“When someone touches a cross, a peach bear cub should cry” * - this is perhaps the cutest requirement that I have ever met (but, fortunately, did not implement). It was formulated by an employee with 12 years of experience in the same company. Did you understand what she needs (answer at the end)? A confident second place is occupied by this: “Billing should be launched at my request, the desire is expressed on a mobile phone” **.
Indeed, users who are far from IT often cannot formulate their requirements and behave rather strangely with developers. Therefore, we decided to write an article accessible to everyone: it will help ordinary users and non-IT businesses to easily formulate requirements, but for us, IT people, the topic is to discuss and share experience.
The user avoids responsibility for claims
If you look at the requests that people write about CRM in social networks or in specialized communities, there is something to be surprised at. Lots of outraged posts about not being able to find CRM for long sales, engine oil distribution, outdoor advertising agencies, etc. And if a person is engaged in wholesale sales of hay, then they are looking for CRM Seno version and nothing else. But in the process of communicating with the vendor, such requests somehow immediately disappear, because the person who chooses CRM is immersed in the topic and understands that modern are able to solve the problems of almost any business - it's not about the industry version, but about the settings and individual improvements.
So where do inadequate requirements come from?
- Main reason - misunderstanding of the essence of the CRM system as a technology. Any modern CRM system basically has many different tables that are interconnected by key fields with certain values (those who are not familiar with the DBMS, but once worked with MS Access, will easily remember this visualization). An interface is built on top of these tables: desktop or on the web, it doesn’t matter. Working with the interface, you are actually working with the same tables. As a rule, the tasks of absolutely any business can be solved by customizing the interface, creating new objects and new connections in conjunction with the simultaneous provision of the logic of their interaction. (revision).
Yes, it happens that the field of activity of the company requires some special solutions: medicine, construction, real estate, engineering. They have their own profile solutions (for example, for TV and radio holdings and outdoor advertising operators - media planning, work with editing lists and on-air references, and management of advertising placements are implemented in a special way).
But in general, small businesses can use a CRM system even without modifications and cover all the needs of operational work. Precisely because CRM is created as a universal solution for business automation. And how effective it will be for your company depends on how it will be configured and filled with data (for example, RegionSoft CRM has several cool tools that can be adapted exactly to the needs of a particular business and even its departments: business process editor , a customizable calculator for building calculations of product parameters, a mechanism for setting complex KPIs - and these are suitable mechanisms for any company).
- A business representative knows about CRM from others, the opinion is based on someone else's negative experience. He believes that something similar will happen to him, not suspecting that his acquaintance will never say “I didn’t understand CRM” or “I squeezed money for implementation and training, and now I’m suffering”, no, he will blame the developer or vendors “sucked me into this CRM”, “sold it to the bushes”, etc. These guys often decide that the vendor should spend hours of employees' time for free (I can’t understand why they don’t require free maintenance and a daily car wash from the manufacturer or dealer, but calmly pay the cost of maintenance of an official dealer.
- Potential customers believe that since there is someone on the market who offers CRM for free (with a bunch of restrictions and stars), then the rest should just give away CRM systems. About 4000 people search for free CRM in Yandex every month. What they hope for is unclear, because in fact any free CRM, if it is designed for more than one person, is just a stripped-down demo version and a marketing tool.
There are other reasons as well, but these three come by a wide margin. It is rather difficult to work with such clients, since they already have a formed image of the ideal CRM in their opinion and they often wait for an answer to their question like: “No, you will give me a CRM for sales of Sever brand refrigeration equipment or I should call Germany and order SAP? At the same time, the budget for the implementation of CRM is only enough for a call to this very Germany. It sounds a little evil, but in fact, going with an ultimatum to CRM developers is much less productive than discussing requirements and listening to experienced implementers.
How to formulate requirements?
Functional requirements
Determine what you need to improve in the company - this will be your key requirement for . There are four most common tasks for which companies are thinking about buying CRM.
- Improving work efficiency. If the sales team in the first place and the whole company as a whole gets bogged down in administration, misses important events and loses customers, forgets to complete tasks on time, then the program needs help in managing time and tasks. And this means that among your first requirements should be a cool client card, various schedulers and the ability to quickly collect information on clients in a single database. Pretty standard requirements. At this stage, you can make an additional requirement - business process automation, which streamlines the routine in a business of any size.
- Increasing sales volume. If you need more sales, especially during the crisis, which is now circling over our already gray-haired heads, then you have key subtasks: collecting complete information about the client, segmenting and personalizing customer calls, fast work with closing a deal, and an informative sales funnel . All this is also available in standard CRM systems.
