The CRM Marathon Cheerleaders
by Raquel Lewis, CRM Success Consultant and Chris Fritsch, Client Success Consultant
CRM should be a team sport. Trying to go it alone in implementing a CRM is not only painful, it’s impossible. A number of key stakeholders should be drafted to help ensure success.
The Marketing team is critical for defining a CRM strategy and assisting in the planning, communication and training. They should work with CRM users to ensure the system provides value, helps build relationships and enhances business development efforts, rather than being perceived as a glorified Rolodex.
The support of the firm’s IT department is also essential.
The CRM Marathon: Plotting Your CRM Course
by Raquel Lewis, CRM Success Consultant and Chris Fritsch, Client Success Consultant
Before embarking on your CRM marathon, it’s important to plot the best course. To do this, it’s helpful to determine where you are now. Successful CRM implementations begin with a comprehensive assessment of your current situation. Think about the reasons your firm needs a CRM in the first place. What problems are you trying to solve? What processes are you trying to improve? What are you trying to accomplish?
With the information you gather from your needs assessment,
CRM Is A Marathon, Not A Sprint
by Raquel Lewis, CRM Success Consultant and Chris Fritsch, Client Success Consultant
When considering a CRM system, you may think that this is a technology that simply needs to be purchased, installed and implemented… but, in reality, that couldn’t be further from the truth. CRM is not a project, an initiative or a rollout. Rather, it’s a fundamental change, and an improvement, in how your firm manages and leverages its relationships. These relationships are critical to the success of the firm – which makes CRM essential for firm success.
It can actually be helpful to think of CRM as a marathon – a continuous and integral part of your marketing and business development efforts.
Winning the CRM War
by David Whiteside, Director, Client Growth & Success and Chris Fritsch, President & Client Success Consultant
There is an old military adage that goes, “No battle plan can withstand the first confrontation with the enemy.” This references the fact that war is often unpredictable, and no amount of planning can account for all possible outcomes. And yet, to even have a chance of winning, planning is critical.
To try to account for this vast uncertainty, the military uses war games. War games allow military leaders to test the myriad possible outcomes that may result based on different factors inherent in a battle.
The Dollars and Sense of Cleaning Up Your CRM Data
Few people will disagree that good CRM data is essential for effective marketing. Despite that fact, bad data has become endemic in marketing databases everywhere. Not only does this result in frustration for many marketers (and overtime work for many data stewards), it also has some significant hard costs associated with it. In fact, a few years ago, research from leading research and advisory company, Gartner, indicated that poor-quality data was costing organizations on average $14.2 million annually. On the other hand, clean, correct and complete contact data can positively impact your bottom line and lead to return on your marketing investments.
The CRM Framework
Once you have a solid CRM foundation to build upon, it’s time to begin building out the CRM framework for your system. Of course, the building blocks for every CRM are the contacts, including both people and companies.
CRM Contact “Building Blocks”
There are a number of considerations you need to think about related to your CRM contacts:
- Where is the information now?
- How much of the information should be moved into CRM?
- Will additional fields or notes be needed to capture information related to contacts?
- How will the contacts be related to each other or to entities?
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.
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.
Diving Into CRM
Have you ever heard the saying that you have to walk before you can run? It’s usually being spouted off by one of those really annoying self-important know-it-alls with all of their clever little sayings. You know, the ones who are usually all talk. Anyway, I’ve heard them say this about CRM too, but I disagree. Instead, I would say that CRM rollout is more like a triathlon: you have to swim before you can run (ok, a triathlon without the biking – and after swimming and running, most of us would be too tired to care about the biking anyway).
The Business Development Trickle Effect
Drip… drip… drip… That little drop of water trickling down the sink drain often seems pretty insignificant. But over time, those small drips add up. In fact, one drip per second is actually 86,400 drips in a day. In a year, a few little drips here and there can add up to between 500 and 2,000 gallons of wasted water. Now that seems a little more significant – especially if you’re the one paying the water bill.
Little Efforts Can Produce Big Results
It’s the same with business development. Little things can mean a lot. You don’t have to try to do lots of big things.