Audaxium Blog

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Throughout 2011 Audaxium has been working with more and more companies and we’ve seen some interesting situations. In working on NetSuite fixups, and implementing Pardot with customers with various CRM systems, both NetSuite and Salesforce, we’ve noticed companies getting into trouble in systematic ways.  Often, problems happen when the data in the system doesn’t match what’s happening in real life.

Life is complicated.  People like simplicity.  And getting people to use CRM properly can be challenging depending on your organization.  So why not just keep things simple? Doesn’t KISS apply?

Here are some examples of somewhat common decisions that cause problems later.

Custom Field for Sales Rep

The client decided, that, in order to not let sales reps think they “Own” accounts, to not put the rep in the default Sales Rep Field.  Instead they used a custom field for Sales Rep and left the main field blank.  Result?  Difficulty in using standard reports.  Difficulty in getting notifications to Reps.  Difficulty in integrating with marketing campaigns.

Duplicate Contacts on Customers

The client decided that, to make it easier on the tech support team, if a person called in to discuss an issue at a certain customer location, (which they were tracking as sub-customers), they would enter a NEW contact on that company record, with the same name, email address and phone number.  Result?  Massive contact duplication in the database, no single source of the truth with regards to communication and emails.

Manual Prices on Items

To make it “easy” on order entry, the client decided to put only a few items in the item master, and overwrite the description and price.  Result?  No ability to report on the delivery and fulfillment of particular types of services.

The above are just a couple of examples of compromises made that lead to problems later. But anecdotes are just that, there are, to my mind, 3 main reasons why you should truly map what’s going on in your business in your CRM or ERP system.

3 Reasons Why Reality is Important

Information Accuracy

There is a balance between segmenting your data for reporting purposes, and capturing every last detail. What level of accuracy do you need to both operate, and make decisions?

Take a company that sells chickens and eggs. You could weigh and measure every egg you sell, sell them by grade, sell eggs separate from chickens, or sell 1 item called “Chicken and by-products”.  In this case, the reality is that the customer buys eggs by grade, either by the flat or by the dozen.

To take an example closer to home, what about our contacts example above?  There is only one person with a particular name, email address and phone number. There should be only one contact, but that contact should be attached to multiple companies as most CRM systems allow.

Easy to Train Multiple Teams

Sometimes by oversimplifying, you’ll need to be constantly explaining how fields are to be used and how to look up certain information.  Because most people in your company will understand how you do business, it’s easier to have them understand the system if it matches real life processes.  The sales team, support team, and services teams need to think of each other when considering how data gets entered.  There’s nothing like hearing things like; “the main contact field is whoever is the decision maker, until they are closing, then it’s the buyer, until they’re a new customer, then it’s the project lead, until they renew, then it’s whoever cares about the renewal”

Your CRM system should enable your business process, not be a workaround for it.  If your processes are too hard for your team to enter into a system, consider changing your processes.

Integration with Other systems

We’re in a world of integrated applications, and when a company writes an integration with another app they make certain assumptions of how you’ll use it.  You’ll need to think long and hard about taking default functionality and using it for another purpose.  Just why are you using a custom field when there’s a similar default field available?  By getting creative with core fields, you’ll risk giving yourself more work down the road when it comes to integration. Sometimes that work can be worth the extra effort, but make sure it’s necessary.

Challenges

Often, customers do understand the above, so why do mistakes get made?  Here are some common reasons.

No system is Perfect

Sometimes they can’t represent the reality of your business because they lack the functionality. Until recently, a good example was NetSuite’s multi-currency function.  You couldn’t create transactions in multiple currencies to the same customer.  This caused un-wanted duplication of records and work-arounds needed to be found.  Fortunately this is no longer an issue. When evaluating systems, ask your implementation partner just what the ramifications of a certain functional limitation are.

Clicks and Keystrokes

Often, when selecting systems, the client, and the end user, will focus on how “easy” things look and feel on some standard screens. If they have to fill in two more fields, or wait 5 more seconds for a screen to load, they’ll be frustrated and complain about productivity.  It doesn’t matter than those 2 fields save their co-worker 10 minutes.  It won’t matter that they can see information they’ve never had access to on that new screen.

Saving someone a few seconds at the price of a messy database is a bad trade-off.

