Best Practices for SaaS CRM Implementation

In order to ensure a business runs smoothly and efficiently, it is necessary that the organization invest in the latest tools and technologies which can empower their staffs in order to perform better, with more efficiency. However, there are certain things which needs to be taken care while implementing a new software within your organization. 

In this context, implementing a SaaS CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is said to significantly improve the efficiency of any business’s operations, streamlines workflows, and improve customer relationships. However, in order to make it a success and to derive maximum benefits, it’s crucial to follow the best practices during the CRM implementation process. 

Here are some of the best practices which you should follow in order to ensure a successful SaaS CRM implementation within your organization.

1. Define Clear Objectives and KPIs

The first step before delving deep into the implementation is to clearly define your objectives and the KPIs which you want to achieve using the CRM. While defining the objectives and performance metrics, you need to ensure that they align with your overall business goals in the long term. Having a crisp and clear goal defined helps in setting a clear direction for your organization and also establishes the parameters on which you will measure the success of your CRM implementation. Some of the examples of this can be Improving customer retention by 20%, improving sales conversion by 10%, etc.

2. Choose the Right CRM Solution

It is important to note that the crux of your CRM implementation lies in selecting a right CRM solution which aligns perfectly with your business. You need to evaluate a set of different CRM providers and try to compare them based on your business needs, budget, and the specific features they offer. You may not find an all in one CRM which fits completely for your business process as the business processes for every company may differ, however you can certainly find one, which ticks most of your requirements’ checklist.

 

3. Involve Key Stakeholders

Often many CRM implementation fail to derive the ROI because of lesser adoption among the employees. However if the leadership stakeholders are keen towards the implementation from the beginning, then it can certainly help in successful rollout and wider adoption. You should engage the key leadership stakeholders from every department early in the process. This will help get valuable leadership’s input on the specific needs and challenges of each department. Getting collective and collaborative feedback early on, can help with increased organization wide acceptance of the CRM system. 

4. Develop a Detailed Implementation Plan

If you are a large organization, then certainly the CRM implementation will take a while before it is fully rolled out. You need to create a comprehensive implementation plan that outlines the major tasks, milestones, and timelines associated. This plan should include data migration, system configuration, user training, and testing phases. A well-structured implementation will help plan out the rollout in a smooth manner and shall ensure least possible business disruption during the transition period.

5. Ensure Data Quality and Governance

Data is the backbone of any CRM system. As it is rightly said, a CRM is as good as its Data. Howsoever costly CRM software you buy, if the data quality is not maintained, the users will never be able to derive its true value and ROI. You need to ensure that the data being migrated and fed into the CRM is accurate, complete, and up-to-date. Implement regular data governance policies to maintain data quality and consistency. Promote this among your staff to regularly update the CRM data and ensure to keep it clean to ensure data sanity. 

6. Provide Comprehensive Training

Many CRM users fail to make the best out of their CRM because of lack of appropriate skills and training required to use the CRM. This ultimately affects the user adoption which is an important KPI for a successful CRM implementation. To ensure better CRM adoption, organizations need to ensure that comprehensive training is provided to all users to ensure they understand how to use the system effectively. As some CRM providers keep adding new features and enhancements to the system, it is also important to keep team aware of the latest releases and feature updates.

8. Monitor and Evaluate Performance

After implementation is completed, you need to continuously monitor the performance of the CRM system and the KPIs which you defined in the beginning. Go through the defined performance metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your CRM implementation and identify areas for improvement. This will help you uncover the gaps which you might need to work as part of continuous improvement efforts.

By following these best practices, you can surely ensure a smoother and successful SaaS CRM implementation that will drive business growth and help enhance customer relationships.

How to automate sales workflows in CRM

If you are looking for ways to automate your sales process workflows in CRM, then you are at the right place. With increasing competition in sales, it is essential that your sales team delivers the best results. It is only possible when the team has the right sales tools and technologies at place to work with better productivity. Automating sales workflows in your CRM can significantly boost efficiency of your team and help reduce manual and time consuming efforts.

Here is a detailed guide you can follow in order to start automating workflows in your CRM system.

1. Identify Processes

Before you automate any workflow in CRM, you need to identify what needs to be automated. There can be a range of processes which you want to automate, however sooner you may realize that either some of them are not-feasible to be automated or some of them end up not giving the required ROI on the effort spent automating the workflows. Hence, this steps is crucial step in your sales automation journey. Start with collecting the list of sales tasks which your team spend the most time upon. Next, try to identify which all tasks are redundant and repetitive in nature. 

2. Check Automation Feasibility

Once this is done, the next step is to assess the technical feasibility of automating the task in your CRM system. Your CRM system should support your use case, otherwise you may be required to contact your CRM service provider in order to help you with add-on features or customizations. 

