10 tips to help with a successful CRM Implementation
One of the most important parts of any CRM project is the initial implementation, the process before your team ‘go-live’ with the final system – it’s the part of the project where you get to think how best to structure your data and processes in the new system, what you need to get out of it and what you can do differently.
I work with our customers to help them through this process and to lend my expertise when it is needed, both from a general CRM perspective and a Workbooks perspective. Here are my top 10 tips for planning a successful implementation:
- Don’t underestimate how much time it will take to migrate existing data – whether you use a spreadsheet, database, post-it notes, or a combination of all three, you are bound to have some data you want to move to your new CRM system.
Now is a great time to go through and cleanse your data, remove duplicates, tidy up addresses/people that have left or just take stock of what you have. - Make sure key staff are involved – your staff will be one of your most useful assets and have a wealth of information that can be pulled into the system, they will make your implementation a success or failure, and it’s good to keep them in the loop as you design your new system.
- Use this as a chance to rethink how you do things – with a new CRM system you have the chance to think about how you work and streamline your processes. Do you do things that are long winded/cumbersome? Now is the time to fix them, but be aware of point 4 below.
- Try not to prescribe people’s process – this ties in with point 2. Just because you need a management report that provides certain data, don’t force staff into long winded processes/ways of doing things that make their job more difficult. 95% of the time, your staff will know how to do their jobs and be able to help you design ways of recording and storing information so that you all get the most benefits from the system without making their lives unnecessarily difficult.
- Training – schedule in time for training, and make sure people aren’t being disturbed. A few minutes interruption during training can cost you hours or even days later on if they don’t pick up some key ways of working with your new system.
- Transition/Migration – try and plan the migration of data and transition to the system at a quite period in your business. If this isn’t possible try and make sure that you have some people available to help answer questions from within your organisation, or roll out the new system in a number of smaller, more manageable chunks.
- Don’t get bogged down in detail, you can refine as you go – yes it’s important to make sure you capture the key information you need in your new system, but don’t get too hung up about every single option in every single picklist, everywhere in the system. It’s easy to make changes and update options as you go. It will make the process easier and you’ll be able to build your CRM system as your business grows.
- Don’t skimp, time is money, let the experts do it – it’s often a false economy to implement your own CRM system. As experts we know lots of the common pitfalls and can implement ideas and processes in hours that may take you days. Is it really worth the time you will spend away from your business to save a few pounds? You’re the experts in your business, we know CRM, it’s a good combination to make an implementation successful.
- Don’t rush, make sure it’s right – taking point 7 into account, it’s important not to rush an implementation through. If you’ve only got a week before your year end, are your really going to make a successful go of a project with everything else you have on? Push it back a few weeks, work out how to make sure you can do everything properly and the rewards will be huge.
- Accept there will be some resistance – there are always some people who don’t like change, disagree with processes or the way things are happening (you’ve probably already met a few if you got this far!). We always suggest you have 2 ‘champions’ to head up a successful implementation who can be a ‘go-to’ between key departments in your organisation and are responsible for the ‘bigger picture’ in your project.
- K.I.S.S. – as an added bonus: if in doubt, ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’. Do you have 2 ways you could do something? Always work with the simpler of the two. It’s much easier to add a bit of detail rather than trying to take away from an overly complicated process.
Follow these simple ideas and you should be well on the way to a successful implementation. Remember, if in doubt you can always give us a call.
Workbooks Summer Release – ships in 2 weeks.
As a SaaS business we are releasing new versions of our software every 3-4 months. Having completed our weekly QA meeting today, I’m pleased to announce we have set a release date of Friday the 23rd of July for Workbooks CRM and Workbooks Business.
This release (in common with nearly all our releases) has several significant new areas of functionality, plus lots of minor improvements based on feedback from our customers and prospects.
The new areas of functionality include:
Email Dropbox
This allows our customers to automatically store emails sent from any email client in Workbooks. It’s pretty simple to use, you just need to add a special address on the ‘cc’ or ‘bcc’ line of the email you are sending, and it will be automatically sent to Workbooks and stored against the relevant records.