Implementation by Department

I’ve seen NetSuite implemented a few times for a particular department and only later does the client discover that they’ve painted other departments in to a corner.  Both Sales and Finance are equally notorious for doing this with NetSuite.  Unless both groups are considered during an implementation, the easy options will be chosen that don’t let the system represent what really happens for the other team. Even if you’re just implementing for one group, work with an implementation partner who understands the bigger picture.

Audaxium is proud to be a sponsor of the Pardot Elevate 2011 User Conference (Nov. 15-16, 2011) http://bit.ly/uqbXQn

Here are the Top 5 Reasons to Visit us at our booth:

1) You’re a new Pardot customer, and you could use some help

Pardot is the easiest to learn Marketing Automation system available today. However, there are often multiple ways to accomplish the same objective in the system. It’s great to have powerful software, but it’s even more important to use it in the most effective manner possible to generate quality sales-ready leads.

Audaxium QuickStart implementations help shorten your learning curve, launch your first campaigns quickly, and get you up to speed on best practices and latest trends in the Marketing Automation community.

2) You’ve been using Pardot for a while, but you’re busy

Most Marketing teams have long lists of ideas for campaigns they would like to run, but they don’t have the resources to get everything done. A typical Marketer’s “to-do” list keeps growing rather than shrinking as tasks get completed.

If you feel that you haven’t gotten enough strategic work done in Pardot or aren’t taking full advantage of the capabilities, why not bring Audaxium in to help? We offer development of drip programs, email campaigns, landing pages, and content marketing strategies.

3) You’re a NetSuite customer and you wish the integration with Pardot worked better

Pardot provides, at no charge, an out-of-the-box connector for NetSuite CRM. It automatically syncs data between the two systems and provides basic reporting capabilities. However, NetSuite has some unique ways that it manages data, so there are steps you need to take to increase the amount and type of data that syncs.

Audaxium can help you configure and optimize this integration in order to segment your lists of customers and prospects in Pardot more effectively, and to deliver to your dashboard better campaign ROI reports.

4) You’re a NetSuite customer and you wish NetSuite were easier to use

NetSuite is in fact a leading system for not only ERP, but also CRM and eCommerce. However, some Marketing and Sales teams are not in love with the capabilities or the ease of use of NetSuite.

This is NOT because NetSuite isn’t a capable CRM tool, but rather because many NetSuite implementations are focused on the requirements of the Finance or Operations team, with little focus on Sales & Marketing.

When NetSuite is configured properly for Sales & Marketing, your team becomes much more productive.

5) You like craft beer or good wine

We really like craft beer and good wine, and we’re always looking for an excuse to buy new friends a drink at the bar at the end of the day. Drop by our booth to say hello, have a chat about Pardot marketing automation, then let’s meet up at the bar to celebrate great software!

READ MORE: http://bit.ly/u0bf2b 

Lead Source: Marketing’s most coveted, and most loathed, data field in a CRM system.

The Importance of Measuring ROMI

It’s stating the obvious to say that B2B marketing teams are being held accountable for a direct relationship between marketing spend and revenue generation. With limited budgets and resources, measuring ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) is critical for determining the best marketing channels to generate quality sales leads that convert to revenue.

Since there’s no “silver bullet” for reaching everyone in a target market, marketers are using multi-channel marketing approaches to build their brands and generate sales leads. SEO, PPC, webinars, whitepapers, eBooks, video, tradeshows, print ads, direct mail, social media… you name it. The question is: How best to divide up your limited marketing budget and overworked resources among all these channels?

The Challenge in Measuring ROMI

The challenge is that rarely will a prospect buy from you because of a single marketing touch, such as a webinar. How did they end up registering for your webinar? Perhaps by clicking on your PPC ad after searching online for something you sell. Then, maybe they read a few pages of a whitepaper you paid a copywriter to write, or watched a short online video you hired a production company to develop. They may even have picked up one of your fancy pens at your tradeshow booth in the past. Read More »

User adoption is key to ROI

CRM vendors all promise fantastic ROI by helping your company increase sales productivity, improve customer satisfaction, and enable marketing effectiveness.  However, those benefits only come to life if your employees actually use the system.

WII-FM:  What’s In It – For Me?

To maximize user adoption, you need to figure out the answer to this question: “How can we make them WANT to use, or even depend on, CRM, even though it might require more discipline on their part?”

Generally speaking, people resist change, they already have too much on their plate, and some even struggle to learn new software.  The last thing you want to do is give them a system that gets in their way, rather than making their life easier and more productive.

