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|  |  Article: CRM Implementation 2 January 24, 2009 CRM Implementation 2 The first article provided an overview of the key areas that need to be considered in the creation and implementation of a dealer Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program. This article provides an in-depth look at those following key areas: · The development of a strategic marketing / business plan around a CRM program. · The considerations for choosing the correct CRM software package. · The technology infrastructure that needs to be in place for a successful implementation. · The training program considerations for a successful implementation. The development of a strategic marketing / business plan around a CRM program is an essential first step in program development – before addressing any software considerations. The planning process should begin with a dealer carefully identifying the issues, or “areas of pain”, a CRM program needs to address. A consensus among dealers has identified the following core areas of pain: · The lack of information about current customers in order to build stronger relationships and identify their needs and behaviors. · The lack of a process to use customer information to effect deeper current customer product penetration and higher margins. · The inability to share customer information across the business enterprise, in areas such as sales, marketing, customer service and other key areas. · The lack of a structured prospecting process that maximizes new customer development. · The inability to monitor customer activity by customer-facing personnel, making accountability for activity goals almost non-existent. The customer or prospect information to be captured and shared in CRM software should be relegated to information that will be subsequently used in strategic marketing decisions. Information such as, competition, key personnel, type of industry and number of office employees has proven to be a good starting point. Any other information generic to a dealer’s business model and objectives also needs to be considered. Two very important questions to answer in the planning phase are: 1. Will the information to be captured for current customers provide the basis for a sound current customer penetration process, or is more needed? 2. Will the information captured for prospects provide the basis for an effective prospecting process? A process used in any area of a CRM strategic marketing plan should be viewed as a series of automated repetitive software-driven tasks aimed at helping reach pre-defined sales and marketing objectives. This represents the Sales Force Automation (SFA) component of a CRM program. Historically, manual processes for current customer penetration and new customer development are fragmented at best; the implementation of a CRM program is a good time to look at any existing processes, remove any gaps, refine them and automate them with software. Dealers implementing CRM programs almost always begin with customer penetration as their key strategic focus, since it is almost always five times easier to increase business with current customers than it is to develop new customers. The personnel who will be using and sharing customer information is an important consideration. What’s also important will be their role in any customer-centric process where using and sharing customer and prospect information enhances the entire CRM sharing process. Sales and marketing personnel along with customer service are the obvious users, and in some instances accounting is included in some form. The considerations for choosing the correct CRM software package relate directly to the strategic considerations outlined above. It’s important at this point to reiterate the following key point from the first article: · One of the five reasons why CRM initiatives fail is because CRM Software is chosen before a strategic plan is defined.
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