Alternatively, if you have received an email from a client and you want to store it in Workbooks, you just need to forward it to the drop box address.
We are also developing a specific ‘plug-in’ for Microsoft Outlook which will also synchronise addresses and diary entries; this will be released later in the year.
I really like the drop box functionality because it’s simple to use, and importantly it works from any email client. It’s especially useful for me as I’m increasingly using my iPad as my email client of choice.
Bulletins
(also known as MOTD – Message of the day, not Match of the Day!)
This functionality allows us to communicate with users more effectively. It allows us to ‘pop-up’ useful information for first-time users and also to publish ‘hints & tips’ on a regular basis inside Workbooks, rather than people having to visit our knowledge base.
Summary Tab
We’ve also added a ‘Summary Tab’ to the majority of records. In the case of People and Organisations this gives a consolidated view of all the Notes, Activities, Emails, Opportunities, Cases and Documents they have been involved in.
It’s a really simple way of quickly getting a picture of what a Person or Organisation has been up to.
As I mentioned, the new release goes live in a couple of weeks but we are always looking for customers to join our beta program, so if you’re interested email us at beta@workbooks.com
Need your numbers now?
In my ‘previous life’ as a Management Accountant, it was my job to supply the management team with the monthly management accounts together with operational and sales statistics and analysis. The monthly accounts although important were generally disregarded in favour of the more detailed performance reports on which managers were being judged and from which decisions can be based.
Sales and marketing managers unsurprisingly were interested in the reported sales performance for their areas of responsibility. The analysis would generally be a mixture of financial breakdowns as well as volume based data and when combined with budgets were all used to generate performance indicators to show how well the organisation was doing.
All of this information was all generated by the accounts department from processing transactions into an accounting system which was only accessible by the accounts people. Generally there was at least a week’s delay, often two, after each accounting period was over before these reports were available. In larger companies it is not uncommon for a period of 3 weeks to be required to get the monthly accounts published.
In a fast moving environment, waiting weeks for sales information arising from the beginning of a month can be at the very least frustrating. Understanding and monitoring performance in this way can result in decisions not being made as quickly as they could be, to correct or exploit any emerging trends. Accounting systems are necessary to provide control and statutory reporting but because of their very nature are not generally the right tool to generate analysis reports in a timely manner. Reports from accounting systems also can be very prescriptive and largely depend on the chart of accounts structure, and if new reports are required this will normally involve a considerable amount of work to make them available.
At Workbooks we take the view that the full sales process including the generation of orders and invoices i.e. ‘prospect to cash’ should all be part of the CRM system and reports and dashboards should be updated in real time. We have therefore designed our service in this way so that Sales, and for users of Supplier Orders or Schemes, Gross Margin information, can be viewed simply by logging in to the service and their dashboard and read the graphs and charts change as transactions are processed live. Sales numbers can be sliced and diced and based on whatever makes sense to the organisation, i.e. by product, market sector, geography or combinations of these, and not by what was determined many years ago when the accounting system was set up.
There are many benefits of integrating the Sales order process inside the CRM, which will, or have already been, covered by other blog entries, the point I am trying to make is simply that we understand that you need your numbers now!
The Problem with Scheduled Downtime
One of the things which surprises me about IT systems, whether SaaS or not, is the amount of time that upgrades take as systems grow, their often inconvenient timing, and the impact the resulting downtime can have.
Whilst not as damaging as the unscheduled variety, scheduled downtime still has an impact: with international travel it’s not uncommon for your colleagues in distant timezones to need to access and update your data, at what are otherwise unsocial hours. Or, if your system is based in another continent an “out of hours” upgrade can happen at the most inconvenient time (for our UK users, the good news is that we are UK-based so the timing of our scheduled outages is less likely to be a problem). But, regardless of where our users are, we want to reduce the duration and minimise the impact of our scheduled outages.
So we do all we can to reduce scheduled downtime. We have always kept the frequency of system updates to a minimum and considered their timing carefully – for example by adopting a quarterly cycle for major releases – but now we’re taking advantage of Workbooks’ architecture to do things a little differently.
