4 Steps to Succeeding in the Evolving CRM Landscape

In today's increasingly competitive world, companies are looking to accelerate their pace of business to stay ahead of the competition and maintain profit margins. More and more often, this requires identifying comprehensive and scalable solutions with cross-functional benefits across sales, marketing and customer service.

It's no longer enough to simply buy and implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM and expect to be off to the races. Critical customer information must be freed from silos, allowing various business owners to have the real-time customer insights they need to make better decisions and improve performance. The benefits of this information sharing are significant. For instance, in a recent study conducted by Scribe, we found that integrated CRM data leads to better accuracy and consistency of customer information in 63% of businesses, plus a reduction in time spent accessing multiple systems for 44%, and the ability to achieve a holistic view of the customers for 41% of companies who responded.

To achieve acceleration, the process of sourcing and implementing solutions has changed greatly in the last decade. Successful businesses implement change from the top, identify the business cases to improve, and secure executive buy-in before setting the detailed requirements for a solution purchase and app configuration. Beginning with the end business results in mind is key to driving strategic purchasing and integration decisions.

Smart businesses also rely on the help of strategic integration consultants to see the big picture, who ensure the solution is working properly and encourage solution adoption. In fact, we find that successful Dynamics CRM implementations nearly always benefit from the participation of a systems integration consultant. To that end, I connected with Lucie Schulze, Director of Marketing and Administration, and Julinda Prekop, Senior Account Executive, both of ...