Feature:
Plagued by Information System Bottlenecks?
Use These Tips for Selecting the Right Solution

Growing companies encounter various bottlenecks that inhibit growth and cause them to plateau. It starts innocently enough. Everyone reaches for a spreadsheet to make lists.

• Marketing gets a list of prospects.
• The sales department uses that plus their own data to create a list of qualified prospects. They also have a list of customers.
• Accounting creates their own list of customers to track receivables.
• The product guys have a list of inventory.

Things are fine while there are only three or four of you. Then the new hire in sales creates their own list of customers. Accounting hires an administrator who starts a list of office supplies and their own mailing list, derived from the other customer and prospect lists. Pretty soon you not only have confusion over who has what, but the sales manager is pretty annoyed that a consolidated sales forecast takes hours instead of minutes to produce.

“Spreadsheet suffocation” is that stage of information sharing pain that causes people to start cussing.

When a team of people reaches this point, they need a way to share data that is safe, fast and reliable. The pain of trying to collaborate is now so high that they are suffocating – a significant growth bottleneck has set in. They may need to buy a more robust application designed to handle their specific needs.

Buying Enterprise Software

Unfortunately, buying software is not as easy as buying a car. Cars perform the same basic function year after year – they allow people to get from A to B without getting wet.

Buying a specific car involves many other decision factors including style, comfort, economy, and brand loyalty. But these are secondary factors. You wouldn’t buy the best-looking car if it only turned left. Great gas mileage is useless if the vehicle won’t stop.

Unfortunately, getting “the basics” in a software package is not as straightforward. To avoid a poor purchase and have the confidence that you bought the best system you could afford, the selection process should move through a logical series of steps:

Why
Why do we need a CRM (or other enterprise software) system? What is the expected return on this investment? Are we sure that we need a CRM system, or is there another area of the company that needs automating first?

Who
Who will the system affect? That is, what are all of the different types of users the system must satisfy? At a minimum, you need to think about sales staff, sales support staff, marketing staff, managers, assistants, customers and prospects. It is tempting to skip this step, but if you do, some audiences will not be properly represented in the next step and the effort will be short-sighted, raising the risk of a poor choice.

What
What must the system do? Do we need Account Management? Lead Tracking? Marketing Campaigns? Support Tickets? What about remote access?

Be specific as you write down your needs. Instead of saying that the system “must be flexible,” say “a given account must be shareable by multiple sales staff, with assigned commission percentages.” The exact requirements will depend on your business model.

Selecting new software for your company is a project and it should be treated that way. Navigating this process with confidence requires a project champion. Pick someone who can interview the stakeholders, organize the results and manage the conversation with potential vendors. If everyone is too busy to take on this extra work then find an experienced consultant who doesn’t have a horse (product) in the race. Objectivity is important when shopping for a “best fit” solution.

Michael Wilkes is the chief Disambiguator at Dynamic Answers and is dedicated to helping small companies buy and use technology wisely. For more info about creating business software blueprints, contact him at 678.381.2010.