Today's post is written by Matt Weiler, a Principal Architect at Sonoma Partners.
Here at Sonoma Partners, we've been using Dynamics CRM to run our business since the heady days of CRM 1.0. Microsoft likes to call using the product you're selling "dogfooding", as in, eating your own dog food. We just think it's smart business.
Not only is Microsoft Dynamics CRM a good product that can work well for any business, but in working with the product ourselves, we know where it's strong and know where it might need a little bit of help. Developing for our internal system gives us practice identifying pain points in our business and thinking about how CRM can help make them go away. We don't want to just take orders, we want to really understand your business and make sure you're getting the most out of your CRM implementation.
We have a special name for our internal CRM; appropriately enough for a company named after a wine region, we call our CRM Grapevine (and we think you should brand CRM, too!).
As our business has grown and technology has changed, we've continually evaluated how we do what we do in Grapevine, and we've added, updated, and enhanced it appropriately.
One of the key benefits of CRM we've found is: you can get something basic up and running very quickly. Create a new entity, create some new fields, design some views and forms, create a process flow, a few processes, and some business logic rules to handle some simple validation, assign security, and boom, you're ready to start entering data. In many cases, that's all you'll ever need.
Think about it. If the data is entered in front of a computer, is fairly independent, and doesn't have a lot of relationships with other data; you may continue to use that setup for years to come.
But if this process is one of the core processes of our business, or if it becomes one of them over time, you'll soon discover that a completely out-of-the-box solution can no longer meet your needs.
Maybe it takes too long to fill out the form because there are a lot of lookups, maybe the data is commonly entered while on the road and the mobile app doesn't have a great interface for entering the data, or maybe the data needs to be combined with data from additional non-CRM sources to really give an overall view.
For any of these issues, the solution can be found in simple updates in CRM, a new user interface, a new website, a new mobile app, or some combination of all those things.
In this series of blog posts, I'll be showing you some of the core processes at Sonoma Partners that live in or interact with Grapevine. In all the processes I'll be highlighting, we started with a very basic implementation and over time we enhanced it to make it easier, or to meet our changing business needs. For some of you working with or evaluating CRM, this may give you some ideas on how CRM can be used with your business; whether you're a professional services firm like us, or you work in any other industry.
I'm really hoping you'll get a little bit of the perspective that I've gained over my 9+ years of working with CRM: it's a living, evolving system, and based on your business, your clients, technology, and a host of other factors.
CRM needs to be analyzed continuously and updated to make sure it's doing what it's meant to do: make it easier to run your business.
