Top 5 tips to eliminate data silos – Pt III

Understand your requirements before selecting a maintenance work order app platform, so you know what will work for you and your organization’s needs.

Select a platform that will fit your sales organization structure and help you reach your goals.

Here, we’ll outline the vendor criteria and selection workflow. By following each step, you’ll be in a position to choose the right platform.

This isn’t a process to skip: selecting the wrong vendor can be an expensive and time-consuming process to fix, so choose wisely.

A primer on The manufacturing software evaluation process

Before you can document your requirements and shortlist vendors, you must conduct some preliminary research.

This is a method of “soft research” that helps you measure the overall CRM landscape. Here are the categories to familiarize yourself with:

1. Business Function: Many CRM Software platforms are tailored to specific business categories, roles and functions. Your choice of CRM will depend on company size, structure and principles. For example, do you value agile and cloud-based systems or is it less of a priority?
2. Costs: Get an understanding of the costing structure and typical pricing for each CRM platform you’re evaluating. Some may charge per user, while others add compulsory add-ons such as onboarding and data importing
3. Data Quality: How does each CRM handle customer data? Do they help with opportunity prioritization, and are there any data enrichment features to help with your personalization efforts?
4. Brand: How familiar are you with your ERP Software of choice? Do they have a good reputation in the space? Measure up their klout, user reviews (check out G2Crowd) and the value they deliver in their content.
5. Customization: How flexible does your CRM need to be? This will depend on the sales processes you build around your organization. We’ll cover processes in greater depth in the next section
6. Migration: Even if you’ve never used a CRM platform, you must work out how easy or time-consuming it will be to move your existing data into the new platform
7. Scale: If you have aggressive growth plans, you’ll need systems that can handle it. Even if you’re starting as a small, boutique company, you should consider how easy it is to scale as your business growth goals evolve.
8. Integration: It’s likely you’re using several other systems that will need to communicate with your customer relationship data. Customer support and marketing automation platforms are two of the most common. So, how well do the solutions you’re evaluating integrate into these existing systems?

Use this checklist as a quick criteria to fully understand the field service management software space. Even if you record this information in a notebook, it will help you get a bigger picture of the landscape.

Step 1: Create a requirements document

When evaluating CRM platforms, it’s best to reverse engineer and find a fit for your goals.

In other words, first decide what you want to achieve and what your chosen ngo accounting software must empower your sales teams to do. Then, work backwards to find a CRM or technology stack that helps you achieve those goals.

Documentation should start with a simple statement that summarizes what you wish to achieve. For example:

“Our chosen CRM must help my organization to track and prioritize sales opportunities, streamline and personalize outreach activities at scale, and provide ample reporting to provide insights at all levels of the business.”

With this defined, you can create a tailored checklist of features and requirements.

Earlier, you learned about the fundamental features all free job card management software platforms should offer. Use this list to create a checklist of feature requirements. For example:

1. Email integration
2. Reporting and customizable dashboards
3. Email templates and personalization
4. Pipeline management

As well as features, you should also consider onboarding and integration requirements:

1. Possible to import all existing customer data from your current CRM or Excel
2. Integrates with marketing automation platform
3. Syncs with customer success platform

Remember, your cold storage software solution has to play well with existing systems, so assess the simplicity of data migration and integration.

Step 2: Cloud vs. on-Site

These days, it’s common to use software that is hosted on the cloud.

And we may be biased, but we believe Cloud CRM is the safest and most scalable approach when implementing a job card software platform.

However, your chosen deployment method will vary depending on your needs. To remain impartial, we’ve listed out the benefits of each approach:

Cloud CRM:

• Less need for IT initiatives and infrastructure
• Fewer server or hardware costs
• Cost is scalable depending on the size of your sales organization
• Updates are taken care of by your provider
• Setup can take a matter of hours, not weeks
• GDPR compliant out of the box

On-Premise CRM:

• Manage in-house
• Control over your data
• Higher price-point means dedicated IT support
• Control over customization
• Not dependent on external servers

Choose your deployment method based on the goals and requirements you listed in the first step. Remember to work backwards, making your CRM vendor work for you.