Just yesterday, I finally found what I consider is "the" critical building block of CRM.
With CRM, everything starts from the reps seat and works out from there. Everything.
If the system is not sales rep friendly, then everything is a mess. Customers get lost, reports are junk, reps just blindly push buttons to try to shut the schedules down to shut it up (because the choices don't match the reps needs). If the system is not intuitive for the sales rep, then we get the age old computer classic: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
So... what I have found is the single most important focus point to pull ROI out of CRM is to view CRM from the sales rep's seat.
One small example of a day in the life of a Sales rep (a ReyRey CRM user).
Reps have a handy "Daily Work Plan" page. It lists out all tasks that need to be done today. Reps have to manage mountains of communications, new prospects need to be called and emailed, old prospects need to be called and emailed, CSI calls, anniversary calls, you all know what I am talking about.. snail mail, emails, etc... all need to be executed.
Our reps (on average) have 70+ open tasks in their "Daily Work Plan" area every morning. That's right... 70 incomplete tasks, all presented in a multi-page list, but, NOT ALL TASKS ARE EQUAL. A rep wants to attack the fresh prospects that came in overnight. There is NO TASK RANKING SYSTEM. Reps need to be smart, so they have to manually review the list to find the fresh leads first...AND finding them fast is not easy.
Fresh prospects can be found in a different area. This is another UI flaw.
Note to CRM Project manager at ReyRey. Go old school. Listen to call center recordings. Go on tour. Go to dealers (large and small) and watch and observe. If you really want to fast track your platform, find a UI expert to help you produce more ROI for all players. Benchmark winners like SalesForce.com