One reason why upgrades are time-consuming is because they involve changes to how data is stored and organised, and the more data that you have to modify at the same time the slower things will get. At Workbooks we’ve taken a different approach from our competitors as to how we store customer data: for security and scalability that data is completely segmented into separate databases for each customer. Amongst other advantages this means we can process upgrades one customer at a time and prioritise the processing of updates for customers who attempt to access the system in the minutes just after the upgrade has been initiated. Because many customers don’t actually access their data at night over the weekend this means that we can reduce scheduled downtime for those that do. We can also run more of the upgrade in parallel further reducing its duration.
I’m pleased that we’ll be using this new scheme for all future upgrades, starting with our next major release.
Don’t make me think!
It has been some time since I read ‘Don’t make me think’ by Steve Krug, which is a book about human-computer interaction and web usability, and although he was primarily discussing commercial websites, a lot of what he says is also true in relation to business software applications.
Making business applications intuitive and easy to understand can be as important as the functionality the system is attempting to provide. The benefits expected to be accrued from the implementation of a new business system can only be maximised if the user-base can readily absorb the new processes and support the change.
Improvements to quality & efficiency, reduction in support burden, and hopefully the system being seen by its users as a pleasure to work with, rather than a hindrance, are a few of the direct benefits which can attributed to a well thought out user interface.
With the rapid improvements in web technology it has become easier to produce web-based applications with a clean and intuitive interface, which users are quick to adopt.
At Workbooks we took the decision to build a ‘Windows Like’ desktop interface, so using Workbooks is a lot like using Windows. You can debate the merits of the Windows interface, but one thing is certain: everyone knows how it works, which means Workbooks’ users spend less time learning the product and more time being productive.
If you want to see the user interface there is a short video below. It’s well worth taking a look and hopefully you’ll agree that it won’t make you think!
Business Start-up and Raising Funding
Last week I was invited along to the Business Start-up Show at ExCeL in Docklands to talk to budding entrepreneurs about how to raise external funding.
Having recently closed a second round of Angel investment, I was asked to talk about my experiences and what types of things potential investors what to discuss.
In the current financial climate when Banks are seemingly only lending money to established businesses, Angel investors and Venture Capitalists are pretty much the only source of funding for business that needs capital to fund R&D.
Both VCs and Angels are pretty savvy investors, so a key theme of my presentation was about operational execution and the importance of really understanding how to target prospects and execute a sales and marketing strategy.
They know the importance of clearly defining your ‘go-to-market’ strategy and tracking KPIs within a business, so if you want them to invest their hard earned money in your venture, you really should have good answers to questions like:
- Who is your target market?
- How are you going to acquire your customers?
- How many leads do you need to make a sale?
- How long is your sales cycle?
- Why are you more likely to succeed than your competitors?
The presentation was well attended and lots of people asked for copies of the slides – so I’ve uploaded them here.
Your data is safe with us
One of the questions we’re often asked is “how can my data be secure if it’s on the Internet” or some variant of it. Before I give the Workbooks answer (the short version is “at Workbooks we take data security very seriously indeed”), I’d like to run through a little corporate history.
A decade ago (our company then was known as Activis) security became our number one priority – we were responsible for managing and maintaining over four hundred firewalls for a hundred corporate clients from three locations (UK, Germany and the USA). As you can imagine protecting the keys to the firewalls at the heart of our clients’ information security was something we had to do in ways which stood up to scrutiny from our clients – often these were Information Security Officers and the like. Multiple layers of security – “the onion model” – and completely redundant systems including redundant operating centers were central to the solution.
John mentioned BlackSpider in a previous article. BlackSpider was our next venture and it specialised in email security – at its core it was concerned with the detection and blocking of e-mail threats including early-stage viruses which the traditional anti-virus industry was unable to combat effectively. From the beginning we built data security into the core of our systems and we extended Information Security – through the implementation of something called an Information Security Management System – throughout the whole company. So we gained certification (to the “gold standard”: ISO 27001) not only of our SaaS systems but also of Information Security in our HR processes and our CRM processes.
