Finding and Choosing a CRM System: What are some good recommendations and how can user adoption be ensured?

Here's my perspective as a tools developer. Pre-Purchase • Create a buying decision team where all of the different stakeholders are represented. Executive decision makers, end-users, and krep other people who are affected by the changes the new system brings in the loop and bring them along in meetingd when relevant. • Build the decision criteria within that group and find out what it is you want to achieve. Try to stay clear of features and functions, first focus on your goals with this change. • Bring various vendors in early, let them meet the decision team, and for the love of god use them. Professional sales people have a wealth of knowledge in their field and they will be of help to you and they'll gladly do so. If the product is a bad match a good sales rep will explain why and point you in another direction, I can usually do this on the first or second call. • Stay flexible on features, the end choice will always be a compromise. Try to keep an open mind and you might find something that perhaps doesn't have Google Docs (as an example) but is able to give you something that you hadn't considered. Valuable insight, clever productivity tools, etc. • And if you want adoption, never think of it as a reporting tool. You need insight and being able to analyze the effectiveness of your teams, but that can never be the defining factor. It's a side order to the main dish which should taste really sweet to the end-users. While we're on the food metaphore a few appetizer are also a good idea, some features that the team actually look forward to using. Implementation • Do the training. People need to feel fully comfortable in the tool. A good indication is when people after a while start to come up with creative uses. Sometimes they might be crap, but you can strike workflow gold that way as well. • Get all the necessary data in there, and don't make it a hassle for the team to get it all in there. It's a big demotivator. If you have a personality on the team that doesn't mind the repetitive ardous task of getting that initial bulk of data in the system, allow them to do so. Or hire somebody. • Roll it out in phases. If you have a larger sales department, start with one specific team and then roll it out as the kinks get ironed out. Continued Adoption • If the leaders don't use it on a daily basis, why should the team? Make it a part of management's daily routine and live in the system (if you've done all the other steps right you simply have to have presence there, nagging rarely helps) • Minimize input, maximize output - Try to keep data entry to a minimum and make sure the end-users benefit from using the tool. • In this case it's a joint effort by sales and marketing, so commit to common definitions and routines of things such as sales-ready leads, how to nurture a lead that sales returns to markeing, etc. • Hang in there! Change always takes time. If you have done the stuff above, it will most likely be a success, but it can take longer than you think, or would like. Personal (and biased) reflection I believe that a big part of the alignment challenges between sales & marketing comes from the idea that they should be shoe-horned in the same tool. They are two very specialized disciplines and both deserve razor sharp tools for what they do. Then you integrate those, and integration these days is easier than ever before. We develop http://Membrain.com, a razor-sharp tool for sales. Then we use http://Hubspot.com, which is a razor-sharp tool for inbound marketing. I've yet to see a product that's great at both.

It's hard to find a CRM to fulfill every need of a company. That's why Ragic is here: for you to build a CRM yourself exactly according to your needs. You don't need any coding to start, it's basically like creating a spreadsheet form to fill out. Feel free to try it out! http://www.ragic.com

Most of the CRM systems are architected the same and unless you need an industry specific CRM, I would suggest either Salesforce or Sugar.   Both have all of the functionality you listed above. In terms of adoption, here is a great article with some basic suggestions http://blog.prialto.com/2012/07/09/6-best-practices-to-drive-crm-adoption/

I've personally used Salesforce, Highrise and Microsoft Dynamics in my previous positions. My overall thoughts were that Salesforce was a lot to handle and took a lot of time to train the sales team. Highrise works well, yet really struggles on their mobile platform and we had troubles integrating Microsoft Dynamics with our other tools. As for user adoption best practices, I think it's important to understand why a sales person has troubling integrating a CRM with their daily activities. Here's an ebook that takes a deeper look. http://resources.getbase.com/5-reasons-why-your-sales-rep-wont-use-a-crm

I rate Highrise personally, really easy to use and get started with and seems to cover most of your requirements. Regarding adoption, try http://Unifyo.com which allows everyone in the organisation to see CRM data (plus much more) anywhere on the web. Without having to remember to visit the CRM and search for it manually.

