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.

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.

We live in an age of self help.  Anyone with a brain is supposed to be able to sit down, and with a good enough help file be able to turn on just about any technology going.

This has lead a few folks I know to implement NetSuite without much help at all.  It’s not that it’s impossible, or even terribly difficult, but it’s harder the first time you do it.  This got me thinking and this quick list came to life.

It’s a bit Scary

When you implement NetSuite, you’re putting in an application that has the potential to affect almost every part of your business.  You don’t want to mess it up and fly into the ground.  Or, perhaps worse, you don’t want to wreck anything or anyone while trying to get off the ground.

Solution?  Talk with people who’ve implemented it before!  You don’t learn to fly from the guy in the showroom who sells you the airplane. (If you can afford an airplane in a showroom) Talk to people who run the system day to day, and to people who’ve seen mistakes made.  That would be me by the way!

It’s Easier with a Copilot

With NetSuite you can get people to help you implement it remotely.  They’re really smart.  And having someone talk you through it over the web just might work in many cases.  But there is also something to be said by having someone by your side, giving you the best practices and the finer points that will take you from good to great.

Consider what the benefits are of getting someone into your boardroom to help you out.  Even if it’s just for a second opinion or for best practices and change management.

Airplanes have Standard Dashboards

NetSuite has a lot of power in it’s Dashboards.  It’ll consume a lot of time if you simply try to muddle through and figure out the best way to work.  Talk to those who use Dashboards every day, what works, what doesn’t.

There’s a lot that belongs on dashboards but there’s a lot that doesn’t.  Get stuff up there that really lets you manage the operations of your business.  This isn’t Salesforce.com here.

Heads Up Flying

It’s critical when flying to fly the plane and look up, and not keep your head stuck in the instrument panel.  The same is true for a NetSuite implementation.  You’ve got to manage the people involved, you’ve got to constantly be examining your situation and your business surroundings.

When implementing NetSuite it’s about getting your business to the next level.  Keep the end goal in mind and you’ll have a safe arrival.

Everyone has experienced it.  You have a wonderful experience with an account manager while you’re investigating a solution.  And then, magically, once your purchase order hits their email inbox… silence.  It’s deafening.

It seems to me that many companies look at their sales team, and at the systems they provide that team, in isolation of what is best for the customer.  And this results in the grand old strategy of “islands of automation”, and a big disconnect between sales and the rest of the company, and a big disconnect between sales and the customer.

Many CRM Vendors seem to build their systems like this as well.  Just look at the standard steps in the “sales process.”  Most have something like this:

• Lead – Unqualified
• Lead – Qualified
• Prospect – Investigating
• Prospect – Needs Discovered
• Prospect – Demo
• Prospect – Closing
• Customer – Won

Now I don’t have any real difficulty with these stages of bringing a company into your customer list, but, it doesn’t reflect the fact that the work doesn’t stop when the customer makes their first purchase.

This won’t come as a surprise but the C in CRM stands for customer, and when you implement CRM you really should think about how you manage your customer base first, and then think about how you turn a company who could buy from you (Lead) into a company who has bought from you. (Customer)

So here’s some ways to ensure that doesn’t happen.

First. Make sure everyone in your company has access to all customer related information. There shouldn’t be a case where someone says “I don’t have that information here, that’s another department.”  At least for the vast majority of information.  There will always be secure or sensitive information that only certain people can see.  But don’t force your employees to waste a lot of time walking issues around your office.

Second. Make sure that your company tracks opportunities and not just Lead/Prospect/Customer statuses.  Alternatively you could track quote or estimate statuses instead of opportunities but the effect is the same.  If you’re a services firm you could track jobs or projects as separate from the customer.

Third. Don’t rely on systems integration to connect different parts of your business.  It’s a constant battle to keep that stuff buckled together.

Many vendors will talk about the fact that they are open, and can hook to other systems, or they have a million partners you can pick from.  Sometimes it works. In the last 4 days I’ve talked with 4 people who looked at a one particular CRM system and said something like “I’ve looked at that system but the integrations between the third party apps and it don’t seem very solid.” Again, I’m sure that there are many good integrated apps with that CRM tool but it will require patience to keep everything connected.

The conclusion of all this is that a CRM system must, naturally, be a system that integrates many parts of your business, from Sales, to Marketing, to Finance to Tech Support.  Large companies have had this available to them for year, at a high price.  But now almost every company can afford it.

I’ll be making a bit of a series out of this I think.  Rather than post walls of text I think I’ll post some smaller, bit sized pieces of information.

I have been managing a NetSuite implementation for 2 years and have helped out a few people with their implementations and in doing so I’ve learned a few things about what made us successful.

One thing I learned is that it is easy to get very distracted by the ROI and high level strategic rationale behind implementing CRM/ERP during the rollout.   Pretty simply, your employees really don’t care a whole lot about that.  Their question?  “What’s in it for me!”

When deploying NetSuite it’s important to get feedback from the diverse group of people that will be using it.  After all, it covers a lot of ground as an integrated system.  Find out what people care about, what’s getting in the way, and how they visualise improvement.

Once you round up that data, and of course, by continuing to talk to people throughout the deployment, you’ll stay on target with what really matters.

Then you’ll be ready to sell the change.  It’s critically important that you can articulate, to each user, just how their life will get better after NetSuite.

Here’s some real, actual examples.

Inside Sales – With NetSuite you’ll be able to hand off opportunities to the sales team without having to craft and send individual emails each time you run across an interested prospect.

Marketing – You’ll be able to run more targeting email campaigns. (Should you choose to do so!) You’ll be able to track in real time the responses to your emails.

Sales Reps – You’ll be able to access the system from anywhere. You’ll be able to track commissions realtime.  You’ll see new leads and opportunities fast.  You’ll be able to spend less time managing spreadsheets and more time in front of customers. You’ll be able to quickly log your calls to keep yourself on track with the sales process.

Sales Management – You’ll be able to track activities by Rep. You’ll be able to see outstanding quotes and opportunities. Forecast review meetings will be able to be focused on the important deals, not just what the rep brings in his latest spreadsheet.

Admin – You’ll be able to process orders much more quickly.  Orders will be cleaner with less fire fighting to do.  Tracking orders, shipments, payments will all be done in one spot with no cutting and pasting.  

Tech Support – You’ll be able to pick up, respond to and close cases faster with NetSuite.  You’ll be able to see case history for a whole company, not just by email address.  You’ll be able to create opportunities for the sales team without switching applications. You’ll be able to see and manage onsite visits and projects in the same spot with NetSuite.

IT – You’ll be able to stop worrying about keep the system up, backed up, and updated and can instead focus on interesting value add projects to configure it and make it work better.

Those are just a few examples.  I think I’ll have to run a poll of some folks and get some other responses of users and managers who have been around NetSuite for a while.

Homework

Before you go and select a new CRM, ERP or Support application, create a survey for your team and ask them what’s standing in their way, and what they want to see in the tools they use each day.  Then think very hard about what’s in it for them before you commit to an implementation.