The CRM Foundation
How solid is your CRM foundation? Once you have a concrete strategy and have formed a plan, you need to build a solid CRM foundation to ensure long term success. Doing this type of ‘groundwork’ will ensure that your CRM implementation and structure will stand the test of time.
During your CRM assessment you should have identified the core needs that the CRM can help to fill and problems it can help to solve — the concrete system value (aka, what’s in it for them). That value should form the cornerstone of everything you do moving forward to a build a solid base of support from your stakeholders and users.
Basics of CRM Success
-By Chris Fritsch, Client Success Consultant and Founder of CLIENTSFirst Consulting
What to Focus On
In working together with firms of all sizes on CRM projects, I have come to appreciate that there is no “one size fits all” for CRM success – either in terms of systems or functions. What is more important is to understand what you are trying to accomplish –the firm’s unique needs and goals– and then to fully evaluate all of the solutions that are available to see which can best meet those needs and goals. Ultimately, a CRM system should help your firm solve problems and automate processes.
Choosing Your CRM Builder
Selecting the right CRM Builder is much like choosing the right team to build your house. We’ve all heard horror stories about dealing with bad contractors. Without the right building partner, you are likely to get a house that takes longer and costs more than you imagined. You can even end up with a house that doesn’t “meet code,” forcing you to redo some of the work or, even worse, find another contractor and rebuild from the ground up.
With CRM, this is even more important because you don’t often get a “do-over.” Once users are frustrated with system functionality or data,
The CRM Plan – A Blueprint for Success
CRM success starts with a CRM plan. Once you have invested the time to articulate the initial ideas for your new CRM home, share your thoughts with your CRM consultant or architect and key stakeholders in the organization, and put your CRM plan on paper.
Your CRM consultant or architect can assist you in formulating a strategy and drawing up a comprehensive CRM “blueprint” to help capture all the essential elements of the project. This “blueprint” should address all of the details to successfully execute your building plan and will assist you in understanding the scope of your project.
The CRM Architect
Building a home – and configuring a new CRM system – are complex projects. For both, it typically makes sense to bring in an expert to help plan the project. Just as it makes sense to hire a skilled architect to create the blueprint for your new home, for a CRM project, it can be helpful to enlist the services of an experienced consultant or CRM architect.
The ideal CRM architect should have significant expertise, of course, and will likely be able to share references from other happy clients whose perfect CRM homes he or she has helped design.
CRM Building Project 2: Teardowns
Is it time for a CRM renovation or a tear-down?
Many of the firms we work with have had their CRM systems for years or even a decade or more. They can likely still remember their CRM building process and original “move-in” day when they first bought the system (which hopefully didn’t require a mortgage) and migrated all their information in. At that point, their CRM system felt like the perfect place to be.
Integrate, renovate… or start over?
Sometimes a firm begins to get “growing pains.” Over time, these firms may have acquired a lot more “stuff” and may feel like they are outgrowing their CRM home.
CRM Building Project 1: New Construction
So for some reason, one day about a year and a half ago, I decided that it would be a good idea to build a house. Not sure exactly why I thought adding this to my never-ending list of existing projects would be a smart thing to do (OK, perhaps my friends weren’t entirely wrong when they suggested that I was a bit of a type-A) but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Imagine the idea of having your dream house – designed exactly to your specifications. I’d finally get to have all the things I wished my current house had: more space,
Data Quality Do’s and Don’ts – Part 6: The CRM Adoption Wreck
CRM adoption has the greatest potential for a wreck. Having worked with almost a hundred firms to help them achieve and enhance CRM success over the last eight years, the biggest challenge we always seem to run into is CRM adoption. Firms consistently tell us that their CRM system is literally a ‘wreck’ due, in large part, to poor participation.
These firms frequently say that in the beginning of the CRM deployment, everything seemed to be running fine. They purchased the right system and implemented it without a hitch. The system was firing on all cylinders,
Data Quality Do’s and Don’ts – Part 5: Herding CRM Users or “Cats”
Herding your CRM users or “cats” toward full participation is a challenge. The beauty of a CRM system is that by gathering and maintaining the collective information of all CRM users, contacts can be kept updated across the organization. If an attorney receives updated information for his contact but simply modifies the contact information in Outlook, the new information doesn’t flow to everyone who shares that contact. If that attorney updates the information in the CRM, everyone receives the new information and everyone wins. That is, everyone who participates….
CRM Users Win with Full Participation, Contact and Relationship Sharing,
Data Quality Do’s & Don’ts – Part 4: The Missing Pieces of CRM Contact Data
A common complaint is missing pieces of CRM contact data. This significantly reduces the value of the system for users and hinders CRM adoption. Let’s face it, it’s challenging enough to get people to actually use the system. When they finally do decide to go looking for information and can’t find it, it will be exponentially harder to get them to go there again.
What’s even worse is that, without complete CRM contact data, it can be challenging or impossible to communicate with your contacts – which is the whole reason most organizations bought the CRM system in the first place.
Data Quality Do’s and Don’ts – Part 3: Adopt CRM Orphans
CRM orphan contacts require care.
There is nothing sadder than a poor, lonely little orphan – especially in your CRM system. When an “orphan” record is left in your CRM system and all the attorneys who once knew the contact are gone, the record is essentially abandoned. It’s left alone in a CRM world where relationships are so very important.
So what is a CRM caretaker to do? Well, start by regularly keeping watch for the these abandoned orphan records. It’s rare for them to be left prominently on your CRM doorstep. Instead, you must go looking for them.
Data Quality Do’s and Don’ts – Part 2: “I See Dead People” (in my CRM system)
Seeing dead people in your CRM system?
Many of us may remember that chilling quote from the movie The Sixth Sense. Seeing dead people in your CRM system can be almost as disturbing. Nothing is more likely to cause your CRM users to tune out and turn off than finding deceased contacts living on in your system.
Even more disturbing, these contacts are often known by multiple people in your firm – yet not everyone may be aware that the person has passed. So when the contact is removed from a mailing or event list,
Pipeline to Success
What gets measured gets done, and this can certainly be said about “non-billable” activities in law firms. For anyone familiar with attorneys, this is not surprising. Busy lawyers are tasked with competing demands for their very valuable – and very limited – time. And for lawyers, time is money – literally. So when there is client work to be done, anything that takes away from billing often ends up being put off until they have time – which sometimes means indefinitely.
But as competition for work has increased recently, law firms are finally being forced to focus on the one non-billable activity that makes all the other billable activities possible: business development.