For decades, CRM implementations have had a higher failure rate than most other types of corporate software. Most analyst estimates are http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-decision-maker/crm-failure-rates-2001-2009/!  Ironically, CRM failures are not hardware or software failures, nor are they problems with integration or system performance. Quite the contrary, most CRM failures are the result of a single very human problem–a low adoption rate.  CRM is always installed with the highest of hopes and with the full knowledge (at least on the part of sales management) that CRM will improve revenue and reduce costs. However, if the salespeople aren’t fully on board, they’ll either refuse to use it (if they’ve got clout) or (if they don’t) passive-aggressively avoid it whenever possible.  Fortunately, it’s possible to achieve a high adoption rate by following these guidelines: http://blog.getbase.com/how-to-increase-your-crm-adoption-rate

Really Simple Systems Cloud CRM is targetted at small & medium sized businesses, http://www.reallysimplesystems.com/, and as the name implies, is quick and easy to use. It has both Sales & Marketing functionality, including built-in mass emailing with tracking.

A social CRM tool allows you to connect and manage a list of customers or prospects. It amplifies the power of your collected list, enabling you to create and manage long-term customer relationships. Otherwise, your list building efforts could be simply ending-up with partial results. In this article, we are discussing direct and indirect benefits of http://www.kapturecrm.com/account-management/.1. Personalize Customer ContactsWith social CRM enabled, you will be able to attach social profiles to individual customer or lead accounts. Under this categorization, you can understand and categorize each customer types based on their concerned social profile types. This information gives you a better perspective for handling customer and prospect conversation. Progressively, you can go ahead and personalize your customer contacts.2. Social CRM improves your Contact and List QualityA social CRM empowers you to constantly find and add new relevant members to your customer contacts. By ensuring presence among various social forums and platforms, you could constantly communicate with new prospects. For example, consider a cold-calling scenario. In this situation, phone book forms a random prospect list with lowest possible rate of conversion. The social CRM usage lets you manage each prospect through layers of communication. This enables you build a lead list involving higher-value and more relevant prospects, who are more likely to get converted.http://kapturecrm.com3. Simultaneously Manage Multiple Platforms and QueriesDifferent social platforms are the gateway to diverse audience groups. By ensuring presence among different digital platforms, you could instantly increase your reach and gain leverage of association. Rather than tabbing between multiple social platforms, social CRM gives you a unified platform for managing all social conversations. It also allows you to collectively add different social profiles to your customer accounts, instantly increasing reach and penetration. With covering platforms including twitter, facebook and instagram, you could cover an audience base with different tastes. This enables you to uncover specific customer niches, which are inaccessible through traditional advertising.4. Initiate and Encourage CommunicationsIn social Media, one of the easiest ways to generate collective audience interest is to spur conversations. If a business has regular open audience communication, that a particular enterprise is seen as being active and engaging. With maintaining an active and instant-response social platform, you could instantly increase and streamline your customer conversations. Also a business social media page provides a permanent record for a particular customer conversation, available for reference at any future time. It also happens to be an indirect way of receiving more visitors and prospects.5. Build and Earn Audience InfluenceWith staging digital-social conversations, you could prove your expertise in your concerned business endeavor. This helps you to progressively earn audience influence, which happens to be the staple of confidence among online audience. With increased number of followers, you could also receive increased number of leads, which simultaneously increases your following. This helps you to build audience influence among specific audience niches.http://kapturecrm.com