- Worker Performance Tracking (not to be confused with employee time control, we do not play on this field!). Here everything is already more interesting. It is very easy to find a CRM that will solve the two previous tasks, it is much more difficult to find a CRM with KPI, it is not at all easy to find a CRM with a real, multi-criteria, analytical KPI mechanism (if you are looking for, then we have and above, and KPI in it). If your chosen CRM system does not have a KPI system, you can ask for such a refinement, but it will most likely be quite expensive, because it is practically a separate module for any software.
- Security. At first glance, CRM does not apply to corporate security tools. But automation without security management looks untenable. Often, the choice of CRM leads to the desire of the manager to get rid of gray schemes, kickbacks and "their personal" customers from salespeople. The CRM system stores data, saves the client base from attempts to copy and transfer to third parties, thanks to the separation of access rights, it helps to control the circle of clients and the competencies of each employee. And note - you control and make safe work activities directly, and not employees' time at work.
As a rule, requirements are formulated not for one of the listed tasks, but for several. This is true: since modern CRM has long become CRM ++, why not use its capabilities not only for the sales department, but for the entire company at once. For example, a calendar, telephony, schedulers, customer records and business processes can be used by all employees of the company. As a result, the whole team is collected in one interface. The optimal way, especially now, in conditions of remote and partially remote work.
By listing the functions that you need and trying them on for real processes in the company, you formulate the functional requirements for CRM. The matter is not limited to them.
Additional requirements for CRM
Small businesses today have such a situation that these very additional requirements are of paramount importance, because CRM will not work immediately, but you need to pay here and now, you need to integrate work services right away, train employees immediately. In general, it all comes down to costs.
How to estimate the cost of CRM?
We had , but it outlines a universal approach that can be applied both for an individual entrepreneur for 3 people and for a telecom operator for 1500 employees. For small businesses, the situation looks somewhat different - and even more so we urge you to look at it differently in the current crisis.
So, you need CRM and you have 10 employees in your company, each of which you want to connect to a single information resource of the company - let (we have no right to consider other people's decisions).
If you decide to buy CRM, then you will pay 134 rubles for all licenses once (as of July 700). On the one hand, this is the best way: pay and forget, these 2020 thousand will not grow either in a year or in three. If, for example, you rent a cloud-based CRM, then in the first month you will pay only 134.7 rubles, but in a year it will be 9000, in two - 108, in three - 000 (and then, if you do without annual price indexation) .
But! We know that a business may not have 134 now, and CRM is needed more than ever during a crisis. Therefore, we have an installment plan - 700 per month and rent - 11 233 per month with redemption option. At the same time, you get not some reduced package of functions, but the same powerful edition.
We made this calculation not only for the sake of advertising. If you come to a vendor, you should correctly formulate price requirements.
- Don't ask for a free version - you will actually sell it to yourself (because it's free) and fall into a marketing hook: in the end you buy it anyway, but you get a little pissed off with communication, and then you get pissed off due to functionality limitations.
- If you are not ready to pay a year of rent or the entire cost of an on-premise solution, discuss the possibility of installments and discrete payments.
- Never order a revision right away if you are not sure that the feature is needed right now and it is not in CRM. Better start using the CRM system and gradually formulate what you need to improve and how this improvement will be used in the company.
- Check with the vendor what additional costs are required: for someone it is a paid external mail client, a mandatory connection to a single IP telephony operator, a technical support package, and so on. These costs can come as a sudden and unpleasant surprise.
- Find out the cost of implementation and training - in 90% of cases these are justified expenses that pay off due to the quick and correct start of work in the CRM system.
And remember: money should not be the only requirement! If you focus only on the cost of the program, then most likely you simply won’t be able to choose the solution that your business needs.
So, we have dealt with the two most important requirements: the functionality of the CRM system and the money that has to be paid for it.
What other requirements may be for CRM?
- Load on the CRM system. Tell the vendor how much information is planned to be added to the database daily, how it should be stored and what backups to have. For most modern CRM, this is still a fundamental point that can affect the speed of work, cost, delivery model, etc.
- Possible settings. Discuss in advance which settings are especially important to you. This can be a sales funnel, an email client, mailing lists, a mandatory distribution of access rights, etc. As a rule, here the wishes are the most specific.
