6 Considerations For A Successful CRM Investment

By Hernan Vera, Managing Partner. Sales Outcomes, Inc.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software solutions and their impact on business growth and profitability continue to increase in importance for Logistics and Transportation leadership teams. Justifying the ROI and realizing the value from a CRM investment are the common challenges for the large enterprises as well as small firms.

Sales Outcomes has collaborated extensively with companies to manage the critical issues faced in selecting, deploying and realizing value from CRM investments. Based on our experience spanning companies across a variety of industries, we’ve compiled our top 6 critical considerations for a CRM investment in the logistics and transportation industry: 

1. Pick a CRM solution that is 100% in the cloud
2. Involve your IT department, but take the lead in the evaluation and decision process
3. Focus on the key functionality in logistics & transportation
4. Be clear on were the ROI is coming from
5. Don’t underestimate the difficulty your organization may have in adopting a CRM system
6. Ensure that a CRM system has a fully functional mobile application for Android and Apple devices. Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices applications are a plus, but scarce.

CRM solutions have been around for more than a decade. Functionality and flexibility have sky-rocketed with monthly pricing-per-user tumbling to less than what it costs to take a client to lunch.

There is a new game afoot when it comes to CRM and senior logistics and transportation leaders need to be aware of if it they plan to keep pace with more nimble competitors. The new game is about improving, leaning-out and automating critical business processes and customer service interactions at an accelerated pace. How is this related to CRM? The leading CRM vendors understood that they had to do more than provide a repository for customer, contact, leads and opportunity data so they expanded their focus to play an important supporting role in enabling organizations to become more agile. 

It is an exciting time for our industry and the use of CRM. It’s also time for business leaders to look beyond Lead and Pipeline Management when it comes to CRM. There will be several sessions covering CRM at the 2015 TMSA Logistics Marketing & Sales Leadership Conference June 7-9 in St. Petersburg, Fla. Come join us!