So you’re looking to implement a CRM solution for your business. That’s great! But first, you need to determine the CRM scope of the software you’ll be implementing. Defining the scope of CRM projects means figuring out which areas of your business to include in the CRM implementation plan.

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Before any CRM initiative begins, scoping is essential to establish what the effort will and will not cover, as well as to prevent feature creep and project bloating. Follow the steps below to properly define the scope for your next CRM project.

What This Article Covers

• What Is CRM?
• Importance
• How To Define the Scope of CRM
• Wrapping It Up

What Is CRM?

To explain the purpose and scope of CRM, let’s first discuss what CRM does. As the name suggests, CRM (customer relationship management) software streamlines customer interactions, service and care. From lead generation features to a contact management database, CRM optimizes the ease of communicating with potential and current customers. This includes but isn’t limited to, transaction and interaction history.

71% of customers expect companies to provide personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when that doesn’t happen. CRM helps users interact on a personal level with customers to make them feel cared for.

CRM has business-facing benefits as well. Instead of jumping from Google Calendar to Outlook Mail to a ticketing system to complete a single task, CRM software converges these functions into a single interface.

It also offers reporting and business intelligence capabilities to judge the ROI of marketing campaigns or track customer care representatives’ interaction metrics. This can help users identify pain points and correct problems.

Importance

Understanding the CRM scope you hope to achieve is crucial to the success of your CRM implementation. “Scope” refers to how far-reaching the CRM will be within your organization.

For example, if only your customer service reps will be using it, you can consider the scope of your CRM narrow. If your marketing teams, sales reps, customer care team, data analysts and project managers will all use the system, that is a broad scope of CRM. Defining the scope of CRM can help:

Get Clear on Implementation Goals

Spelling out the CRM scope is the first step in the CRM implementation process. It helps gain clarity on each department’s goals and objectives, be it improving customer service, streamlining communication or automating tasks. You can use this information to get a CRM that suits your unique needs. Without a proper understanding of your business processes, you risk a lack of user adoption or even project failure.

Allocate Resources Effectively

You can identify and estimate how much time, budget, personnel and technological resources you’ll need to set up a system. Your staff can develop a realistic schedule to help keep implementation processes on track. By establishing a clear CRM scope, you can manage possible bottlenecks, delays and cost overruns.

Identify the Right Software and Integrations

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to CRMs or any software, for that matter. Investing in an enterprise solution while you’re a small company of 50 employees can reduce your process efficiency. Large business CRMs come with a range of advanced features that may be too complex and even unnecessary for small businesses. This is why clearly understanding your business and staff needs is vital.

Defining the scope of CRM will help narrow down your options out of thousands of available solutions in the market. Choosing the right fit ensures the system aligns with your current infrastructure and technology. You can also determine the customization level and integrations you’ll need.

Lay a Solid Foundation

Having a well-defined CRM scope gives insightful information and forms a strong base for taking the project forward. However, this doesn’t mean you need to commit to the first software you shortlist or that you can’t change your requirements later.

CRM scoping is non-committal, and you can switch up solutions if necessary. And since you’ve already done a fair amount of groundwork, you won’t have to start implementation processes from scratch.

Avoid Scope Creep

CRM scoping can help manage employee, client and other stakeholder expectations. It prepares them for possible setbacks and clarifies what a CRM will or will not deliver. This prevents scope creep, wherein the project continuously expands beyond its initial boundaries.

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How To Define the Scope of CRM

To begin the scoping process, reflect on what you’re hoping to improve by utilizing a CRM system — this should help narrow your focus and help you understand what kind of scope you need. To keep expectations realistic, make a list of questions for yourself and the vendors of your shortlist platforms.

Consider things like budget, time frame and how much training you think you’ll want (or, more likely, how much you’re willing to pay for). By asking these targeted questions to the project managers and stakeholders, you can confidently move forward after discussing important parameters with all the necessary people on board.

Set Your Parameters

That being said, defining the scope of customer relationship management software is easier said than done. You may know that you want all of your employees to use it in theory, but what does that look like in practice? Questions like these can pile up quickly, so we’ve made a targeted list of questions and steps to keep you on track.

Questions To Ask Yourself

Will your CRM scope be broad or narrow? You can decide this by understanding how many people the solution will affect. Will your entire organization be using the system or only a single department? This can determine whether you need a large, robust CRM or a smaller, more focused system. It will also dramatically impact the price — most software is priced on a user-license basis.

Will you roll out the entire solution at once or stagger its implementation? This is a question to ask your vendor as well. Doing it all at once helps keep everyone on the same page and can build team camaraderie as you learn to use the system together. Staggering the implementation can mitigate potential risk and cost if the system isn’t a good fit or doesn’t perform how you hoped it would.

What is your budget? It may be a challenge to come up with a budget without knowing what CRMs generally cost. Check out our pricing guide to get a feel for the market so you can begin building an informed budget. CRMs are typically based on a per-user-per-month or per-user-license basis, so you can generate a ballpark estimate for your organization fairly easily.

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Questions To Ask Vendors

How long does this solution usually take to implement? The time employees spend learning to use the system (and not selling or gathering leads) results in additional personnel costs. So it’s important to have a general idea of how long it will take to go through training for the system.

What training resources are included in the base cost? How much does additional training cost? Almost all software vendors offer preliminary training and customer support as you’re getting set up with the system, but after that, they typically charge for additional training.

What kind of customer support resources do you offer? Some vendors only provide customer support tickets rather than immediate phone support or live chat features. Finding out what they offer beforehand will prevent surprises and frustrations later.

How well does the CRM integrate with other systems? If you utilize an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, learning management software (LMS) or other business software, it may be important to integrate the systems.

