GOOD2USE Knowledge Network Basic Getting the Design Right

PC Knowledge Base - Getting the Design Right

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The correct design should reflect the goals of your CRM strategy. These might be:

To help sales people manage and close opportunities
To give sales managers a complete view of the pipeline, and to automate sales forecasting
To safeguard ownership of the sales pipeline, a key company asset
To make sure that your organisation has a full picture of every sales process
To provide a complete picture of every customer to those that need it within your organisation
To run and track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns
To provide better service for your customers

Many people will answer all of the above, and most both sales and marketing. If this is this case for you then it is best to start with the sales process and then bring the rest on line afterwards. Why? Because marketing and support teams are well disciplined people, used to and happy to accept automation, and they know that their tasks cannot be achieved without a system.
Sales people, on the other hand, are perfectly capable of making a sale without a CRM system so their co-operation cannot be taken for granted. So design your system so that it meets the needs of the sales people, and then fit marketing and support/service around that.

For sales people to use the system fully, it must be both useful to them and easy to use, so don't make the design too complicated. The more complicated the design is, the more fields you add to each screen, the more screens you have to go through to add a contact, the more barriers to successful adoption you will have erected.
Every extra field you ask the sales person to complete, especially mandatory ones, the greater the chance that the sales people will enter garbage, leave fields un-entered, or simple only use the system under duress.

So,

Start with the minimum design, not the ultimate, to get people using the system
Make sure that as many fields as possible have sensible defaults
Make sure that key fields that you wish to capture (like marketing source) are shown on standard reports so that if they are not completed it is evident

Design by Democracy or Dictatorship?

Should you solicit the views of everybody in each department, or should you simply impose a system because you know best?
Both approaches have their drawbacks. In the former 'design by committee', the risk is that in order to please everybody the resulting design will incorporate every feature ever invented, and then some more.
This will result in a complex system that will be expensive to purchase and set up, and then fail because people can't use it, or can't be bothered to use it.

Design by dictatorship will result in a lean minimalist system, easy and fast to use, but the risk is that other departments may reject it because they weren't consulted. You need to ask everybody want they want, ask them again what they really need, decide for yourself what the pay off is between functionality, cost and ease of use, then get everybody's buy in for the final design by cajoling and argument.

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