The CRM Software Guide

July 25, 2007

WED 25 JUL 2007

4 Marketing hurdles when deploying a CRM software system By Tom Greenberg | click to add a comment Tag: crm software, crm system, crm solution, marketing

 

A Marketing department, often the most neglected when it comes to CRM solutions; will usually face critical issues when their company is deploying a CRM software solution. Here is a short list of issues and how to fix them.

1. Believe in the Integrated One-System idea

   Often more than not, different departments at a company use different unconnected systems to manage operations in what is known to be called data-silos. Integrated CRM solutions however connect these data silos by utilizing wall-to-wall one-system solutions, sometimes out-of-the-box.

   You must educate your employees in Marketing, Sales and Customer support on the benefits an integrated system brings to them to get their buy-in

2. Get your employees to buy-in CRM

   The best integrated CRM solution for your business will be quickly rendered obsolete if your employees will not use it.

3. Marketing First, not Last

   Since for a CRM vendor, marketing licenses represent less than 10% of an average deployment, some solutions lake major marketing automation features. Make sure your marketing department's opinion about a CRM software solution represents more than 10% of the final decision.

4. Integration, Integration, Integration

   Your marketing department might resist giving up their usual marketing tools for an integrated system. If this is the case, the make sure that the CRM system you are implementing can be integrated to traditional and in-house systems, and possible have a web services API if it is an on-demand solution,

In many cases, management-support for CRM solutions is critical in a successful CRM deployment. Make sure managers understand the sophistication of data security , user, and profile management and how it can help them hide any data they wish hidden from the normal user or employee; this will give your marketing managers the peace of mind they need to accept and adopt CRM and wall-to-wall software solutions.

Finally when selecting such a solution from traditional vendors such as Oracle or SAP, or from software-as-a-service vendors such as Netsuite or Salesboom.com, make sure that you engage professional services to quickly customize, configure, deploy and adopt the solutions.

WED 25 JUL 2007

Software-as-a-Service is good for the environment By Tom Greenberg | click to add a comment Tag: green software, crm software, crm, crm system, sal

 

Each person or company in North America has a carbon dioxide footprint that can be estimated in which it indicates how much damage each person or company is doing to our environment.

The SaaS Movement lead by CRM software vendors such as Salesforce.com and Salesboom.com are eliminating tens if not hundreds of thousands of servers and hardware equipment required by traditional CRM solutions by offering CRM as a service in a multi-tenant shared environment.

Also the fact that these applications are online, cuts on printing of user manuals greatly. From my experience CRM demonstrations, presentations and training sessions in the SaaS industry are also performed online saving on emissions released by traveling.

Ideally, a CRM vendor that offers it's solutions as a hosted service, should choose a solar powered hosting provider and become 100% friendly to our beloved environment. But until that happens, choosing a hosted CRM solution over a traditional installed one is a great contribution to save our earth.