For the tasks that you have listed, and for the sake of easy implementation, simplicity, ease-of-use and a high degree of affordability, you may want to try https://www.agilecrm.comWith Marketing Automation, Telephony, Helpdesk, Web Engagement, Social Media Integration, Email Campaigns, Mobile Marketing and more, there are few CRMs out there that can be better choices. It is an all-in-one CRM with complete Sales, Marketing & Service Automation features, built for growing businesses.We just released the ‘Free for 10 Users’ option, so having a dekko and using the available features incur no cost at all.End User AdoptionAs for end user adoption, here are some interesting tips I found on the Super Office that should Help you understand user adoption better:<quote>How to Boost CRM End-User AdoptionWe have found that the best way for organizations to “boost” and then “sustain” high CRM end-user adoption is to develop and implement a comprehensive user adoption strategy. Many CRM failures occur when organizations only focus on the “on-time” and “on-budget” delivery of the technology, but neglect the necessary actions to drive and maintain user adoption over the life of the system.It is important to recognize that CRM end-user adoption is all about changing user behaviors, it is not about technology. The skills and methods you use to change behavior are very different than those required to build and deliver effective CRM systems. This means that the people who lead and manage your CRM system implementation may not be (and probably are not) the right people to lead the user adoption program.Here are some (though not all) key elements of a CRM end-user adoption program:1. Involve users from the startAs we mentioned above, people resist change. It is a common instinct in the human nature. Reasons can be fear of the unknown, of more work, of unwanted changes in daily tasks. If you can make the unknown known, then it takes out all the uncertainty. So, involve the end-users who will use the system. Clearly demonstrate to those involved how the new system will benefit them. Ask for user feedback. Be sure to listen to the feedback, and incorporate suggestions when appropriate.Remember, you purchased the CRM for the users, and therefore it’s important to consider their opinions. By doing all of this, you can reduce uncertainty, clarify misunderstandings and promote support for the decisions made.2. Choose a CRM ambassadorAppoint a person in your company who is an ambassador for CRM. This person can be responsible for creating routines and guidelines, ensure data quality, and follow up users if they have questions or are doing something wrong. When needed this person can facilitate a work group to come up with best practices, and document the results. This person needs to be an expert in the system, and have a certain authority in the company to be able to carry out the CRM initiative. The CRM administrator is a good choice for this role.3. Create a routine guideA CRM routine guide outlines what kind of information the users should capture in the CRM system, how, and who is responsible. It also reinforces the actions and behavior you want your end-users to take in order to achieve business goals.Be sure to update this routine guide continuously to reflect changes, either in the CRM due to upgrades, or new routines you have decided on. The guide should also be easily accessible for the users. A few good places to keep it could be on your intranet, in a central project in your CRM, or in a shared drive.4. Make sure the system is easy to useThe CRM should make life easier for the users, not harder. Therefore, the CRM administrator in your company should tailor the solution to reflect the way your users work and not the other way around. Users hate interfaces cluttered with irrelevant information, so leave only those choices your team will need today. You can add more later, if needed.5. Train your employeesSet aside time for training your employees. You might even want to create specific training for the various business processes. For example, a marketing professional should learn how to register and follow up leads, whereas a sales person needs to know how to create a sale and http://www.superoffice.com/blog/five-ways-inject-speed-accuracy-sales-process/.Administrators should be able to answer user questions, and should receive training that is more extensive. Administrators should also learn to configure the solution and other administrator-related tasks.Keep in mind that a CRM system holds many features, and learning them all in one go can be hard. Therefore, an on-going process with more frequent and shorter sessions is better than one long training session. Offer repeated training as time passes; when the basics are in place and well known, move on to more advanced features and processes.6. Reward usersReview how your employees have used the CRM system and think about rewarding those who use it well. The reward system is a great way to get everyone moving in the same direction.For example, you could look at how many outbound calls a person has registered in the system, how many http://www.superoffice.com/blog/how-to-convert-online-leads-into-paying-customers/, and how accurate their data entry is. Then you could reward the best ones, and make known to others what they did to achieve this reward.ConclusionImplementing an effective CRM adoption program is not easy and it does take time and resources.But, with a commonly reported CRM failure rate near 63%, it is clear that organizations need to take action to protect their CRM investments. By following some of the tried and true best practices above, we are sure that you will come far.</unquote>Hope that helps!