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How to ​Define Your CRM Vision and Goals

When embarking on a new CRM strategy, defining your organisation’s CRM vision is crucial. Perhaps your organisation faces one of more of these frequent issues:

  • Not knowing key numbers across key performance metrics
  • Unable to measure the value of each customer and personalise service accordingly
  • Lack of customer feedback and insights
  • Balancing the demands of improving customer experiences and controlling service costs
  • Needing to improve win and retention rates
  • Time is wasted across inefficient processes
  • Managing data across multiple sources

At the outset of your CRM project, a clear vision should be defined that states where your business wants to overcome its current challenges.

Think of the vision statement as a 30-second pitch for your CRM project that summarises its purpose and critical aspects in just one or two sentences. By articulating and documenting this statement, you’ll have a destination and reference point throughout the project to steer decisions.

This should be a team effort. Also, it should be a business vision rather than a technical vision that will often:

  • The future direction of your business
  • Your business values – guiding principles of why you are in business and what sets you apart
  • The mission of your organisation
  • The standards, benchmarks and any other criteria that you use to measure success

CRM Vision Statement Examples.

Here are 6 visioning examples which you can use as a basis for discussion:

  • “Build and develop long-term client relationships by creating personalised experiences across all touch-points, anticipating customer needs, and providing customised offers.”
  • “To implement a consistent methodology across all of our sales teams that encourages consultative selling with a systematic method to qualify opportunities that will be readily accessible to regional sales teams.”
  • “Engage our clients by personalising their journey with us alongside effective retention strategies as well as efficiently responding to leads to generate new client wins.”
  • “Create a hub for a complete, uniform and robust view of our interactions to ensure that our staff have the correct information at their fingertips when dealing with customers and prospects.”
  • “Have a clear structure and a defined process that enables our sales team to progress any opportunity from a lead to an outcome uniformly, and report on this activity, revenue generated, conversion rates and pipeline.”
  • “Build a centralised and secure CRM solution that will provide long-term scalability, meet our global reporting requirements, and help us maintain GDPR compliance.”

CRM Goals.

Your vision should be supported by a series of goals. In addition to the goals of the executive team, these will span different teams and departments within your organisation, so there will likely be a variety of goals across these groups.

The goals of an organisation’s executives will frequently include:

  • Identifying the most valuable accounts
  • Increasing the volume of new sales opportunities
  • Understanding the ROI from marketing activities
  • Reducing operating costs
  • Accurately measuring customer satisfaction

The goals of individual managers may include:

  • Identifying why deals are being lost and increasing win rates
  • Increase collaboration between team members and with other teams
  • Ensuring Service Level Agreements are met
  • On-demand reporting across key metrics
  • Being able to easily create highly targeted customer marketing lists
  • Replacing time-consuming workflows

For end users, goals that support this vision could include:

  • Online and offline access to customer, sales and process information
  • Single source of truth about customers, members, prospects & other contacts
  • Getting credit for work delivered
  • Reducing administration and simplifying data entry
  • Understanding which client service issues need to be resolved
  • Which sales opportunities need immediate attention

Next steps.

It is critical that your key executives are involved in defining this vision, that you document it, and that it is understood by everyone.

ANS will help you achieve your goals and realise your vision through Dynamics 365 and solutions built on the Microsoft low code platform.

Contact us to discuss your requirements and receive advice from one of our CRM consultants.