Is your company looking to implement a new CRM system? If so, there are many reasons why it makes sense to hire a CRM consultant. Many businesses do not have the resources or the manpower to effectively manage a successful CRM implementation.
Even if your company does have an individual stakeholder to successfully manage the transition, there are still many other reasons why hiring a CRM consultant often makes more sense than the alternative.
Here are the top 8 reasons for hiring a CRM consultant:
A CRM consultant has years of CRM expertise and they thoroughly know the marketplace
Most businesses do not have a person on staff who is an expert of the CRM marketplace. This means that any internal resources are going to have to learn on the fly. Companies who fail to hire an expert will have to spend money and man hours getting their internal resources up to speed.
By hiring a CRM consultant, you get the benefit of hiring an expert who already has the expertise necessary to maximize the success of the implementation. You don’t have to spend money training your internal resources who, in the end, will only know a fraction of what a CRM consultant has learned over many years.
2. A CRM consultant can bring best practices and helpful experiences from other industries to your business.
Most CRM consultants have years of experience implementing CRM systems. This gives them the benefit of learning what works and also what doesn’t work. These experiences can be considered for your implementation to help make it better. This will lead to a better CRM system design.
3. A CRM consultant can objectively define and document your business processes.
The key word here is OBJECTIVELY. By having an internal stakeholder define and document business practices, some of the objectively necessary for the process to be successful is often lost. Having an outside CRM consultant brings it back because the consultant doesn’t work for the company. This will help you gather better requirements and consequently guarantee a better CRM implementation.
4. A CRM consultant will discover how your staff ACTUALLY does their job, not how managers THINK they do it.
One of the most common mistakes made in a CRM implementation is a failure to accurately capture how a person does their job. A manager may THINK he or she knows how the team does their job. However, there is often a gap between what the manager thinks and what is actually happening on a day to day basis.
If the way a job is being done is not accurately captured this will result in an implementation that may fail to capture important considerations. The end result is a CRM implementation that has an application that is either not used or that slows down the employee. Having a CRM consultant actually find out how the job is being done avoids this. This will lead to a more user-friendly (and used) CRM.
5. A CRM consultant can help you prioritize and weigh your requirements based on your actual processes, not generic CRM requirements.
A CRM consultant deals with a number of clients over the years looking to successfully implement CRM. The benefit to this is it helps the business understand what they actually need specifically. This will prevent you from asking for requirements that don’t apply to your business.
6. A CRM consultant knows the current CRM landscape and can suggest platforms that are strong today and have a good roadmap for the future.
Another common mistake made by companies purchasing CRM is not knowing the full scope of what is available, the benefits and the shortcomings. You may implement a CRM system that works well now, but may not work well in the future. Even better, you won’t purchase a platform that peaked five years ago.
7. A CRM consultant can evaluate if it’s better to integrate a CRM with a current tool you love, try to custom build a specific functionality into the CRM platform, or use a pre-built third party integration/solution.
The benefit to this is huge! Many businesses that implement CRM waste a lot of time and resources trying to get CRM to integrate well with other tools that they already have. Other businesses waste time trying to design customized functionality from scratch, not recognizing that there is a third party solution already available that can provide the necessary functionality.
A good CRM consultant is aware of many of these issues and can help you circumvent them successfully. With a CRM consultant you receive a custom solution that satisfies your business needs.
8. A CRM consultant can prioritize the proper amount of time to run a thorough evaluation, instead of asking your internal staff to do their “regular” jobs plus the CRM project!
When a business implements a CRM application and uses internal resources, most of the time these resources are going to be doing this in addition to their current job. This is an inefficient and ineffective way to do an implementation.
Having a company employee do this takes away from their ability to do their existing job and it also takes away their ability to maximize the implementation of a CRM system. The benefit to having an outside consultant do it is you can be confident you conducted your CRM evaluation with the utmost due diligence and efficiency.
Don’t make the same mistakes many other businesses have made. Invest in a CRM expert instead.
