Archive for Buying CRM
Your organization’s CRM buying process has been moving in fits and starts. You’re personally frustrated because you want to get a new CRM system in the hands of your team and the buying process has stalled out once again. Is the problem some elusive notion such as “group inertia”, or is it something that’s clearly identifiable? (more…)
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Let’s start with a basic premise. That is, most new CRM systems are now moderately to highly customized by the organizations that implement them. CRM continues to become more of a platform than a solution. CRM systems give organizations the ability to build out specific functionality that goes well beyond the out-of-the-box configuration. (more…)
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Because selling is a profession, it’s understandable that there’s a lot of emphasis placed on sales processes, sales management and sales training within vendor organizations. In fact, there’s an entire industry that was built around improving sales performance. (more…)
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CRM vendors have been claiming for many years that there’s a cost of waiting to implement a new CRM system. While there are identifiable costs to delaying a decision, these costs can vary significantly across organizations. However, whatever those costs are for a given organization, they may now be higher than they ever were. (more…)
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Below is some of what we’ve heard from representatives of sales, marketing, customer support and management over the last several years. Please comment below if any of this sounds familiar. (more…)
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Your company is considering switching to a new CRM system or has already committed to a new CRM system. What is your implementation resource strategy — utilizing internal staff, contracting with third party consultants, or a combination of the two? (more…)
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Traditionally, the RFI/RFP process has served to help buyers at companies understand important feature/functionality differences between multiple vendor solutions, so that a large group of potential vendors can be whittled down to a short list. An RFP can also represent an initial round of vendor scoring. RFPs have even been used to disqualify vendors early on. (more…)
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In the CRM purchasing process, a common sequence of events for CRM buyers is to first go through a round of vendor demos and to then decide on and commit to a specific CRM vendor. After the purchase of the CRM system, the next step is to go through the exercise of defining detailed CRM requirements. Finally, a CRM implementation is performed based on those defined requirements. (more…)
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With the iPad taking enterprises by storm, the availability of a fully featured, CRM iPad app has suddenly become a must-have requirement for many CRM buyers.
The consumerization of IT isn’t something that’s coming — it’s here. IT managers have little choice but to support the demands of mobile users in the multi-touch device era, which was kicked off by Steve Jobs when he famously rejected the idea of a stylus in his design concept for the next generation smart phone. (more…)
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