Stop talking and do something!

August 30, 2020

The importance of structure

The importance of structure

Elon Musk's view on meetings

We are offering to build a brand new website for anyone

  • No large meetingsIf you're not adding value to a meeting, leave.
  • No frequent meetings.

What will I need to provide if I win?

This is buying pre-built software from a supplier then configuring and customising it to support your business needs. This is a key point - if you choose an off the shelf platform, you need to keep customisation to a minimum. The more you customise the more pain that generally causes further down the road in terms of updates, changing to another product, onboarding new team members etc.

Today, off the shelf platforms are generally cloud based, on premise alternatives are available, and you usually pay per user for different features - licensing models get complicated trust me.

When it comes to features, where do i start. All of the big players in this area provide feature rich customer experience platforms that can be configured to support virtually any business and its processes. They unify customer engagement across multiple channels and offer out of the box leading edge technologies such as chatbots and artificial intelligence to supplement their core products.

One of the biggest attractions in recent years is the low code / no code offerings that CRM platforms provide. No code / low code provides users with the ability to build complex solutions through point and click intefaces - this requires very little coding experience but requires training,

Build a custom CRM

CRM systems have matured so much over the past 10 years and are now feature rich digital platforms that flex to different market sectors, putting the customer experience at the heart. With that in mind, there are some rare occasions when you might want to built your own. If you feel your requirements can't be met by a CRM in the market place, the CRM's are just to expensive, or there are some other valid reasons where the company wants to build a custom CRM then you can create something from scratch.

It's a brave decision, if you find yourself starting on that journey start to think of the skills required, the project management involved, the total cost of ownership, the time required to build and deploy, the list goes on! But who is not to say you don't end up building something so good it could be resold and compete on that gartner quadrant.

*Terms and conditions

The customers main goal was to get all of their customers data in one place so team members could collaborate on different sales pipelines. They already had a product in mind so I set about getting the team at Infraweb to run some workshops.

What about the power?

I started writing this blog fresh off the back of consulting with a small finance company who were looking at using a CRM to support their growing customer base. During that engagement I often referred to the "power of the CRM" and how they should look to utilise the out of the box features where possible - lets not reinvent the wheel. This often lead to dicsussions on changing business process but only where that benefited the company, and was generally best practice in the industry.


Would you like to learn more about how a CRM could work for your business? Do you need help gathering requirements or with product selection stage? Get in touch with the team and we will be happy to chat through ideas with you.

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