Top 4 challenges when switching CRM and how Workbooks overcomes them

Investing in CRM software is a big step for many companies, but what do you do if that investment doesn’t give you the return you expected? Stick with it and hope it will work out? Or switch to a system that will help your business drive revenue and streamline processes? It can seem like a daunting process, but it doesn’t have to be if you have help managing it.

Define your business outcomes

At Workbooks we start every project with a Workshop to define three things:

1. Why are you investing in CRM: What are the business outcomes you are looking to achieve?
2. How do we deliver those outcomes using CRM?
3. What technology, workflows and tools do you need?

Most CRM projects fail not because the software doesn’t work, but because the project didn’t deliver the business outcomes the organisation was expecting. You need to be clear on your business outcomes, define how those will be achieved and then translate that into a requirement for CRM.  To review what such a Workshop entails, who should take part and how to organise it for optimum results, click here.

Data Migration

This often is the primary reason why companies put off moving systems: how will our data get into a new system? What data should we move? How will we clean up all the duplicate records and improve our data quality?

Workbooks has a range of tools to make this process easy.  We have data migration connectors to many CRM platforms, allowing us to connect to systems like MS Dynamics and Salesforce, extract the data automatically and push it into Workbooks CRM. These connectors can continuously synchronise data between your old CRM platform and your new one, while you test the system and train users. Even if your data is in spreadsheets or an old legacy platform, we can extract and transform the data, so it can be loaded into Workbooks.

In addition, Workbooks offers a range of data quality tools, allowing you to import data from various sources and then de-duplicate and clean the data once it is in Workbooks.

User Adoption

If your current CRM isn’t working well, it is important you get your users excited about the benefits of a new system. The key to this is to achieve two things within the first phase of your new implementation:

1. Ensure the new CRM system does all the things the previous one did in phase one – ideally better. This is called the minimum viable product (MVP).  So plan some time for users to test the system (we call this User Acceptance Testing) to ensure they are going to be happy.
2. Identify a few features which are going to make their life easier. It might be a Mobile Client so they can access the system on their phone or iPad, or Outlook integration making it easy to synchronise emails and contacts, but highlight a couple of ‘Wow’ features.

By making sure the initial phase of the project go as smoothly as possible, you will take the users with you on the journey of change; they will be supportive and will adopt the system more quickly, increasing your time to value.

Integrations

Workbooks make it easy to integrate your CRM with other business applications you are using.  We have a pre-built integration into Office 365 and Google’s Office Suite, allowing your users to use Single Sign-On. We have hundreds of integrations available from Accounting Systems, Telephone Systems, Webinar Platforms to Payment Gateways. You can find more details on our Integrations Page.

As part of the Workbooks platform, we have our own ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Load) tool.  This is licences from Tibco and is called Scribe Online.  This allows us to build bi-directional synchronisation between business applications such as Microsoft Dynamics AX or Epicor. You can find more details here.

For simpler workflows to other cloud applications, we are part of the Zapier integration hub, allowing you to connect and push data back and forth to your favourite cloud applications.

In addition, we have an open API which allows us to pretty much integrate with any other application in the cloud or on premise.

Workbooks has successfully moved 100s of customers from other CRMs, by creating a seamless process to get any company off their existing CRM and quickly onto a new one, with the fastest move taking place in just 4 weeks. If you’re still unsure if a new system is the right move for you, read our 6 steps to switching CRM whitepaper.