Most companies forget this step in CRM deployment

Yesterday, we presented a customer journey blueprint to one of our new customers that we are rolling out the HubSpot CRM.

The CRM consulting team working on this project, had in my mind produced an amazing journey blueprint that considered many steps that a customer may take from lead through to customer, to service and renewal. And this would form a good foundation for new customer journeys to be ideated and added in the future.

We were expecting to have to walk out of the presentation having blown the customer away, however we ended up having to calm an irate customer.

They were not expecting a blueprint that mapped out the customer experience and the resulting data flows, they were expecting our blueprint to only explain how we will setup the CRM. That is what they had received from other CRM consultancies and agencies they had worked with in the past.

All was fine in the end though… as we explained:

This is the number one mistake that companies make when they roll out a CRM. They focus on the technology, they focus on the customer record, and they often focus on one department.

As a result, the CRM is setup and it works.

But when the company wants to scale and automate customer experience, when they want to delight customers, when they want to communicate with customers. They find that the CRM was not setup in a way that allows them to get the dataset they require. And this is when a CRM system begins to collect dust, and these requirements that should be simple, have to get executed from spreadsheets and other systems.

To ensure a CRM project is a success, make sure you take the time and effort to map out all potential customer journeys and then let this inform the configuration of the CRM system.

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