Planning For CRM Success: Managing the Shift In Ownership From IT To The Business

Tomorrow, MSDynamicsWorld.com will host the first in a three-part webinar series, Planning for CRM Success, delivered by CRM industry veteran and Microsoft MVP Rick McCutcheon. The series offers a new look at the perennial challenges of user adoption, system design, and business process mapping, and how to address them by taking advantage of the latest capabilities in Dynamics CRM.

While long time CRM users may have a strong grasp on CRM and the processes and techniques around it today, McCutcheon believes that a dynamic tool like CRM needs to be learned and re-learned. New companies arise, new employees join the ranks, and CRM itself evolves. Interestingly, the challenges - achieving the highest-possible ROI, convincing sales and marketing of the utility, taking advantage of new features and capabilities-are always new.

Also new, says McCutcheon, are pressures of moving CRM forward, like from social marketing. "People want to leverage Facebook, LinkedIn, educational marketing, and content marketing. Those types of products are implemented in organizations and CRM is the back end. So that is why CRM is still a hot topic."

Social CRM is not all about brand awareness, says McCutcheon. He describes it as capturing information in social networks for marketing and real lead generation.

You'll learn to manage a successful CRM project

The new sessions will be decidedly non-technical because as McCutcheon has observed, "we're seeing a trend toward business people owning CRM projects and less dependence on IT." 

"My expertise is salesforce automation," says McCutcheon. "I'll ...