Translating from Corporate CRM to Microsoft CRM for the SME

By getting connected with the online CRM community, you can benefit from the 10-plus years of accumulated experience that has been developed in the industry.

What to Look For

The following guidelines provide a roadmap to make the most of this resource:

• Look for best practices— Some of the most useful and informative offerings in the online CRM community are online case studies and descriptions of CRM experiences from which you can extract best practices. These practices can be applied to businesses of any size with a little thought and creativity.

• Use the literature— More literature about CRM exists online than you could ever possibly read through. Use this treasure of information to provide a basis for your efforts.

• Understand the concepts and principles of CRM— These are the same whether you're applying them to big businesses or small- to mid-size entities. If you visit the online CRM resource and gain an understanding of the concepts and principles of CRM, you'll be ahead of your competition just by virtue of exposure to what's being done in the industry.

• Adopt new business models and scale down for your size— when new business models appear in one vertical or one segment of the industry, it won't be long before they start to pop up in other areas. Monitoring the online community and making note of new models and practices that you can scale down or otherwise modify for your own use is a great way to keep pace with your industry.

A Word of Caution

Hopefully, this chapter has given you the enthusiasm to go out and make use of all the great resources that are available online, but perhaps a note of caution is in order as well. If you want to be welcomed on all the sites you visit, and not considered an intruder, consider the following guidelines for participating:

• Lurk before you leap— Unless you're experienced in participating in a particular online community, it's usually a good idea to hang out at a site and lurk for awhile before you make your first post—just to be sure you're familiar with the protocols of the community.

• Remember you might have different needs— Keep in mind that if you're a smaller company using CRM for the first time, you might have different needs than the typical participant in an online CRM community where most members are from larger enterprises. There's nothing wrong with being a newcomer and having different needs of course. In fact, savvy members of any community recognize that often it's the newer voices that bring a fresh perspective that helps the whole community. Just be sensitive to your impact in this regard.

• Defer to the norms of the community— Just because you've been participating in one community that allows flames and encourages outlandish behavior, doesn't mean that every site is the same way. It's best to identify the norms of your new community and “when in Rome…”