The case history
- The Client: Digital Services Company
- Location: London
- Dimension: 140 employees
- Turnover: 50+ mil
- The Challenge
The company had been using an upmarket CRM for over 4 years, but lately they had figured out that many of the services and features of that CRM were not used at all.
Their sales process is long and of high complexity, this is because deals are worth over 6 figures which results the specific way salespeople have to work.
When the sales director came to us, he had his concerns about the idea of switching their CRM, interested in doing although apprehensive. It is always a challenge when you change a software, even more so when you have 20+ people using it every day for years and you run a risk of destroying their habits and procedures. But he moved on with his decision quite quickly: the feeling of lack of efficiency in sales process management was pressuring him.
Also the provider selection was straightforward: ability to prove the capability of running a project like this, but also being a reliable organisation, were the requirements to win the deal. At easyCRM we are not just programmers dealing with software implementation, but well educated and extensively experienced marketers who have designed, developed and used several different CRMs in organisations to run marketing projects. The sales process is our focus, we then deploy the digital tool that empowers teams to run their sales process at the best.
You wonder: how can marketing skills create value on a CRM migration project?
Well, if one system is like the other, then you expect to just move data from one to the other. But when it comes to data management, especially about CRM, this is not the case. CRM should be a system designed around the very sales process of a company: pipeline stages, activities to do, clients audiences and data architecture are all related to a specific organisation.
You would think that once the setting is done into one system you would expect to just move that setting into another system, isn’t it? Some services do offer this type of migration done by a software, in theory you just have to provide your credentials for both CRMs and the software starts copying everything. Just in theory.
Then why an organisation, more so a digital services provider, would have to outsource the CRM migration?
Well, we can argue that a “shoemender often wears broken shoes” (an Italian expression), but it is not just that; of course it can be harder to run a project internally taking away resources, always scarce from clients paid projects. It is a more reliable solution, instead, outsource the project to someone who is able to get it done in a more effective/efficient way.
Actually, it is mainly about focus: being focused on a technology and its purpose, but also having the know-why of it. It is something that can really make a valuable difference to the project outcome. Effective people know it: they are capable of allocating the right resources to each project. If project time and cost are the parameters whilst the outcome is the project purpose to pursue, effective people are focused on the best setting to use resources wisely, according to the purpose value.
In this CRM migration, we had to manage dozens of tables linked via alphanumeric IDs, each table had dozens and dozens of fields also customised by users. The whole DB was quite big and this was just the technical side of the problem that a software could solve.
We used SQL and spreadsheets to carefully manage tables that were linked in new tables to rejoin, but also verify their content, validate it, and verify the data architecture to avoid useless data to be migrated. This is something that a software cannot do: the logic behind the data architecture, the reason why in a system you have some data and not others, although in another system you better collect the data in different ways. Creating the information is the purpose, but how to create it, using data, is something mainly related to the business itself but also strongly connected to the digital tool you are going to set up.
Do you use CRM to its full potential?
We can add what we found in a recent study, an incredible number of 75% of companies that use a CRM do not use it at its full potential. We cannot assess if the study is really accountable, but it resonates with our experience: over 20+ years working with organisations in marketing, having seen dozens of CRMs we rarely, if ever, have met an organisation using the CRM to its full capability. Here it doesn’t really matter if organisations that can improve their CRM use are 7 or 8 out of 10, even only 6 would be enough to show that CRM is largely misunderstood. When organisations create their business tools internally, quite often these are not deployed to their full potential. If you run a business, it is worth spending your time on it, not creating the tools to manage that business. Great drivers know how to fix their cars, but they rely on the technicians who can make it perfect. They do not build and repair cars, they drive them ‘till the last lap. And they eventually win.
In this migration the client also took the opportunity to rethink the use of CRM: how to shape it around the sales process to stick with its requirements, it is something we can better rethink when we are about to change the system.
Know-why
The most important contribution that easyCRM can deliver to an organisation is the know-why: knowing why the CRM works this way and how we can make it work better in order to really support your sales process at its best, can make a huge difference. We know why problems happen, we know why people do not like the system, we know why a specific sales process works this way and what are the activities that matter to get a client on board. It doesn’t mean we win all the time, but it is a pleasure when we play. It is a pleasure for the sales people and for the whole organisation that finds the real value of using the CRM. This is the reason why a CRM should be easy to use, simple and effective.
Client voice
“We are extremely happy with the outcome of this project. We were using Salesforce since the company founding, however last year we started to check if other solutions would be more user-friendly. easyCRM made us test Pipedrive in order to decide if it was the solution for us. We then planned the migration with a little apprehension, I have to say. Our company is an information technology provider, well established in the London market. We run quite big IT projects and we are well aware of the difficulties when you deal with migrating data from completely different systems. Well done!”
-Sholto V.
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