Despite all the end user pain, constant complaints, and a lot of insightful research on a new CRM system, you have delayed the decision to switch due to the usual reasons — time and money.
Any of the following scenarios sound familiar to you?
- Adoption level of your legacy CRM system has slowed or dropped. Salespeople have reverted to either managing their sales activities with pen and paper, using an email client for contact management, or installing a single user copy of a recent version contact manager.
- Your team doesn’t trust the data in your legacy system because no one has been keeping it current, relevant, or actionable. This has led to a lot of manual work to get around the system deficiencies.
- Your marketing team won’t speak to you because they can’t integrate the company’s legacy CRM system or data with an email provider that works for them, with an inbound marketing system, or with a marketing automation system. They have become experts at exporting lists from one system and importing into another.
- Customer service is using an old system or spreadsheets to log and manage customer service issues. The system works ok when issues are phoned in, but it can’t support the direct submission of complaints, questions, or issues via a website form or via email. Customer issues that are emailed get distributed to five or more people.
- You lost your legacy CRM system developer. You are multiple versions and several years back on the software. You might have one guy in IT who knows how to keep the current system running, but that’s about it.
- Management is requesting real time reporting, but your team is still spending an enormous amount of time manually generating forecast spreadsheets each week. By Monday, these are no longer real time.
- Your annual software subscription renewal is due again and it has gone up – again! While you hate to just pay it, you don’t think you have time to look for a new solution before your subscription runs out. You are afraid you will lose your data and not get it into a new system in time.
If so, you need to migrate to a new CRM system.
Yes, moving to a new CRM system will cost money. Internal resources will need to be involved. But the expense of waiting to implement a new CRM system have been steadily increasing as the worlds of sales, marketing and customer support go through major transformations.
The team at xRM3 has been through this with clients and prospects before. Let us sit with you to develop a migration plan that makes sense – from a process and financial sense.
By Ken Farmer, President, Dyn365Pros, a Microsoft Partner, San Diego County Southern California.
