CRM & SYSTEMS SELECTION
CRM selection is one of the most consistently failed technology decisions in business. The evaluation focuses on features; the implementation focuses on configuration; the failure happens twelve months later when adoption is low, data is incomplete, and the sales team has reverted to spreadsheets.
We run CRM and systems selection engagements that start with your sales and service process rather than with a vendor shortlist. The process gets mapped, the requirements get documented, and only then do vendors get evaluated against them.
The outcome of a CRM selection engagement is not a software licence. It is a system your team actually uses, configured for the process they actually run, with the data they actually need to manage their relationships and their pipeline.
REQUIREMENTS DEFINITION
We run structured sessions with your sales, marketing and service teams to document what the CRM needs to do, in the language of the workflow rather than in CRM feature terminology. Requirements documented this way survive the gap between evaluation and implementation, because the team who will use the system was involved in defining what it needs to do.
VENDOR EVALUATION
We run structured evaluations with each shortlisted vendor, testing against your specific documented requirements rather than following the vendor’s standard demo script. Reference checks with organisations at similar scale and similar process complexity are part of the evaluation, not optional extras if time allows.
IMPLEMENTATION OVERSIGHT
The gap between what a CRM was selected to do and what it is configured to do during implementation is where most CRM projects fail. We provide oversight during the build phase, reviewing configuration decisions as they are made and ensuring that time pressure during implementation does not produce a system that works but does not do what the business needed it to do.
PROCESS MAPPING
A CRM configured around the vendor’s default workflow rather than your actual process requires the team to adapt their behaviour to the software. Most do not. We map your process in detail, including the informal steps that live outside any current system, so the configuration reflects how your team actually sells, not an idealised version of it.
DATA MIGRATION PLANNING
CRM migrations that treat data as an afterthought tend to discover that their contact records are incomplete, duplicated or miscategorised after the cutover, at which point the team loses confidence in the new system before it has had a chance to prove its value. We plan the data migration before the implementation begins, including cleansing, deduplication and mapping to the new schema.
ADOPTION PLANNING
A CRM that went live and was not adopted is a failed project regardless of how well it was configured. We design the adoption programme before implementation completes, training structure, manager accountability, data quality monitoring, and the early success metrics that tell you whether adoption is on track or needs intervention before the window closes.
We map the process before speaking to any vendor. A CRM selected to support a process that was never documented will be configured around assumptions about how the team works, usually wrong ones. Process documentation is not a pre-engagement deliverable; it is the first deliverable.
Adoption is not a post-implementation concern. We design for adoption from the start, which features to configure, which to leave unconfigured, what data to require and what to make optional, because a system that is technically complete but practically unusable is not a successful implementation.
A CRM that launches with migrated data that has not been cleansed, deduplicated and validated starts with a deficit that compounds. Data migration is a first-class deliverable in every implementation, not a task assigned to whoever has capacity in the final week before go-live.
