zoho implementation partner working with a client to implement a new CRM.

Zoho Implementation Partner

You’ve made the decision to move ahead with a CRM. You’re not migrating from another CRM system, but starting from scratch. Whether you’re on the search for a Zoho implementation partner or an Act! implementation partner—you’re in a very good place and poised to get off on the right foot. This is a great place to be because you’re not hindered with an old clunky CRM to influence how you move forward.

At this stage, you can and should approach implementing a CRM with caution. We encourage you to leverage the knowledge of a consultant to avoid common pitfalls. If you haven’t been implementing CRMs for 15 years then you’ll definitely want to take advantage of that experience. Whether or not it’s with us.

The first step is identifying your needs and goals. Once we’ve done that we can find a CRM that achieves those goals. From there it’s a matter of customizing the system, importing or migrating any data you have, and then training your users. Of course, there are some checks and balances along the way but this is the basic outline.

Migration and Importing

Whether you have a pre-existing CRM, Excel spreadsheets, or just an Outlook address book – migrating data is often a big piece of a CRM implementation. It seems simple, just get your data into Excel and then imported into the CRM. But there are some common mistakes that can be made during this step. Mistakes you might not find until it’s too late.

The most common issue with importing are duplicate records. When a user looks up a customer and finds two records how do they know which one to use? In our experience, they don’t know. They just pick one record and go for it. This means both records end up with valuable data. Avoiding duplicates in the first place should be your first step. Training users how to deal with them is the second step.

Another common issue with importing into a new CRM is messy data. This can be especially tragic if your CRM is brand new. Getting off on the right foot means having a nice clean database. As they say garbage in garbage out. There are three key aspects we examine during this phase of implementation.

  • Organization
  • Relevance
  • Field Density

Let’s examine each in more detail.

Organization During Migration

One of the most important aspects of any CRM is organization. When you glance at a record you need to be able to tell if it’s a prospect, customer, vendor, competitor, etc. Often data coming from sources like Outlook don’t have these kinds of organizational tags. Before bringing them into your CRM, we need to tag them correctly.

The benefit of have your records well-organized is fairly obvious. But one often-overlooked value is that marketing can become much more effective. If your records are targetable then your marketing efforts can be as well. E-marketing is still one of the biggest ROI you can expect. But not if your data is unorganized.

Relevance During Migration

If you’re like most business people you’ve been collecting contact data for years, sometimes decades. Chances are a lot of that data is no longer relevant or simply incorrect. Weeding out this old data can be a chore but is necessary to have a clean CRM.

E-marketing has changed quite a bit recently. Now if you’re caught sending an email blast to closed/canceled email addresses, you get in trouble. It’s become easy to get blacklisted. Preventing issues like that begins during this critical phase of your CRM implementation.

Field Density During Migration

This is a term used to discuss how well populated your CRM fields are. For example, let’s say you have a Fax field and out of your 5,000 records you only have 10 fax numbers – that’s bad field density. Having unnecessary fields is common. But there’s a right and a wrong way to deal with them. The main goal is to keep things streamlined.

Dealing with low-density fields needs to be addressed in multiple phases.

  • During the customization phase
  • During the import phase

During both of these phases we need to examine the value of every field in the system. Some high-value fields may have low density, so you won’t want to get rid of them completely. However, you don’t want them in the way of standard data input either.

Finding the right place for this data depends on the CRM system and whether or not you need the data for marketing purposes, reports, etc. The goal is a streamlined CRM that only asks for the pertinent data. Yet still has a place for some of the less common, but still important, data.

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