Six Tips to Select the Right CRM System: Evaluate Products and Providers
Once you have identified a few CRM systems that meet your requirements, you can begin the vetting process to select the right CRM system for your firm.
Tip 4: Direct the Demonstrations
It’s essential that the CRM demonstrations allow you to make an informed decision and adequately and accurately compare systems, features and pricing. It’s also important at this phase to again involve your users. CRM systems have a reputation for being notoriously difficult to implement, and the last thing you want is to be responsible for unilaterally selecting a system that then doesn’t meet user expectations.
Six Tips to Select the Right CRM System
– By Chris Fritsch, Client Success Consultant
Research estimates that up to 70% of CRM systems fail to meet expectations – and a failed CRM implementation can be extremely costly, not just in terms of the financial expense, but also because of the costs in lost time – and credibility. Even more impactful: you don’t often get a second chance at CRM success. This means that it’s critical to select the right CRM system.
The good news is, CRM success is possible. If you simply follow a few critical steps before and during the CRM selection process,
Six Tips to Select the Right CRM System
by Chris Fritsch, Client Success Consultant
Research estimates that up to 70% of CRM systems fail to meet expectations – and a failed CRM implementation can be extremely costly, not just in terms of the financial expense, but also because of the costs in lost time – and credibility. Even more impactful: you don’t often get a second chance at CRM success. This means that it’s critical to select the right CRM system.
The good news is, CRM success is possible. If you simply follow a few critical steps before and during the CRM selection process,
Contact Management 101: So Many Contacts, So Many Ways to Manage Them
by Chris Fritsch, Client Success Consultant
While formal contact management may be foreign to younger lawyers, this isn’t necessarily a generational issue. In fact, we now frequently find that even some of the most experienced lawyers are managing their contacts in different ways. The issue also isn’t caused by inattention or idleness. Actually, there are a number of valid reasons why changes in contact management methodologies have been taking place, such as:
- Attorneys are out of the office more often today, so it’s critical to have contacts on their mobile devices where they can easily access them
- Advances in search technology have made it easy to find contacts anywhere,
Pipeline to Success – Part 6: The Problem
Over the years, we have all heard way too many stories of CRM systems failing to meet expectations. What we don’t typically hear is that the reason why these systems didn’t meet expectations was often that the expectations were unrealistic. Indeed, people have been complaining about CRM systems for as long as…well, as long as there have been CRM systems (and these complaints are not limited to law firms.) Managing expectations is a key part of your CRM strategy.
CRM Strategy: Set Realistic Expectations
The main problem with CRM technology is that it’s just technology.
Pipeline to Success – Part 4: The Past
When some larger firms with sophisticated marketing departments began to realize the limitations of spreadsheets years ago, they started looking for alternatives. But because the profession had not been focused on sophisticated business development tracking or technology in the past, there were not many choices of pipeline software available that could meet the specific needs of law firms.
So as an interim solution, some firms started testing CRM technology and software such as Salesforce to help overcome the limitations of spreadsheets. While these CRM systems included advanced pipeline functionality, unfortunately they didn’t make sense for a firm wide deployment.
Pipeline to Success – Part 1: Law Firms Finally Embracing CRM for Business Development Tracking
What gets measured gets done. 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.
Business Development Pipeline Saves Time
But as competition for work has increased recently,
The CRM Hurdles
While you are running your race toward CRM success, sometimes you can get ahead of yourself – even though you paced yourself, hit your stride and were prepared to go the distance. Your goals are set, everyone is trained, the data quality is under control, the assistants aren’t complaining, the technology is chugging away – and, most importantly, your attorneys are actually using the system. Yep, it’s all downhill from here.
Then suddenly you run into the CRM hurdles: Out of nowhere, your key staff person quits. The venerable old server finally gives up. The attorneys’ new smart phones pour a river of personal and incomplete contacts into the database.
CRM On the Shelf
It’s easy to question the relevance of CRM now that there is newer technology on the market or because of the CRM implementations that failed to meet expectations in the past. What is more difficult is to take some responsibility for CRM failure.
CRM is about people, process and technology – and CRM failure in the past has been largely due to people and process issues, not the CRM technology. CRM requires a fundamental change in the way firms think about and manage relationships, and a lot of firms just weren’t prepared to deal with the change.