How to Plan a Roadmap for Your CRM System
So what’s the secret of ensuring that your CRM system is adequately aligned to your organization’s business strategy, maximizing its long-term value? The answer is developing a CRM roadmap.
In this article, we’ll discuss how you can successfully prepare your business for CRM implementation while ensuring your organization puts the necessary pieces in place to exceed your customer base’s needs consistently.
The Benefits and Importance of Laying Out your CRM Roadmap
When trying to get the most benefit out of your CRM system, it’s essential that you take the time necessary to establish a transparent and well-documented CRM roadmap. But why is this the case?
First of all, a CRM roadmap allows you the opportunity to audit or identify new CRM integration phases designed to help you get the most value out of your system. Some of these phases include:
- Setting clear goals and expectations of the platform
- Identifying business pain points associated with your current CRM solution
- Collecting all relevant business data for seamless integration
- Documenting appropriate workflows and processes
- Paving a sustainable path for long-term company adoption
Constructing a CRM roadmap before system integration allows you to organize all of your business functions ahead of time, establishing a clear picture of how your CRM system can help improve your workflows and bridge communication gaps between your teams. CRM implementations not only help you to organize and prioritize partner and customer outreach, but they’re also a catalyst for breaking down siloed departments and improving internal communication best practices.
A CRM roadmap allows businesses to visualize all elements of their integration path, ensuring that integration projects are on time and on budget–from start to finish–while bringing the return on investment they should.
Determining What Each Department Needs Out of a CRM
To ensure company-wide adoption of your new CRM solution, first, you should determine what each department needs from the system. Of course, this can vary from business to business. However, by following a CRM roadmap, you’ll be able to identify each relevant department or stakeholder in the organization that should be involved in the planning and implementation stages. This typically involves working with all forward-facing departments, including sales, marketing, and customer support, to address their CRM needs.
Once relevant stakeholders have been identified, you can map out your current systems and processes to ensure that your new CRM fills all department needs. This can be achieved by creating cross-departmental workflows that unify the way the organization uses its CRM system while also focusing on the satisfaction of each individual department’s needs.
This added transparency across multiple departments helps to throttle expectations on the timeline associated with CRM implementations, giving you the context on priorities necessary to stagger the integration of your system over several months or years as needed.
Putting It All Together
Equally important as the information that makes up your CRM roadmap is how to present it. Like any building blueprint, your CRM system’s purpose and integration strategy need to be clearly understood by more than one person, and often this means ensuring that your roadmap is easy to follow both contextually and visually.
One way to achieve this is by laying the roadmap out visually with images and workflows, so it’s easier to digest during the implementation process. This eliminates the need to read large amounts of text and creates a visual aid in charts and process maps that limit room for error.
Another method of preparing your CRM roadmap is by using premade templates formatted in word documents or PDFs that help you create an organized and systematic process for reviewing and presenting your roadmap with applicable timelines and milestones.
Regardless of how your organization operates, the critical thing to remember is that there are multiple ways to present your CRM roadmap when starting down an integration path. However, to ensure you’re getting the most value out of your CRM integration, it may be beneficial to work with business professionals who can help you take the necessary steps.
Faye is a business and strategy consulting firm that helps organizations simplify their IT and business processes, including CRM integrations and road mapping. As business transformation and software implementation experts, Faye provides you with the tools needed to start building your CRM roadmap quickly and efficiently. Make full use of your CRM system while positioning your organization for better sustainability and growth.
Contact us today for more information on how Faye can help you with your business’s CRM initiatives.