3. Decide Automation Priority

Once you have identified this, try to assign an order of priority in which you want to automate the processes. The priority can be set basis Business urgency or potential ROI to be generated post automation or based on the expected time savings for the sales staff.

4. Create Workflows in CRM system

Once you have identified the priority, you can start creating workflows in your CRM system for the processes which needs to be automated on first priority. Depending upon your CRM vendor, your CRM should allow you to create workflows by defining the automation trigger points and the corresponding action which should happen. An example workflow trigger point can be the time when a new lead is added, and an action which should happen can be a welcome introductory email sent to the new lead or creation of tasks in the CRM for follow up activities, etc.

5. Test, Iterate and Refine

Last but not the least! Teams should try to test the implementation automation, and iteratively refine up the automation. CRM workflow automation is not a one-time effort as it may appear to be, it should be adopted with an innovation mindset, where in teams should constantly try to identify the redundant and repeatable tasks in their day to day activities and try to automate them in order to improve business efficiency.

By the way, if you are yet to try out a CRM software for your business. Do check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM Software. It’s Free!

How to drive CRM adoption in Sales teams?

You invested a lot of time as well as money trying to implement a CRM solution across your organization but it ended up as a failed project.

How does it feel? It doesn’t sound cool. Isn’t it?

But this is often the case with many organizations who are unable to derive value from their CRM implementation even after making huge investment in this regard. The biggest reason for CRM project failure is low CRM adoption among the end users of the system. If sales leaders can lead their team to adopt CRM faster, they can quickly start reaping tangible benefits out of their CRM implementation. 

Photo by Mikael Blomkvist from Pexels

Here is what you can do to drive CRM adoption within your sales team:

By the way if you are still looking for a CRM software for your sales team, do check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM.

1. Keep team involved from the beginning

When you are implementing a CRM solution in your organization, try to involve the end users from the beginning. Listen to their challenges, ask for feedback, implement their feedback. This way you make them a stakeholder in the implementation. When you respect others’ input, they tend to associate themselves as a part of the project. They tend to own it end to end. This way you stand lesser chances of failure since the end users are going to drive it in future on their own.

2. Choose an easy to use CRM

One reason why users tend to avoid using a CRM is due to the complexity of using it. The objective of implementing a CRM is to make the lives of the sales team simpler and easier rather than making it more complex by asking them to use a hard to use CRM. Always ensure to take trial of the CRM software and test its usability and user experience before making a final purchase.

3. Provide adequate Training

If the end users are not familiar with the terminologies, various stages and workflows in a CRM, they would hardly use it to maximum potential. Always provide adequate training to your end users on the various functions of a CRM and the purpose of using it. Making people familiar with the basic controls and letting them know the purpose of using it makes it much easier for driving faster adoption.

4. Provide appropriate user guide

When you are providing training, the users may tend to forget it overtime unless and until they are actually using it. Conducting regular CRM training sessions may not be feasible for numerous reasons. Assigning a peer to help a new employee to learn the tool may not bring out consistent knowledge transfer. This problem can be solved if you have a well documented User guide. It can serve the purpose of looking up for some on-demand information or clarification which the end user may have. You may request your CRM vendor to provide the same or may also refer to the knowledge base section of the respective product page such as we have it for ToolsonCloud Sales CRM.

5. Establish easy to follow CRM processes

Often the sales team tends to think of a CRM to be a database rather than a modern tool to manage your sales process. This ideology may prevent them from updating their sales activities in real time and they will end up updating the tool once in a while just to keep the data in place. This way the CRM system will end up reflecting stale and unusable data for the sales leaders to analyze and get insights as to where they can step in for certain tangible help. To solve this, you may need to establish well defined guidelines and processes which can serve as a single stop blueprint for your team to follow.

6. Create CRM Advocates

Creating CRM advocates or ambassadors from the end user of the tool is always helpful. Modern marketing revolves a lot around influencer marketing. You are much more likely to religiously try a new product if you were told about its benefit by an influencer having a similar background as yours. Your sales team will be able to appreciate the value of crm implementation only when they start using it. They will religiously use it for sometime only when you have CRM ambassadors from the team guiding them on the best practices and effective utilization of the tools.

7. Reward early practitioners

Getting the sales team to adopt a new tool can be tough. But it can be made easier if you start rewarding those early adopters who shall be setting up a benchmark and advocating best practices to peers. Reward the users who religiously update the tool and keep the status up to date. Reward the users whose CRM data is clean and is of high quality to derive fruitful insights out of it.

I hope you will find these tips useful for you. 

If you are looking for a CRM solution for your team, feel free to try out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. It’s Free!