Information Security – as any expert should tell you – isn’t just about keeping your data secret: it’s also about ensuring it is available when you need it, and that it can be believed. In the industry jargon you ensure information’s “Confidentiality, Availability and Integrity”.
With the the advent of Workbooks, information security remains uppermost in our minds. We began with our “clean sheet of paper”; one early decision was to store customer data in completely separate databases – this helps with the Confidentiality bit – for example you no longer need to worry about accidentally picking up some other customer’s data when generating a report; it also helps keep performance consistent because within customer-specific databases you have much smaller indexes (but that’s probably for a future blog article).
The “onion model” at Workbooks looks a little like this:
- Physical security of our servers is achieved through their being located in inconspicuous buildings with 24×7 manned security, CCTV-monitored data centres with biometric systems and certified entry procedures.
- Availability is achieved through using buildings with redundant power and airconditioning systems and through the use of two physically-separate locations with a high-speed network connecting them. Our policy is to implement systems with no single points of failure. All hardware has remote-management capability.
- Network security is achieved through the application of multiple layers of protection, including packet filters/ACLs, firewalls, and other techniques which are confidential. External specialist organisations are used to vulnerability scan at the network level and do more involved penetration testing. All data transfer happens under strong encryption; all access to Workbooks secure website uses 256-bit SSL together with an Extended-Validation certificate.
- Careful design. All systems are built on the principle of ‘least privilege’ such that processes run with the minimum set of capabilities and software is not present on the operational systems unless it is specifically required. The operating system is under tight version control and we monitor for reports of security vulnerabilities in the OS and its components.
- Our Development and QA processes are geared towards a controlled release cycle with a focus on avoiding security vulnerabilities and data corruption. The processes are extensive and include both automated and manual testing at many levels: unit, integration, system and functional. System changes are only permitted under a full Change Control process with signoff by senior Workbooks management.
- Data is accessed and copied only over strongly-encrypted connections. We implement separate databases for each customer to add an additional layer of security above an extensive Permissions/Capabilities model which allows functions to be limited to specific roles or groups of users. Underpinning all data storage is a row-level security model which allows users to hold private data securely and permits control to read, modify, write, change access or change ownership on a record-by-records basis.
- As described above, each customer’s data is held separately which enables us to offer customers the ability to receive a file export of all of their data; this could be used to recover customer data in the complete absence of the Workbooks service.
- Workbooks’ development and customer support staff do not have access to live customer data without the customer’s prior permission which the customer grants through the use of the Workbooks service itself.
Finally, our customers are encouraged to help themselves. By default we set password security options for all our customers to enforce secure passwords. There is no substitute for keeping those passwords secure and hard to guess!
This is a public blog article so I’ve had to be a little circumspect with some of the details but hopefully I’ve answered the question; if you want to know more we’re always happy to discuss things in a little more detail privately.
Giving your sales a MEDICAL
At Workbooks.com we are frequently engaged with organisations who are looking to improve their sales execution. So I wanted to share a set of slides that Edward Berks our VP of sales put together on the importance of a sales process and a common language in sales and marketing.
We hope you find them useful.
The buck stops here
As with IT generally, there are a lot of facets to “cloud computing”. Some companies deliver cloud services for end-users (facebook or Microsoft’s hotmail for example). Some, like Workbooks, deliver services for other companies. And some companies deliver services to support other companies’ delivery of cloud services.
Amazon Web Services is perhaps the leading provider to such services – it is a division of Amazon which many organisations use to power their IT services by providing them with computer and storage capacity “on demand”. If you take Amazon’s Web Services’ main offering – EC2 – then you are renting “virtual machine instances”. These are systems on which you can run your own operating system and they share a portion of the underlying hardware’s resources. You are of course sharing hardware with other EC2 customers and it’s down to chance whether your fellow virtual machine users are resource hogs or not. So there are now cloud services which help you manage your Amazon Web Services and it’s perhaps unsurprising that some of them report variations in EC2’s performance.
