Saturday, March 1, 2008

How to Select the Right CRM Solution

So you run a business and you wish to select a CRM solution that is a perfect fit for your company. There is a plethora of CRM alternatives out there, you need to select the best based on a few criteria. You have to be in a position to ask the right questions so that you can get the required information about software capabilities and vendor appropriateness.

Consider the following points:

  • What are your prime requirements; targeted marketing, customer retention, adding to the customer base, business intelligence, or a combination of these
  • Is your staff prepared to move on to a CRM system and work on the deployment
  • Do you have the IT strength to run and maintain a CRM deployment
  • What is your financial capacity to endure a sustained deployment process
  • Is your business better suited to SaaS or an on-premise CRM deployment
  • What is the extent of database integration that is required
  • Will your legacy systems work with your new CRM deployment
  • What will be the cost of upgrades
  • Is the vendor reliable, what is his past track record
  • At what point will your CRM system yield an ROI

If you search for answers to these questions, you will not go wrong with your CRM selection.

1 comment:

Ghanshyam said...

Thanks for sharing this candid article. CRM is an investment. Hence organizations need to think on a lot of dimensions before selecting the right CRM solution. If you are going to provide handheld devices to your sales-force, make sure that your opted CRM solutions can be deployed across a variety of devices and platforms, including iPhones, iPads and Androids; like CRM on iPhone or CRM on iPad or CRM on Android, etc.