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Customer Reviews
Business management has always been about maintaining a fine balance between the science and the art of selling. At the heart of this timeless debate is the customer; they are critical to your enterprise's future and decide whether you can butter your bread (or will have it plain and rough).
This means it pays to engage in meaningful Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which is essentially about knowing the customer. It is a suite of technological solutions with qualitative inputs weaved in to ensure you can serve the customer better. With proven effectiveness, CRM is indispensable for most businesses. Yet, it can be taxing, and pretty ineffective, to have a CRM installed for your business, without taking stock of your unique requirements from it.
This blog gives you practical and useful Top 5 CRM Requirements Templates that makes it easier to take a call on the CRM solution best-suited to your unique needs. All our presentation templates are 100% customizable and editable, and meant to equip you well on your way to improved business results using CRM.
Let us start the tour.
Template 1:Â CRM Software Requirements Matrix for Customer Data Management
CRM is a tool to interact better with the customer, and better still, record and analyze that experience for analysis. A good CRM software has to be able to offer outstanding customer data management. Use this template to know what this means in practice. Compare CRM software on parameters like secured web access, integration with other applications, contact and lead management, customer service, marketing, sales, etc. Each of these is a critical input that will make your CRM decision clear and easy. Download now.
Template 2: Business Core Processes CRM Requirements
This PPT Template gives you the perfect-fit use case for Business Core Process CRM Requirements. Broadly, a CRM must offer you the functionality in the five broad domains of managing opportunities (sales methodology support, direct versus other channels, etc.); manage bids and contracts; manage agreements; manage pipeline performance, and plan sales and managing territory (geographies, etc.). Forecasting, guidelines planning, etc. is important to pipeline performance. Use this presentation template to list your CRM requirements as aligned to your broad objectives and the mission and vision for your business. Get it now!
Template 3: Business Requirements CRM
This PPT Template, with its exquisite design, is meant to ensure that your CRM Requirements are actually linked to the way customers respond to your products and services. If your business driver for CRM management is their design preference, then the CRM Requirements list has to have it as a variable. If the primary stakeholders see the business drivers in a particular way, that also has to be incorporated. An example is a toy manufacturer having to balance between a child’s need for creative, safe toys versus the average parent’s capacity to pay. Who the customeris, then, makes a vital and visible difference to your CRM Requirements? Use this PPT Template to make sure your CRM Requirements submission to the vendor are in sync with the unique critical success factors for your business, changes you expect over time, and the solutions you offer. Download now!
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Template 4: Checklist for CRM Business Requirements
This is the classical template that serves the purposes of CRM Business Requirements to a T. It is a checklist, so it is initially itself, designed to be of greater use to businesses than any other kind of template. It starts with Contact Management (i.e., contacting the customer) as the first step, followed by lead management, wherein you see what kind the product is, scheme or service will help you convert a lead. Sales automation is another major CRM requirement of most businesses. Ensure you have it here, with the covered checkmark, on the list of this practical template. Finally, with workflow management and security of all your systems, reach a stage where you could be in a position to ask for knowledge management from your CRM vendor or the in-house providers(if you are lucky enough to have one). Download now!
Template 5: CRM Implementation for Fulfilling Business Requirements
Managing customer relationships is a brilliant philosophical guide for businesses, yet CRM requirements, when put in black and white, have to actually integrate into your processes. Hence, paying attention to these is critical or you could end up wasting a lot of effort without gaining anything meaningful. This PPT Template draws up a roadmap for you to decide on CRM Requirements with care and ensures you will always have the optimum package at your disposal. The first step is obvious, but hard to define in practice, which is determining the business requirements from CRM. After this is done, identifying a suitable CRM vendor is the key. Then, the budget to buy the CRM package and how to train employees are also important considerations. Use this PPT Template to ensure your CRM becomes an integral part of all your processes, with everybody on the same page on it. This single factor will help you make a success out of it. Download now!
Service, service, and more service
Customer relationship management is all about making sure that your business makes the best use of its resources for their service. You may spend millions of dollars on business development, but if you take the customer for granted, it will simply not fly. Even as CRM is vital, it all starts with the service you provide to customers. Ensure that your business treats customer service as a revenue center than a cost center, with a download of our comprehensive course on customer service, with training material included. Access the course that will help you delight customers with a click here.
P.S. With customers increasingly getting relevant for business policies and the kind of products and services are offered to them at scale, diversity and inclusion has become a key variable as well for businesses, who are global. Know how diversity, inclusion and equity can make a business gain immeasurable customer respect with our comprehensive training module on diversity and inclusion, with training material included. Click here to access the course.
FAQs on CRM Requirements
What are the key requirements of a CRM?
The key requirements of a well-organized, modern and relevant CRM are many. The major ones are centralizing customer information. A functional CRM system is also expected to automate sales, the way you service customers and boost productivity. It has to improve the forecasting power of your business and help devise a system for both contact, and then lead, management. Product and Pricing configuration also form part of the way a good CRM tool helps businesses. Even marketing segmentation is a functionality that your CRM Requirements template should include. At the end of the day, the aim is to crack the customer behavior code within all realms of possibility.
What are the three types of CRM?
There are, in theory, broadly three types of CRM and the requirements and the ultimate business thus, depends on these. The three types are:
- Operational: In this kind, the aim of the entire effort is to make operations as smooth as possible so that the customer feels part of the system. E.g.: In a hotel, with the customer living with the product and the service you create (room types, sizes, the service, the pantry, the aroma and even the noise level around, it is critical that the entire hotel staff are aware that operational CRM is critical here to guest satisfaction. Unexplained delay in room service means your CRM has not worked; in some hotels, we even have the provision for people to be woken up on demand for breakfast. An operational CRM makes it possible.
- Analytical: In this kind of CRM, you prove your business skills in prediction and analyzing buying behavior of the customer, and being ready for it. For example, which color sells most in the rose flower export business?
- CollaborativeCRM: In this type, the aim is to ensure you can improve the customer experience and automate functions so that all departments work in unison and, always, broadly remain on the same page. It is like one integrated customer service department in most businesses or ensuring a single-window clearance in government operations.
What are the key questions to ask before buying and integrating a CRM into your business?
A CRM requirement or the package itself is unique for industries and then individual businesses. If you don’t answer the right questions here or do not maintain a checklist of your customized requirements, no CRM can work. The first question then to ask is on what is your ultimate goal from the use of a CRM; then you decide on the baseline figure on how much money you can spend. Also, keep in mind the relevant questions for your knowledge and comfort-level with IT.
Another key question is to decide on the pace at which you want to grow, and any unique task that you need your CRM to perform.
