Why Your CRM Strategy Should Dictate Your Data Strategy (Video)

Diolachan Consulting founder Edward Garry explains why CRM strategy comes first in this clip from CRM evolution 2018.

Edward Garry: Your CRM strategy has to really dictate what your data strategy. You have to be willing to say, "This is not what part of what we're trying to do with this tool." And that comes from the very beginning. That comes from your RFP. That comes from the beginning of your process. You define your mission and what the system's going to be. It's gonna be one, two and three. It's not gonna be one through 10 because if it starts together into that piece, you're going to really struggle with being able to deliver on the promise of what your charter is, what you're supposed to do.

I'm looking at a particular company as an example. There are financial services companies, B2B companies, and what are the things that they need for their salespeople to be effective? Well, they got kind of lost on their agenda. They were like, "We need revenue. We need account plans, and we need plan issues and requests. We need all of our marketing, and every single communication we send out to the customer to be in the CRM system. We need every single client survey that we've sent out to them."

I thought to myself, does the average salesperson really want to have all of that information? They might want it on an individual cases when they have to dig down deeper into something, but there are other tools that you'd be able to get that information from. It doesn't have to be in the CRM tool. What you're missing and the things that we really need to focus on, is every single client interaction from a sales meeting and a business development perspective, needs to be in the CRM tool.

The CRM tool that we were using, or they were deploying at that company, actually did not connect very well with Outlook, so they were missing about 60-80% of all of the client's interactions that were taking place. So, that needed to be fixed. The call reports. We have different divisions of the company on different CRM platforms, I'm sure many of you have multiple instances of the CRM tool within the organization, especially if you're a larger organization. The challenge that we saw is that a very important call report was sitting in one side of the organization where it was billing really relevant to somebody else that was interacting with that customer today, and they didn't have that information. Whether that was a positive or a negative situation, depends on what was contained. Was it contained in the call report? But the goal is to be able to have everybody to be able to understand what's happening with that customer.

Lead management was a key piece. Most CRM systems have this. They have the tools to be able to do that. But I think the real pain point comes from both the business and the technology is to be able to decide how they score those leads, how they route those leads, how they deliver those leads. And really that's going to add more pipeline, and your ability to be able to build your business, and grow your business, maybe faster than those client surveys might.

And then finally, you know, while you’re building things, to watch with coming in the front door, you do have to keep an eye on what's walking out the back door from where you have customer issues. That's where they start to tie in things like, "Oh, what we need to have all of the client issues, and all of the revenue that's at risk here. What are the reasons why this is at risk? Why are we experiencing this customer looking at our competitors, and they've been a customer with us for 10 years. And I understand that, but it doesn't always have to be all in one system, because you can do individual research and look at individual situations to be able to come up with the data.

But the day-to-day aspects of your CRM are about building business development, watching what's going out the back door, managing client interactions, and understanding that when you have those interactions, what is the result of those interactions? What did the customer tell you that they need?

 

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