- Compatibility with existing infrastructure. Specify what integrations are possible, how telephony is organized, what server hardware is required and whether it is required (for desktop CRM systems). See what software from your zoo intersects CRM and discard it to save money and put things in order.
- Security. If you have specific security requirements, please discuss them separately, as not all of them may be met for some types of software delivery. Specify the timing and frequency of creating backups, as well as specify whether this service is paid or not.
- Technical support. We recommend buying a paid priority support package from all CRM providers for the first year - this way you will be much calmer. In any case, make sure that technical support is available and clarify the boundaries of its provision.
- Cloud or desktop. The eternal dispute from the category of Apple vs Samsung, Canon vs Nikon, Linux vs Windows. In short, the desktop is ultimately cheaper, in some places safer and faster to use, the licenses belong to you and will not be lost along with the vendor. The cloud is more convenient for young, novice teams when personal implementation or refinement is not required. The scalability of both types of CRM delivery is the same.
Top user mistakes when describing requirements
- Get into the little things. As a rule, almost any little thing can be customized, it is much more important to pay attention to how CRM is consistent with your business processes. If you think that the most important thing in CRM is a dashboard with data or the ability to replace the developer’s logo with your own (by the way, it’s easy in RegionSoft CRM), talk to your colleagues — they will help you collect requirements, describing all the shortcomings of their business processes in a very colorful way.
- Turn software requirements into a shopping list. You carefully read all the reviews, social networks, Habr, other portals, watch demo versions of all CRM systems and methodically write down everything that interests you in any way, and then dump this whole long list on the most suitable vendor. And he, the poor man, does not understand why he should develop a corporate portal, a claims management system, an accounting module, and a traffic and document management system for a small trading company in one bottle.
Choose only what you really need and what you can work with. Because we can design an ekranoplan for you at a certain level of payment, but a) it will be expensive; b) why do you need it? In general, choose a CRM system for a normal working life, and not for admiring a set of modules and features - it may simply not pay off.
- Include fantasies and desires in the requirements. Specify in the requirements what you really want to do in business and will use; tasks set in a vacuum and out of touch with reality will cause harm: you will waste time discussing them and not get a result.
- Talk to the vendor like a robot. If you communicate directly with a CRM developer (and not with an affiliate network), then you should know: we are not only programmers and engineers, we are, first of all, the same business as you. Therefore, tell us about your problems, we will understand them perfectly and suggest how CRM will solve these problems. We are not just solution providers, in most cases we combine the CRM story with an analysis of your business problems. Therefore, speak with developers in a normal, human language. Tell us why you suddenly became interested in a CRM system and we will explain to you how to implement it in the best way.
- Be inflexible and stubborn in every wording. Pay attention to how the vendor proposes to solve your problems - he already has experience in hundreds of automation projects and his engineers often offer the most effective solution of all possible. For example, a client may insist on requiring BPMN 2.0 notation to describe processes (because it was well “sold” at a CIO conference) and not recognize alternatives, and then try a convenient native business process editor and make sure that ALL of his employees can use it deal with business processes. Choosing convenient and practical, rather than trendy and expensive solutions is an ideal practice for small businesses that spend their money on automation, and not the bottomless budget of a corporation.
- Talk about CRM in general, not about a specific system. When communicating with a vendor, talk specifically about his CRM system, request a detailed presentation, ask detailed questions on the merits. So you can understand what tasks of your business this particular CRM system can solve.
A well-planned collection of requirements is the key to success in choosing a CRM system. If you equate requirements with "wishlist" and "friend's advice", you will get a poorly adapted for your business , which will suck up resources and will not bring tangible benefits. Each implementation project is labor and resources on both sides, so it is better to be honest with the implementers so as not to ruin the entire project at the very beginning. Your great friend is a CRM developer, who, by the way, is not profitable to offer his software for any requirements. It is important for him that you successfully work in the system, and not just buy it. Anyway, it is important for us. Let's be friends!
And finally, a simple way to determine if the CRM implementation has succeeded: if you use CRM and the speed of business processes has increased, the implementation has been carried out correctly and your business has become more efficient.
(carefully, 77 MB)
Deciphering the requirements from the introduction
*“When someone touches a cross, a peach bear cub should cry” - it was necessary to fasten a “dont live popup” - a picture with a discount that would pop up when trying to close the page. The crying bear cub seemed the most convincing animal.
** “Billing should be launched at my request, the desire is expressed on a mobile phone” - billing must be launched manually by an ACS employee after receiving an SMS from a commerce employee about the completion of settlements with partners.
Source: habr.com