THE CRM-HOUSE
(By courtesy of Martin Brendel)

Operational advantages for each department – announcing and advertising the project in the company

Central address management always forms the foundation for successful customer relationships. With the contact management that is based on this, a company can transform from the employee - centric forms often seen today to a customer - centric approach. Day-to-day tasks that are labor - intensive and time - consuming can be automated at the touch of a but ton in future. Opportunity management and sales methods now enable targeted, planned and coordinated deals to be achieved with the inclusion of offer and order management. Complex economic assets are managed centrally as objects with deployment repor ts. Information from Service, Support and Ticketing will be available to employees in future. Almost no other group of employees is so familiar with customer needs. Successful marketing activities and campaigns also directly affect a company’s success.

Internal specification and prioritizing of requirements

The internal specif ications are an initial list of functional requirements of the divisions in the company.

For this, all the company divisions must be consulted without defining no-go‘s in advance. Detailed information is not yet required in this step.

All requirements relating to functional properties are prioritized individually and internally by the various divisions. Different priorities are later given a different weighting. All A returns are automatically implemented as number 1 etc. A table view makes the information clearer, and if necessary can be supplemented by detailed text explanations.

If required, process investigations, prioritizing and any changes to processes are carried out first . System support for the individual departments is often not needed here.

A requirements profile for collecting and evaluating offers is then drawn up on the basis of this.

Standardised questionnaire

Collecting offers

The information (requirements profile) is then sent to a few selected providers. Criteria for selection are usually:

Trade fair meeting conducted beforehand with brief presentation

Suitability of provider from technical perspective

Reference installations

Industry suitability

It is impor tant for the providers to f ill out a predefined list (requirements profile = internal specification for example as .xls) , and also be able to enter their own explanations. This permits well-organized, fast processing/comparison on the one hand and also enables the company to “learn from” the providers.

Offer comparison and provider selection

The returned information is compared and evaluated. The most important factors here are the individual evaluation of:

Functional requirements/evaluation criteria

User acceptance

Functional scope/process support

Data connection

System integration

Technical requirements

Front - end and back- end connection

Mobile working

Off line/online dif ference

Web clients Architecture evaluation

Quantity structures Performance

Company view

Project risk

Project duration Guarantees

Experience

Industry exper tise

CRM consulting expertise

Other service of ferings

The final result is an overview of max. 4 - 6 possible suppliers and systems. These are invited to come to the company to give a presentation.

Round of presentations

It is impor tant/helpful to draw up a schedule/guideline for how the presentations are to be held. The rules for evaluation and ranking are clarified jointly in the company (how will evaluation be carried out?) . This also means that the same par ticipants from the company must always attend the presentations.

The presentations are usually held on two consecutive days. At the end of the second day, a final ranking of the providers is essential. This enables the company to concentrate on one focused provider for a test installation and a workshop for drawing up the per formance specification.

Test installation and workshop with detailed and binding performance specification

The workshops should be at tended by people

who are familiar with the requirements relating to a CRM system,

are qualified in sales,

have knowledge of the business processes and sales processes,

can draw up alternatives to the aforementioned points, and

are able to make decisions.

These employees should come from different areas of the company, both business areas/fields and work units of the company.

The following are required, for example:

Sales (internal, field, processing)

Marketing

Various management levels

Strategic planning depar tments

IT/organization

Project manager etc.

To ensure the workshop is successful, a certain amount of preparation is required in the company.

Every participant should know and be able to define the work processes in his or her department/division. It is also necessary to check the extent to which these processes af fect other depar tments. Processes should also be carefully considered and questioned.

What are the processes today and how could these be made more efficient?

Are individual positions in the process still relevant today?

In the workshop, each par ticipant should have access (digital/printed) to document s that explain the current processes. Personal tools such as Word files (e.g. revised offers, correspondence etc.), Excel tables (e.g. reports, costings, etc .), and other lists and files are extremely important.

On the basis of the per formance specification that is drawn up, a final offer is made with fixed prices and deadlines, and the CRM solution is modified/configured for later implementation.