This last category poses an interesting question if you believe in the power of the cloud computing model: if you are going to deliver cloud services yourself, should you rely on other cloud services to deliver some of your underlying components? Certainly a model where Workbooks was built upon cloud services from other providers would have its advantages: we’d only pay for exactly what we used, and it would be very easy and very fast to add capacity: simply order some more and turn it on, on demand.
When things go according to plan, everyone’s happy. But if things become unreliable it’s Workbooks which our customers would see failing – and those customers would be right to expect Workbooks to stand behind the service and remedy it. Excuses such as “it’s our supplier’s fault” just wouldn’t cut it. When you have very large third-parties delivering components of the service it’s unlikely that Workbooks’ top priority would be their top priority.
Basically, we think that the cloud model is something which works – brilliantly – where there’s a simple customer/supplier relationship but that it can break down when there are hierarchies of services unless you think very carefully about how you will deal with the contingencies. It’s a little different from traditional business relationships where you have the luxury of at least a little time to sort out most issues: we need our infrastructure to be always available and reliable. We don’t want to be involved in trying to diagnose a third-party infrastructure (like EC2) and having the responsibility to sort out issues within it without having the ability to do so.
So we took a different route. We built our own infrastructure and we are responsible for its management – right down to the hardware. Although we do use third parties for some of the components, there is always redundancy: multiple networks, multiple locations. If a provider fails to deliver a service we can call on an alternative so we can be certain we can deliver the service levels we commit to in our SLA. Maybe we will use some Amazon services in the future but if we do they’ll be non-core and we’ll be sure to have a backup plan.
5 Reasons to choose SaaS over traditional software
For small and medium size organisations, Web based applications like Workbooks.com provide a much more cost effective way to deliver effective I.T. to your business. Here are five reasons why:
Simplicity
With applications delivered on-line, all the complexity of the underlying IT is no longer your problem. At Workbooks.com our customers don’t worry about upgrading hardware, or which operating system version supports which database, or which VPN will work. We take care of the IT complexity so you don’t have to. You just need a computer with a web browser and you can access your business applications from anywhere.
Guaranteed Levels of Service
At Workbooks.com we guarantee your applications will be available 99.5% of the time. In the event we don’t deliver (which has not happened to date) there are penalties to be paid by us. Typically with most traditional software you get no guarantee on how well it will perform.
Cost Effective Pricing
There are a number of reasons why we are able to deliver ‘enterprise class’ applications to our customers at a much more cost effective price than traditional software. Including the fact our infrastructure is shared across multiple customers, so there isn’t the cost of unused I.T.. Because we don’t ship traditional software and have a controlled environment we don’t have to test our software with different versions of operating systems and databases, or write installations manuals or write upgrade guides for our customers. All these reasons allow us to produce solutions at a much more cost effective price.
Security
For the majority of our customers their key business information is more secure in Workbooks than it was in their previous I.T. systems. At Workbooks.com we run two geographically separate datacenters which contain the I.T. infrastructure to deliver our applications. Both datacenters have virtually identical equipment and your data is automatically replicated between the two. So in the unfortunate event that a disaster occurs such as a bomb or a fire in one of the centers, the second datacenter can continue delivering the Workbooks service. In addition to this highly available infrastructure we maintain a rolling backup of your data. All our customers benefit from this common infrastructure, although we do keep each customers’ data in a separate database to ensure your data remains confidential. Compare this infrastructure to what you have in place today: What would happen if there was a fire at your building? How quickly could you get new servers, reinstall all the relevant software? and How current are your backups? Would you be down for just a few days or would it be weeks? What impact would the downtime and potential loss of data have on your business?
Long Term Customer Relationship
We believe that this last point to be the most significant. At Workbooks.com we charge you an annual fee for the service. The truth is by the time we take into account the sales and marketing costs of acquiring a new customers and the money we have already spent on the infrastructure we don’t make any profit in the first year of the relationship. So it’s important that you stay with us for several years. This means we are very focused on ensuring you remain happy customers over the long term. You can contrast this with traditional software vendors who make the majority of their profit on the initial software license sale and have a relatively small ongoing support fee. Their focus is on getting you to buy the license and not necessarily the longer term view.