WII-FM:  Questions to ask yourself

• What dashboards will help my employees make better decisions with their time?
• What reports do they need quick access to?
• What information are they searching for frequently?
• What tools will help them get more work done in the same amount of time?
• What reminders will help them get better organized?
• What real-time performance metrics will help keep themselves on track?
• How do I make it easy and fast for salespeople to keep their forecast up-to-date?

How to answer the Questions

Many people make the mistake of simply asking a few trusted people in each functional area what they want/need, and then turn that into a requirements list.  Observation and measurement are better tools.  Talking to existing CRM reference customers about these questions is another way to find out what works, and what doesn’t.  Watch how your most effective employees get things done.  Replicate some of their methods, and remove obstacles from their path.

What to expect if you don’t consider user needs

There’s no question that a modern CRM system is a wonderful tool for managers and executives.  You get better visibility into the key metrics in your business, you get real-time reports that allow you to make quicker decisions, and you get tools to manage employee performance.

This only works if your whole team uses the system. For example, if only 60% of your salespeople enter their leads, log their phone calls, and manage their sales pipeline, your dashboard is only 60% accurate, at best. Your visibility becomes more than a little foggy.

The Bottom Line

When planning an implementation of a CRM system, put yourself in your employees’ shoes and you’ll make better decisions that will maximize user adoption and accelerate your ROI.

Questions?

Audaxium consultants are former employees of companies who have implemented new CRM systems.  We’ve been through the learning curve and can provide you with some ideas to accelerate user adoption and reduce the impact of change.  Contact us for more ideas.

Often, while discussing systems, implementation, timing, scope of work, and integration, one often forgets to ask the simple questions.  Sometimes, taking a quick step back to think, will help guide the more complicated discussions later.

Here’s where we’ve taken the discussion recently:

How will this add value to the end user?

End user adoption is critical, in the fullest sense, to the success of a CRM implementation.  If you’re not adding value to the end users life, making them better and faster at their job, then you’re failing at building a framework for success.

Of course not every decision will revolve around this.  You may need the users to do more work to capture useful information for you to use to make decisions, but, the end result must be that there is a significant end benefit to the person keying in the information.  This principle will drive everything from your selection of the system, to how you deploy forms and searches.

How will I measure success?

You’ll need to show, in the short, medium, and long term, just how the project is going.  And, if you’re going to do that you’ll need to measure stuff.

Likely, you are not measuring, systematically, the thing that you want to improve.  Number of new leads by rep by product category for example.  I’d encourage you to take some time and measure that KPI prior to starting your implementation.   Doing so will help guide your thinking, and will ensure that the CRM system is effectively capturing the data you want.

What is the vision for the organisation?

Simply rephrased; Begin with the end in mind.  What does life look like at the end of go live?  At the end of Phase II?  Just what kind of information will the CEO be looking at on a day to day basis?  What will the front line team be doing as they fulfill service requests?

You won’t get the vision perfect, and it’ll always surprise you what the CEO wants on her dashboard in 12 months, but the exercise will help you figure out what’s critical, and what’s simply nice to have.

I hope these questions help at least one person get started on the right foot.

With the state of the economy, it’s likely that the LAST THING you want to do right now is spend money and resources on a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.  It would mean a significant investment of not only dollars but also staff resources who are already too busy.

Right now you are likely focusing all your resources on your most important goals.  Some of those may be:

• Hitting your sales and profit targets
• Exceeding your customers expectations and building their loyalty
• Delivering high quality products and services
• Keeping your best employees happy and productive
• Improving your company’s financial position (accounts receivable, cashflow, expenses, etc.)

Although implementing a CRM system can be a big job and big expense, it can help reduce the stress of a tough economy and help you achieve your most important corporate objectives.

The most obvious benefit of a CRM system in a tough economy is that it can help you sell more to your existing customers.  In tough times, many companies go into hibernation mode and tend to conserve cash “for a rainy day”.  They also become hesitant to purchase products or services from a company they have never done business with before.  However, if a company already trusts you to deliver high quality and timely products and services, they are more likely to buy from you, even during a down economy.

It is much easier, faster, and less expensive to sell up-sell or cross-sell additional products and services to an existing customer than it is to win a new customer.  A well implemented CRM system can help you mine your existing customer base more effectively and proactively find sales opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed.

If you don’t already use a CRM system, you may want to read more about how it can help you achieve your goals.  If you’re warming up to the idea, maybe you should consider adding this to your budget for next year?