What is a CRM software?

When you start a business and are few months into it, you find that many other business owners are using something they call a CRM software to manage their business. So you are compelled to think you also somehow should follow the herd effect and start using a CRM as the first step. Why do I call it a 'herd effect'? We will come to that in a separate post. Right now, let's say you decided you want to use a CRM. You sign up for one of the popular CRM software in the market like Zoho CRM, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and start entering data. I see that business owners put in a lot of effort to do a detailed comparison of the various CRM software in the market. But they don't put as much effort to find out how to use the software they finally choose. Actually the effort should be in reverse. To be frank, in today's competitive software landscape, almost every CRM in the market is equal, at least the top players. They necessarily have to keep upgrading their features to match the others top players, lest they will easily be pushed out of the game. So you don't need to break your head to decide which one to use. It's like comparing a brown colored coffee machine, and a black colored one. Doesn't matter which one you get ; it's going to have nearly the same set of features. Having said that, your effort should predominantly go into how to use the CRM software to effectively run your business. 

Many people think it's straight-forward. Am afraid it's not, as I have repeatedly seen business owners struggling at a later stage to do some of their process design and workflows in the CRM. They conclude the issue is with the CRM, and then try to switch to another CRM software, only to find,a year or two later, that they are stuck with the same problem. So the thing is that, before you start using your CRM software (doesn't matter which brand of CRM you are using), there needs to be a CRM design phase. 

This is where you sit with someone who knows CRM systems well, to chart out your business processes and workflows, and then do extensive brain storming on how to model your business processes and business workflows in the CRM. I call this the Meditative Phase. 

It’s truly a meditation … meditating on your business, meditating on your processes. This is a beautiful phase. When I work on this phase with the business owners, it is truly revealing. The business owner also discovers, along the way, several lacunae in his processes and goes back to the drawing board, with his team, to try and fix them and come back to the Meditation Phase. But this doesn’t mean that all the brainstorming is over and there will no more be any meditative phase. This is similar to breathing deeply while in meditation, but then all other time, you are definitely breathing too!  So, meditative phase has to happen on and off regularly while implementing the CRM design. However, it will be the most intense initially.

When you perform the Meditative phase, it is crucial to understand what you are looking at. I would suggest you start with your sales process first. Slice and dice it extensively. If possible, come up with few diagrams explaining your sales process in detail, and on how you are planning to model it in the CRM. I will go over this in more detail in the next post.

Until then, happy Meditating! :)