Finding the Best Products and Services

Finding and organizing the resources that can help you build your CRM capabilities will require knowing what to look for in a vendor, how to evaluate vendors, and how to handle both the acquisition process and set up an ongoing relationship.

What to Look for in a Vendor

The following seven dimensions, or categories of evaluation criteria, will help you evaluate CRM product vendors. The criteria are kept intentionally broad to encompass not just CRM vendors, but also vendors of related services and products. The same criteria can be applied to all the prospective suppliers, giving you an organized product selection process.

Features and Functionality

Functionality is the key to a successful CRM system. Delivering the functionality that your business requires is the most important criteria. A functional CRM system will provide the basics, such as sales and service support and marketing automation. Often, purchased CRM systems will also provide functionality beyond your requirements, which can help you to expand your business practices in the long run.

Functionality also includes features such as the following:

• Complete customer view that enables you to view all contact and account information and history from a central location.

• Leads and opportunity routing and escalation, enabling you to convert leads to opportunities and track and manage opportunities through the sales cycle.

• Sales process management that enables you to use powerful workflow rules to automate stages in the selling process.

Many more features can be identified and reviewed in your vendor evaluations. It's up to you to determine which features you need the most and make sure they are available from the selected vendors.

Single View of Customer

CRM products should minimize the effort required to integrate and synchronize your customer information. Open standards architecture and a comprehensive customer data model help a product to meet these criteria.

The goal is to maintain a single view of the customer, no matter what separate system you're using or whether the information is in your accounting system or your online customer interface.

Integration with Customer Applications

The tightest coupling is usually required between CRM and other customer applications, such as contact management, opportunity management, and customer satisfaction measurement tools.

Successful integration in these areas means your business process can flow easily from one function to the next, whether all the functionality is housed in one system or is spread out across multiple applications.

Integration with Related Applications

Beyond the customer-facing applications, back-office systems process related information that also has to match the data in your CRM systems. The tighter the integration here, the greater ability you'll have for maintaining integrity of customer information and simplicity of updating customer records.

Architecture

The architecture of a system determines how it is built, how it is deployed, how easily it can be customized, and how flexible it is for integration with other applications. System architecture is an important variable in evaluating vendor solutions, and it should be considered in any purchase decision.

Some of the factors to consider in evaluating architectures include

• Platform— The Web servers, databases, and server machines that a CRM system requires or supports.

• Componentization— The extent to which the product is architected into reusable components. Includes the major components of the system, and how they are connected through component interfaces.

• Integration capabilities— The ability of the product to quickly and easily integrate with other applications.

• Ease of customization— How easily the product can be modified for special requirements, and extended to cover requirements that are not included out of the box.

• Internal structure— How the product is organized, including application logic, customer and other database models, and other features.

• Infrastructure— The operating system or runtime services that are utilized to support application processing, request handling, and database access.

Product Viability

How is the product doing in the market? How long has this product or an earlier generation of it been around, and how well do industry experts predict it will succeed?

The viability of a product must be considered so that you don't end up with a white elephant on your hands that becomes obsolete and loses vendor support for ongoing upgrades and maintenance.

Company Viability and Performance

Likewise, the viability of the vendor company itself should be carefully considered. Size of operations, number of employees, particularly in the service role, should all be scrutinized in vendor evaluation.

• Past Performance should be reviewed to assess customer satisfaction with the vendor on prior projects. References should be requested for validation of the information provided by the vendor.

• Management and Staffing Approach must be examined to assess the contractor's ability to effectively manage personnel, provide experienced and qualified key personnel, and respond rapidly to staffing requirements.

• Experience on Similar Projects indicates whether the contractor performed satisfactorily on similar projects regarding schedules, turnover rates, meeting costs, and success in performing the work. References should be requested for validation of the information provided by the vendor.

• Qualifications of Key Personnel should be requested to determine the ability of the contractor to hire, retain, and train qualified technical personnel similar to those required for the task.

• Understanding the Requirements means assessing whether the contractor has given sufficient evidence of having understood the stated business requirements.

• Technical Approach should be assessed in terms of whether the contractor has proposed a solution that is technically feasible and achievable within the constraints of the stated business requirements.

• Quality Assurance and Control Plan should indicate whether the contractor has a process for addressing quality of performance and a plan for ensuring that deliverables for this requirement will meet the quality standards addressed in the process.

Developing a Vendor SWOT Matrix

A good way of presenting an executive summary of your vendor research is to produce a vendor SWOT matrix. The left side of a vendor SWOT matrix lists the vendor name and address information, including Web site for easy reference. The headers across the top include: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Each cell of the document provides an analysis of these dimensions for each vendor.

See the “Use Case Corner” at the end of this chapter for an example of a Vendor SWOT matrix.

Contracts and Employment Agreements

It is not the goal of this book to provide legal advice on any product or vendor, and you should always consult your attorney for review of contracts and agreements. However, there are a few points that might be helpful in setting up a vendor contract:

• Technical issues— You will need to be very specific in technical terms about the end product you expect to receive, specifying not only functions and features, but particular technical information such as:

  • Database structures

  • Data models

  • Processing rules

  • Platforms and infrastructure supported

  • Electronic formats and delivery media

  • Availability schedules and remedies for late delivery

• Requests for proposal (RFP)— The request for proposal is a common document for soliciting vendor proposals. The typical RFP specifies your requirements in technical detail and provides a list of questions that the vendor should answer in submitting a proposal.

• Nondisclosure agreements— A common practice in vendor negotiations is to request a nondisclosure agreement be signed to protect intellectual property rights and strategic information about your company's plans. Visit http://www.williamsmullen.com/news/articles_detail/001.htm for a useful, generic primer on NDAs.

Handling Virtual Connections

When setting up a vendor relationship, you'll often find that most or many of your ongoing contacts will occur remotely. Here are some tips for handling the virtual relationship:

• Focus on managing by result— Get clear about your objectives and make them clear to your vendor, allowing mid-course corrections and adjustments as the project proceeds.

• Increase your use of electronic communication devices— Remote relationships can be just as responsive as the face-to-face kind, when participants will keep mobile phones handy and bridge the distance through increased availability.

• Review progress against objectives in teleconferences— Allow enough time to cover details in your phone conferences, being sure to communicate and deliver any documents for review well in advance, so participants have time to get them even with the occasional hiccup from email systems.

• Give more feedback— When you don't have the usual visual and body language cues to how people feel and what they're thinking, it's important to fill in the knowledge gap by providing and asking for increased feedback.

• Create trusting relationships— Focus on trust in the relationship, being careful to follow through on commitments and requesting the same kind of care from virtual participants.