How To Choose A New CRM.
Get "The Ultimate Action Plan For A New CRM".
This invaluable Action Plan will guide you through the steps for selecting the perfect CRM system for your business. It proposes an independent and unbiased process that will help you assess your business functions, choose the right system, and deploy it effectively.
The Action Plan begins with your first steps in choosing a new CRM system.
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Understand the needs of your business
What can today's businesses gain from a new CRM system? Consider the financial and efficiency benefits.
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What should you expect from a new CRM system?
Many things will have changed since you last looked at CRM systems: AI and automation, cloud-computing, hundreds of ways to keep in touch, and customisation.
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Planning for a new CRM system.
Identify the risks so you can avoid them. Don't be part of the 50-70% of CRM deployments that fail.
Join our webinar on choosing a new CRM system.
Thursday, 7th August 2025; 3PM (BST) (British Summer Time)
Join Steve Baxter and Chinia Waterman for a live discussion of the issues covered in the Action Plan. They will go through the steps for choosing a new CRM and sprinkle in the entertaining (and sometimes embarrassing) anecdotes, opinions and heresies that were excised from it.
Even if you can't make the webinar on the day, we'll send all registrants the recording and the presentation notes.
REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR
New CRM - it's not just about the sales team.
A CRM's primary role will always be to support the sales team. Our Action Plan goes further, covering the departments, partners and industries that could benefit from your new CRM.
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Departments within your business.
The Action Plan covers how a new CRM can affect marketing, customer support, operations, finance, IT and compliance.
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Your customers and suppliers.
Consider how a new CRM system will change the way you do business with customers and suppliers. The Action Plan covers ways to make sure the changes are improvements for you and them.
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CRM helps so many industries.
CRM is not a niche technology. The Action Plan illustrates how it can help diverse industries like retail, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, hospitality, travel, and non-profits.
The foundations of your new CRM system.
Unglamorous, yes, but planning is the most important phase of your selection process. Understanding where you are is essential to getting to where you want to be.
Current processes.
The Action Plan will use real-life examples to encourage you to consider the sales and marketing processes your business currently follows.
Streamline your processes.
Investigating your processes will inevitably reveal some areas of improvement, redundancy and overlap. The Action Plan's examples will help you identify them.
Define your sales pipeline.
The Action Plan will help you consider how simple or sophisticated you want your sales pipeline to be. Do the benefits of extra stages outweigh the complexity of using them?
Incorporate social selling.
The Action Plan will guide you through incorporating social media into your CRM structure. Will it be part of your sales process, after-sales process or just brand building?
Consider other departments.
The Action Plan will guide your research into how far you can automate the processes that exchange information with other departments.
Plan with customers and suppliers.
The Action Plan will help you liaise with customer and suppliers, understanding their business processes so yours dove-tail efficiently with them.
Plan security and access.
This is not a benign world populated by saints. The Action Plan will take you through some of the factors you need to consider when treading that fine line between easy access for users and strong protection against hackers.
Selecting your perfect CRM system.
Once you know what your new new CRM system has to do, you need a process that will help you to choose between the alternatives.
Creating an evaluation process.
The Action Plan discusses the pros and cons of different scoring systems: do you want to use weighting or not, which non-product factors do you want to add to the mix, etc?
Creating a requirements brief.
The Action Plan moves on to the exciting stages: contact with the outside world. Turn your requirements and scoring system into a brief you can send to potential suppliers.
Successfully implementing your new CRM system.
Although the Action Plan's main focus is on selecting your new CRM system, it goes on to discuss some of the critical stages in deploying it.
Turning CRM plans into actions.
Whether you have a Systems Integrator's help or not, the implementation will cover setting up basic details, disabling some modules, customising others, cleansing data prior to import, initial roll-out, automation, integration, training and more.
Tracking the success of your CRM system.
When you first started planning for a new CRM system, you will have had some problems to solve or goals to achieve. Put measures in place to show that you have got the results you needed.
KPIs and targets.
Your new CRM system will certainly improve your internal processes but its biggest benefit may be its ability to report instantly and accurately on the performance of your business. The Action Plan will help you decide which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are most relevant to you, what targets you should set and how to produce reports and dashboards to illustrate your progress.
