1 03/07/2013

HOW TO GET BUY-IN WHEN

BUILDING A CRM BUSINESS CASE

A Guide to Enable Effective CRM with Key Tips to Build

a Strong Business Case and Compelling CRM Strategy

A Caltech CRM Publication

george@caltech.co.uk

2 03/07/2013

IS THIS BOOK RIGHT FOR ME?

Is this ebook right for you? CRM solutions can be confusing and we want everyone

to get the most from our material. See below definitions to find out if your level

matches the content you are about to read.

Introductory

Introductory content is for anyone who is new to Customer Relationship

Management (CRM) solutions. Also suitable for those wanting to know more about

the principle of CRM solutions beyond basic contact management, and why CRM

can be matched to processes and strategies.

Intermediate

Intermediate content is for those people who may be using CRM solutions and have

an understanding of how they work. This content is also suitable for those who

understand many to many relationships, and how powerful CRM strategies can be

when they are working in alignment with organisational goals and processes.

Advanced

Advanced content is for those who want to do more with CRM solutions beyond

contact management. You will have a strong understanding of CRM solutions and

how many to many relationships can propel compelling benefits, and enable

processes to be more efficient. You will understand some technical elements of the

solutions and integrating them across disparate systems.

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3 03/07/2013

HOW TO GET BUY-IN WHEN BUILDING A CRM BUSINESS

CASE

By Catherine Carlyle

Catherine helps new clients gain an understanding of CRM, and ensures they have

everything they need to start using a CRM solution that delivers tangible benefits.

Catherine is the marketing manager at Caltech IT Limited (Caltech CRM) and she

creates and manages content about CRM for Caltech CRM. She is also one of the

first people you will speak to when looking to work with Caltech CRM.

Follow Catherine on twitter @caltechit

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Contents Building your CRM Business Case ........................................................................................................... 5

Why Use CRM Solutions? ........................................................................................................................ 6

The Three Blocks to Success ............................................................................................................... 6

Acquiring profitable customers .......................................................................................................... 7

Retain and Maximise Existing Customers ........................................................................................... 7

Gain Efficiencies .................................................................................................................................. 8

Simplify IT ............................................................................................................................................ 8

Building Your CRM Business Case ........................................................................................................... 9

Scoping a CRM Project .......................................................................................................................... 11

Investment Costs .................................................................................................................................. 14

Choosing a Partner ................................................................................................................................ 15

Summary ............................................................................................................................................... 15

Further Reading?................................................................................................................................... 16

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Building your CRM Business Case

Gartner say that “Cloud and CRM will drive enterprise software spending in 2013

and 2014.”

Effective CRM offers good business practise and an optimised process. Humans

value relationships and they are attracted to good strong relationships. People in a

relationship have boundaries and there is a predictable behaviour. This will ensure

trust and a mutual respect.

Relationships take effort and time to maintain so many people only focus on a few.

Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM ensures that every person can feel like a valued,

understood human-being, as well as starting off the relationship on the right foot.

Once the trust is developed it is easier to maintain that relationship reducing churn

and growing customer experience.

This ebook seeks to demonstrate why effective CRM = good business, as well as

giving you some hints and tips for building a strong business case to get buy-in to

deliver a CRM solution that will deliver lasting results.

Pulling together a CRM business case

can be pretty daunting. Where to start,

who to include, where to draw the

boundaries.

Setting processes and matching

Microsoft CRM to these processes, is

allowing lots of organisations to create

unique selling points and credible

market differentiators.

Ensuring that your organisation focuses

on the right goals and targets, you can

propel Microsoft Dynamics CRM to

revolutionise your efforts.

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Why Use CRM Solutions?

Successful organisations are developing new strategies to strive for growth and

competitive advantage.

CRM solutions have been around since the 1980s and since then the solutions have

evolved and developed to drive powerful successes. Over the years, following a

great deal of research, it has been proven that if CRM is matched to processes and

business strategy, CRM will give pretty amazing results. CRM solutions that are

configured and tailored to propel competitive advantage, build lasting growth.

Every CRM system project has to have a compelling business case. Why are you

undertaking a CRM project? What do you want to achieve? Getting buy-in from the

Board can be difficult, so Caltech recommends a review of quick wins that give

demonstrable benefit, with significant payback. That’s why any successful

implementation of any CRM solution must be carefully thought through, and the

support of experienced CRM professionals can pay dividends in the long term.

The Three Blocks to Success

Placing CRM technology at the heart of an organisation, can add impactful success

to the bottom line, help you win more profitable customers whilst serving existing

customers better.

