Steve Chipman
There are a number of technology categories for which the highest priced solution is not necessarily the highest value solution. This can be the case with emerging technologies in which the dominant marketer is also the early market leader.
The main components of CRM value are increased revenue from more sales and higher customer retention — and decreased costs from greater operational efficiencies.
A proper CRM data migration is often more than a simple point and click proposition, despite the ability of CRM applications to import data and despite the existence of off the shelf data migration tools. What are the factors that make the ultimately most cost effective data migration more than a basic, technical procedure?
Many companies choose to perform a CRM upgrade of their existing, legacy contact manager or CRM system rather than switching to a new system.
The upgrade of an existing system is sometimes needed to support newer versions of operating systems and office suites. Companies also upgrade in order to take advantage of new features and functionality provided by the vendor.
Read more5 Reasons Companies Upgrade Their Old CRM System (Instead of Buying a New One)
If you are switching from a contact manager or a legacy CRM system to a new CRM system, Salesforce and Sage CRM may be among the applications you are considering. Let’s look at both the similarities and differences between these two CRM applications.
If you are planning to migrate your company’s GoldMine® data into a CRM system, there are a number of questions that you can ask yourself as you start to plan a data migration. Coming up with answers to these questions can make your GoldMine data conversion a much easier experience.
If you are planning to migrate your company’s ACT! data into a CRM system, there are a number of questions that you can ask yourself as you start to plan a data migration. Coming up with answers to these questions can make your ACT! data conversion a smoother experience.
CRM data migration can be performed in a “quick and dirty” fashion, or it can be done with careful forethought and execution. With the right preparation and planning, a new CRM application will be easier for end users to work with and and will result in data that can be segmented for marketing purposes in a more meaningful way. It will also provide more accurate management reports.
You’ve finally hit the end of the road with your contact manager and have made the decision to move your company to a new CRM system. You want to make a decision in relatively short order, but you want to make the right decision. Here are some of the things that you can do to make the process less painful.
With a legacy contact manager such as GoldMine®, referencing another contact from within a contact record can sometimes require a very large (and ever expanding) pick list.
Data migration software vendors sometimes portray their CRM migration software as a simple, point and click, drag and drop solution.
Read moreMigrating CRM Data Isn’t Always as Easy as Point and Click
The need for remote users to regularly sync their contact manager or CRM data from a locally installed database back to a central database dates back to a time when the Internet was far less ubiquitous than it is today and a time when Web technologies and interfaces were not as advanced.
Legacy contact managers, by definition, are contact-centric in their design. Each contact is a separate record and does not contain a unifying, company ID. While a contact-centric structure is well suited for B2C sales and service, it can create some limitations in a B2B selling or service environment.
Read moreContact-Centric Contact Managers vs. Account-Centric CRM
Certain legacy contact managers do not allow for the creation of custom tables (objects). As a workaround, when there are multiple occurrences of the same type of data, a series of flat fields are created. For example, a set of Properties that relate to a Contact might be tracked within a tab as four sets of matching fields as shown here:
Today’s business environment is more of a moving target than ever. Employees are demanding increasingly more from the business productivity tools that they use in order to be more efficient, to keep up sales levels in a competitive environment and to do a better job of retaining existing customers. As such, many business managers are asking themselves –- should we switch from our old contact manager (or CRM system) to a new CRM application?
Congratulations, your company has decided to make the switch to a new CRM application. Now comes the work effort — determining how best to configure the application to your company’s needs and migrating legacy data into the new CRM system. There are two general approaches to data migration.
Legacy data can sometimes be very messy. Spending the time to analyze legacy data allows companies to understand the results of a wide variety of users having logged customer interactions within a legacy CRM system over the course of many years.
Migrating data from a contact manager to a CRM system should be relatively straightforward, right? Just bring up a data mapping UI on a screen, map the appropriate fields and then click “Import”. Unfortunately, there are many possible factors that can add complexity to the migration of data from a contact manager to a CRM solution. Here are just a few of them.
What are the major differences between a traditional contact manager and a true CRM application? While the lines are starting to blur, there remain some fundamental differences.
In today’s business world, many companies’ CRM users work in multiple offices, at home, in hotels, at airports and at customer sites. There are two ways to allow off site users to access their company’s CRM database – by synchronizing either all or part of the main database to another computer that a remote user has access to (laptop, desktop or local office server) or by providing these users with CRM database access via the Internet.