As long as my new car is red and has flame throwers to kill zombies, I don’t care about the horsepower and other specs.
I know I drive my husband crazy with things like this.
The wonderful thing about CRM systems such as #Salesforce or #MicrosoftDynamicsCRM is that they are very configurable. New fields, page layouts, reports – so much can be customised without coding skills.
I love it.
You can do so many things.
Just because you can though, doesn’t mean you should.
The art of being a really good Consultant, is the ability to gently ask the right questions to get to the root cause of things. It’s asking in a tactful and sensitive manner that puts the other party at ease so they can open up.
You want to solve the right problem, and not the one that causes the immediate pain.
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This week, I cover how to scope a project when it’s greenfield (CRM-noob, as my ninjas call it) and a brownfield environment (where you already use CRM for your business operations).
I also throw in the top 5 rules for successful Requirements Gathering. (I could have done 3, 8 or 12, but 5 sounded like a good number) 😁
#OnThePeiroll
#30daysofvideos (Day 26)
#RequirementsGathering
#BusinessAnalysis
#ProjectManagement
Transcript
When you’re building or designing something new, it’s always very exciting.
For example, when we’re designing our lounge, I’ll tell my husband who I want all my TV over there when read something really big, that I can put against a whole wall. And I want this and I want that I want to show up over here, on some bookshelves over there.
And he’ll say, “Well, you can’t really fit the TV over there. And also, it’s really expensive to get something that big”.
So there’s this process of negotiating in question, questioning and answering.
It’s the same when you building a new CRM system, it is really exciting.
I would like to collect information about my customer, so that I know how to sell better to them, when they make inquiries about test driving my, the cars in my dealership, or when they’re asking about this plot of new houses that I’m selling.
And it’s very tempting to say, I like to get as much information as I can, about their budget, how much they’re willing to spend upfront, what kind of family they have, how many children they have, etc.
As a Salesforce, or works of sea consultant, or any CRM consultant or an internal CRM administrator, you’re going to get these requests.
And it is useful to ask some good questions.
One of the very classic question, requests I’ve had before was to put was to collect the age of the person who is making an inquiry into the product of the business.
Initially, it seems like a that’s a really good idea.
I like to know the age range demographics of the people who might buy my product in the future.
But as my friend, Rikke Hovsgaard, would say, data is at the heart of everything you do. So you need to question it.
For example, how are you going to calculate the age every year? Because that changes. That piece of data changes.
There’s all sorts of questions around data privacy, as well, to consider.
Another related piece of information might be you want to collect the age range of the children, between 1 to 5, 5 to 10, etc, especially for holidays.
When you’re booking holidays, or flights because obviously, there are different pricing.
But if that piece of information you want to collect for that particular transaction, you also want to keep later on, you need to think about quite a lot of things whether whether it’s legal in secondly, whether that piece of information will be relevant.
So when your customer asks you to put a specific piece of field as an example, that’s the simplest example, a specific field on a form to collect information is really useful to ask, what’s that piece of data for? Can that be obtained in a different way, for example, being calculated from date of birth if it’s something really business critical? An example might be on life insurance policies.
Or if you’re doing HMRC, and the tax, different tax bracket or no, no, that’s on salary, sorry.
There’s that can that information be calculated from something else is that pertinent? And who’s going to keep that data up to date? It’s really important for a CRM or any software system to maintain good quality data consistently, with integrity.
That means that piece of information is the same no matter which system that you might be integrated to contains.
So as an example, might be first name and last name.
were easy, likely to be same in all systems, but how about salutations? How about the address? How about marital status? If you have more than one system that contains this piece of information, there’s a whole lot of science that goes behind data management.
However, I just wanted to focus today on the pertinence or the importance of data that you collect.
And when you get a request from a user or a customer on the absolute need to collect this piece of information, marketers like to do this, by the way because it’s their job, they need to know.
They need to be able to segment data into usable chunks for them to be able to create effective marketing campaigns.
As an example, if you’re not a parent, you don’t really want Tesco to send you vouchers about car seats or baby formula, for example.
So it’s very useful, but the art is asking the right question to make sure that that request is actually thought through and important for a long run.
That’s my tip for today. It’s based on just this request about field. I hope you found it really useful.
And I wish you a fantastic day.