operations for many years. Try to anticipate major changes in your company, particularly in sales management. This will save you major headaches if, for instance, five years from now you decide to add multi‑currency support and your CRM doesn’t handle it…
To learn more and take full advantage of our expert advice, as well as a template to help you draft your needs statement, we invite you to explore our 2018 CRM B2B Guide.
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