Sales force adoption is often the biggest hurdle for companies implementing a new CRM. Understanding how the CRM will support existing processes is key to successful implementation.
Deal Stages. What are the major steps in the team’s buying process? Effective deal stages are clearly defined and tied to a trackable action. Some common stages include call/demo scheduled, follow up email sent, proposal drafted, deal won, and deal lost.
Custom Fields. Most CRM's will come with basic fields like contact email, country and company website. But these fields will not cover information specific to a certain industry. Custom fields ensure a CRM holds all the important information for a specific company's marketing, sales, and services teams.
Lead Ownership. For a CRM system to be effective companies need clear rules dictating ownership of leads and accounts. Without this information, there will be a conflict between individual sales reps and more broadly between departments (for example, sales, and services).
Territory Carving. If a company uses geographic territories to determine sales ownership the CRM must be configured to store this information. Some CRM systems also enable automatic lead routing based on territory rules.
More Data into CRM.
Clean the Data. Don’t waste time importing old test contacts or fields that are no longer in use. Delete dirty data before migration to avoid confusing your sales team.
Discuss the possibility for errors and develop contingency plans. Whenever large amounts of data move from one system to another there is a risk of losing some information. Companies should save an offline copy of every file before uploading it to the new CRM.
Move Data in Sections. There is no reason move every piece of company data at once. Moving data in sections makes it easier to identify unexpected behavior during the migration.