Working with Caltech can help you succeed in three ways:

Acquire profitable customers

Retain and maximize existing customers

Gain efficiencies by improving operational performance through CRM

strategy.

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Acquiring profitable customers

Gartner analysts say that marketing teams will spend more on technology than IT

teams do over the next 4 years. Marketing professionals are finding ways of

generating new revenue opportunities and are leveraging technology to target and

engage, harness Big Data and gain efficiencies. Using CRM, marketers are able to

bring together pockets of information to support decision making and target

marketing campaigns more effectively.

One size fits all doesn’t work. Using CRM marketers can monitor and adjust their

messages ensuring they are getting more from their campaign management.

Using factual real time reporting is essential for marketers to track lead generation

from each marketing activity. This will help focus on the best activities and repeat

them.

All interactions count – which means that marketers can work hand in glove with

sales and service. Having a single information source ensures that marketers are

able to understand each lead and prospect. Setting up CRM correctly is

fundamental to achieving the results that you need.

An effective CRM strategy is a sales force’s compass enabling them to know which

direction to go and when the prospect is ready to engage.

Retain and Maximise Existing Customers

Retaining customers is significantly less expensive than acquiring new ones. An

effective CRM strategy will help to build customer loyalty, increase spend and

longevity, turning your customers into raving fans.

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Plan your strategy to ensure:

Detailed customer profiles can be built – by transaction and purchase.

Capture key detail to help you cross sell, up sell, and deliver exceptional

customer experience.

Bring marketing and sales together to manage new business more effectively.

Reporting – knowledge is the key to fantastic customer service.

Improve service whilst reducing costs – use automation and single data entry.

Review your data strategy – data is the lifeblood of your organization.

Gain Efficiencies

Do more for less by reviewing your processes to ensure that they are supporting the

organisations goals, and the processes are optimised.

All businesses operate within process parameters built around every function of the

organisation and often these are repetitive tasks. Reviewing processes to

understand which series of events were not successful is a critical factor to effective

CRM. Streamlining processes and marrying them with Microsoft Dynamics CRM is

where exciting results can be achieved. Caltech has vast experience across lots of

industries in ensuring you get the most from your CRM software.

Automating these every day processes will help to reduce operational costs and gain

efficiencies.

Simplify IT

We often hear clients talking about simplified IT. IT solutions are complex by their

nature and as an organisation grows it may have several disparate solutions that are

critical to the organisation’s success. There may be discrepancies and conflicts

within the data.

Having one unified system ensures that information is in once place. This makes it

easier for the teams to make informed decisions, reducing wasted time and effort

finding information.

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be integrated with various solutions or databases you

already have – or it may be a whole review is needed. This can be critical to the

success of your CRM project.

Building Your CRM Business Case

Keep your business case as concise as possible. Stick to the main points and show

value and return. Getting senior managers on board will build the support for your

CRM strategy to succeed.

Select a business sponsor, a facilitator and a project manager.

Highlight no more than 3 – 5 top line objectives you want to achieve from your CRM

initiative. Communicate your top 5 initiatives to your sponsor and business regularly

to ensure buy-in and clarity. Keep the focus to a maximum of 5 so you don’t dilute

your message and retain the focus.

Ensure your business case answers the following questions:

How will a CRM solution support your business?

How will a CRM solution support the teams?

Will shareholders see value?

What will the senior management team gain?

Proving that CRM technology will add value is a key criteria, however often

calculating return on investment can be difficult if there is no baseline data prior to

having CRM. So look at what data you can use. Is there anything in place that you

can measure against time, cost and quality.

The benefits of using Microsoft Dynamics CRM are vast, and they need to be

considered for your business case to be compelling.

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There are four key benefit groups that CRM technology provides:

Increased Revenue

Increased Efficiency

Differentiating yourself in a crowded market place

Decreasing Costs

Increase Revenue

• CRM reduces sales costs

• Increases margins

• Maximises revenue from existing customers

Increase Efficiency

• Upsell and cross sell opportunities

• Reduces administration time

• Provides a cohesive sales and marketing effort

• Automates proposals and quotes

• Provides a unified set of data that is usable by non-technical people

• Provides Board visibility of your sales pipeline

• Ease to create valuable reports

• Ease to track KPI's and SLA's

Differentiators

• Gain new customers

• Increase customer retention and profitability

• Improve response time to customer requests for information

• Ability to propel new offerings

• Excel at customer service / customer experience - delighting them every time

Decrease Costs

• Process improvements and automation saving wasted time

• Streamlining the customer journey and touch points empowers lead nurture

• Less wastage of time and effort

• Less time spent fixing incorrect orders and dissatisfied customers

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Scoping a CRM Project

Follow our guide, “How to Implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM in 10 Simple Steps.”