Integration means that you can seamlessly transfer information from one system to another. Not all CRMs are compatible with other software, so research thoroughly before you settle on one.

Gather Information From Relevant Departments

Now that you have the basics down, it’s time to gather your specific requirements. Ask for feedback from the various departments in your organization about their needs and goals for the CRM. Defining your CRM scope should include how the software will impact your business’ infrastructure and processes, as well as instructions to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for your company.

If the changes will impact your teams’ workflow, let them know beforehand how you plan to upgrade/implement the CRM system so they’re prepared. Here are some questions to ask different departments to gauge how they will or will not interact with the new CRM:

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Sales and Marketing

Reach out to sales and marketing teams to get a clear idea of how their lead interactions would change with a CRM implementation. Find out what kind of organizational and customer contact systems they are currently using to make the transition smoothly.

Sales and marketing teams can gain a lot from CRM but often fail to properly implement them. This is usually due to a lack of training and communication. If you plunk an untrained employee in front of a complex software system without proper training, they won’t know how to use it.

This explains why so many sales reps are frustrated with CRMs. By communicating directly with sales reps before choosing a CRM, you can mitigate some of these communication gaps and make sure you choose a system they’ll actually use.

What types of campaigns do you run? Multi-channel marketing campaigns are one of CRM’s biggest strengths. It lets your marketing team combine their efforts into a single streamlined system to manage campaigns via email, social media and more.

What is the current way prospective clients contact your sales teams? CRM systems incorporate call center features, automated email marketing with chatbots and other modern customer interaction methods. Find out if your sales team would like to utilize multi-channel marketing — odds are, they’ll jump at the chance.

How do they record and keep track of leads? Whether the answer to this is a pen-and-paper Rolodex or a sophisticated contact management system, CRM can help improve this. CRM platforms often directly integrate with systems like G Suite or Outlook, saving you time and energy that you would otherwise spend on data entry.

How many leads do they have contact details for? Some CRM pricing plans have a limit to the number of contacts you can store — or at least a price increase over a certain amount — so identify your needs upfront.

Customer Service

The “C” in CRM stands for customers, so your customer care team should have a significant voice in the CRM’s selection and implementation. If your customer relationship management scope will be narrow, they will likely be the only ones who will utilize it. If it’s broad, they’ll still definitely be some of the system’s main users.

How do you log issues, cases or complaints in your system? Whether it’s pen and paper or an external ticketing system, identify how they handle complaints so you can ask a vendor about integration or transferral steps for that data. CRMs come with a customer service ticket feature that will ideally replace (and improve!) any system your service team currently uses.

What is the process for escalating a complaint? Do your reps have to email five people and get a written permission slip to escalate a customer complaint to the next level of expertise? CRMs offer defined workflows for this process, making it easier and more efficient.

How does your customer care team currently communicate? Staying in touch is key to customer relationship management teams. If you’ve been using something low-tech, CRM can kick your communications up a notch. If you use a messaging platform like Slack, CRMs can often integrate or replace it with an internal system, so your employees don’t have to bounce back and forth between screens and lose focus.

Once you’ve received input from each of these departments, you should have an idea of what each team requires and whether your new CRM system will sufficiently replace or assist any of their current systems.

Business Intelligence

CRMs provide business intelligence (BI) tools that help you manage individual, team and company performance. With quick and easy data views, your teams can make informed business decisions. Ask your BI team the following questions to understand which solutions would be the most helpful:

What data do you have? Data profiling can help define the scope of CRM. Is your data structured or unstructured? Where do you collect data from, and how do you store it? What are your primary data sources? Do you collect data from social media channels? Get clear on what kinds of data you need to analyze so you can find a solution accordingly.

Who will your users be? Is your BI team made up of technical or non-technical users? One of the emerging BI trends is self-service. So if your users are not tech-savvy, you can look for a solution with a smaller learning curve. This way, the team can create, access and analyze reports without having to consult IT.

Do you just want dashboard tools or a full-fledged BI platform? Your team needs to assess which features they want and why. This can help you understand how advanced your solution should be. Out-of-the-box BI solutions provide capabilities ranging from data integration to mobile application development.

On the other hand, many sales and marketing CRMs come with BI tools like reports and dashboards that may not be as advanced but get the job done. Think about whether an advanced BI solution, a CRM with BI tools or a CRM platform that integrates with other BI systems will do the trick.

Make Assessments

To choose the right CRM platform for your organization, you need to ensure your needs match up with the features offered by a specific product. Conducting a requirements review for the upcoming project is a great place to start. This requirements document should contain the answers to some of the questions mentioned above, as well as specific features to meet them.

At the end of this stage, you should have produced a business requirements specification and a system design document that answers these and other questions. Share these reports, ask for feedback from your organization’s major players and consult it frequently during the implementation to avoid going off track.

Once you’ve established your needs, you can move on to the comparison step. Comparing vendors based on their features allows you to judge their performance in the areas you need them to excel. It also helps narrow down your options considerably and generate a shortlist much more efficiently. Check out our comparison report to help get the job done in a smooth and detailed manner.

Once you’ve created a shortlist, you can interview those vendors with the questions in the above section as well as our buyer’s guide, to identify your best fit.

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Final Thoughts

Defining the scope of your CRM is vital for your business. It will give you a better idea of the costs of the project and the features you need. It’s also helpful for the company providing the CRM solution since they will better understand your requirements and what you’re expecting from the project.

Doing it at the beginning of the initiative will ensure that the actual implementation of your new CRM system will be as smooth as possible. No CRM is perfect for every business, but now you have the resources to help you select the CRM that’s perfect for your business.

How can defining CRM scope make a difference for your business? Let us know in the comments!