Consider the range, depth and detail. Do you want to include all functional areas or

just a few?

Breaking down your CRM strategy into staged engagements will help manage costs

and risk, and this can also help when writing your business case.

Reviewing your scope and looking at what areas CRM may encompass is a great

way of building your business case.

What are the headlines? We will call these your business pains. The business

pains are the main reasons why you want to ‘do’ CRM – what is preventing your

teams from working slicker, doing more with less manual touch points. Ask your

teams, what needs to be altered to make the efforts more impactful to the

customers?

Scoping a CRM project is all about

deciding which areas of your

business will be covered by the CRM

solution. CRM can be an

organisation-wide solution.

A CRM strategy cannot be developed

in isolation by one team. It has to

embrace the business strategy and

build on sales, marketing and

customer service initiatives that are in

place.

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Speak with your business and with each team; promote a champion from each team.

Document and agree these business pains with your champions and directors. This

is a key way to ensure buy-in across the business, at all levels.

Get your champions together. Decide what you want a CRM system to do. You will

need to consider your current infrastructure, processes, and company-wide key

performance indicators. A good CRM solution will fit your evolving needs, and again

this is where the experience of Microsoft Dynamics CRM specialists Caltech IT Limited

comes into play, marrying your CRM strategy with the technology in the most

optimised way.

Assess your requirements in-depth. Map your customer journey, your core

propositions and how this links to customer loyalty.

Following are some key questions to help get your teams involved:

Look at your business requirements, what

does the wish list include?

How does your business carry out each

function?

What are your business processes?

Is your data clean? Where is your data?

What has led you to review CRM?

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Sales and Development

•How does a prospect contact you to get information about your products and services?

•How do you record and track leads?

•Is there a sales process that everyone follows?

•Do you want to provide quotes/orders/invoices through CRM?

•What is currently causing problems in the process?

•What would you like that you haven’t got now to do your jobs more effectively?

•How do you work out on the road?

•How involved do you want CRM to be with social networks?

•What reporting do you need?

Marketing

•What types of campaigns do you run?

•What is your time spent on mostly currently?

•Do you have the data you need to run targeted campaigns?

•Can you segment data effectively?

•Does each campaign have a tracked customer journey?

•How do you lead nurture?

•What is the qualifying criteria?

•Do you track return on investment of campaigns?

•Do you run events?

•Do you need social media to be more engrained with your CRM solution?

•How joined up are you with sales?

•Do you carry out email marketing?

•How do you manage your suppression list?

Customer Service

•How are cases or complaints logged?

•Are there SLA’s or KPI’s that must be adhered to?

•How do these SLA’s flag?

•How are the SLA’s reported?

•Is there a knowledge base?

•Are there standard letters?

•How does your Customer Care team communicate – through which methods?

•Is there an escalation process?

•Do you need scripting or have scripting in place?

•How do you allocate a service call?

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Investment Costs

Any good CRM solution will require investment. When thinking about CRM investment

the following requirements should be factored in:

Inve

stm

ent

Res

ou

rce

• Initial solution implementation costs

• Analysis and detailed design time and cost

• Potential hardware needs

• Customisation costs

• User training

• Number of people / licenses

• Number of business locations requiring CRM

• Departments involved

• Process alignment

• Integration of systems ie. accounting platform, ERP, other data management sources

• Project management resource from your business

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Choosing a Partner

Caltech CRM adds value by delivering projects to the SureStep methodology. The

reason we do this is two-fold – we get to know what needs to be done and our

customers know that we know what needs to be done! This is crucial to deliver a

precise solution on time and to specification.

SureStep gives you confidence, control and visibility and it’s proven by The Project

Management Institute.

Ensure your CRM project doesn’t fail by checking out our advice – 10 CRM Mistakes

you don’t want to make.

Summary

CRM without doubt offers a whole host of benefits and efficiencies that can

revolutionise your business. If you don’t make a case for CRM, rest assured your

competition will. If you would like to see our case studies click here, or call us on

01924 507 280 for our help and advice. Thank you for reading our ebook and good

luck making your business case.

16 03/07/2013

Further Reading?

See our other ebooks or blogs!

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