IT Proposal

Introduction

ABC is a small company that needs a new CRM. In order to ensure that the new CRM meets the company's needs, ABC needs to undertake the following steps. First, it needs to identify what features and functionality that it needs in a CRM, then it needs to determine whether to make one in-house or to use a third-party CRM. This analysis will be conducted with the systems development life cycle in mind.

Analysis of the Current Situation

ABC has built at in-house customer relationship management (CRM) system, and used it to grow thus far. Customer relationship management systems are used by the sales team in order to not only manage their relationships with prospects, but also with existing clients. The role of the CRM is, at its most basic, to record and store customer information. This includes the basic contact information, but most CRMs will also store the details of client conversations. Essentially, a CRM should put the recorded history of the entire business relationship at the fingertips of the sales staff. On its blog, leading CRM Salesforce describes the core CRM functionality as giving "everyone across the business, including sales, marketing, customer service and business development a better way to manage the customer relationships and interactions that drive success" (Salesforce, 2017).

For the purposes of this scenario, the capabilities in the in-house solution are not known. It should be assumed at a) the capabilities of the current in-house solution are irrelevant and b) that the current in-house solution is not very good. The reason for the latter conclusion is that it was probably developed quickly, in order to serve basic functionality needs. A lot of the leading CRMs are quite expensive. Building your own CRM is going to take developer time away from the core product, which ownership would likely have been hesitant to do. In balancing the need to save money on an expensive CRM but keeping in mind the reality that developer time is better spent on the core product, it is likely that ABC put together a bare bones CRM, which is precisely why it isn't scalable and needs to be replaced at this point. So the focus at this point needs to be on the company's needs going forward.

The current situation for ABC is this. The company is still relatively small, at less than 50 employees, but it has a large customer base. Thus, there is cash flow, so the point where the company can look externally. What ABC does is unknown, so developer capacity is also unknown. However, at less than 50 staff, it should be assumed that most of that is in sales and development. If finance, HR, marketing and customer service are taken out of the mix, there are probably around 15-20 of each sales and development staff, skewing towards the latter. Smaller software companies can be heavily focused on the sales function. However, part of achieving operational maturity as a software company is switching from a sales-focused organization to a marketing focused organization. In fact, integration of sales and marketing functions is a recurring theme in the literature regarding both software marketing and operational maturity (Burghgraef, 2012). CRM maker Hubspot has long advocated that marketing and sales need to work together in the sense that after the low-hanging fruit have been sold, most companies need a strong marketing arm that fills the funnel for the sales team to continue to drive sales forward. Accelerating sales via integration of marketing and sales is surely going to be one of the primary objectives of the new CRM (Savery, 2017).

The other thing that ABC has to take into consideration is that building a CRM is incredibly complex. If the current homemade CRM is no longer good enough, and the company is not in the CRM business itself, its development talent might not have the capacity to build a new one, and moreover to do so would be a waste of their time and energy. First, there is the core product to consider. Second, if they can efficiently build a superior CRM that is fit for a company of 50 people with a large customer base, then the reality is that they should be marketing that product as well. Management will have to take opportunity cost into consideration when examining the build versus buy question.

Challenges

The major challenge that this company is facing is that it needs a new CRM. The current CRM was clearly built with the needs of a startup in mind, but the new one has to be built with the needs of a company working through growth and operational maturity in mind. The new system needs to basically start with the marketing function. The workflow is, roughly, as follows. The marketing team, through its various activities, will attract leads into the sales funnel. The first step is that the marketing team needs to qualify the leads, and those who are qualified become prospects. The marketing qualified leads are then passed onto sales. The reason that leads needs to be qualified before being passed to sales is simple there are only so many man-hours for the sales team. Salespeople are not free, therefore they should only be working on leads that are likely to convert. The conversion rate is a critical component of lead scoring (Vaughn, 2018).

The leads that are qualified and handed off to the sales team will then be worked by this sales team. Typically there are two levels, an opener who will further score the lead, and then a closer whose specialty is, well, closing. The sales cycle, however, does not end there. For most businesses, it is easier and cheaper to win more revenue from existing clients than to find new ones (Morris, 2016). Thus, there should always be a branch of the sales team that is focused on this form of business development. ABC has a large customer base, so there is clearly going to be opportunity to work that existing base and increase sales that way. As Myler (2016) notes, working both new leads and existing clients typically accelerates revenue growth.

The new CRM should function as such. It should allow marketing to easily create a funnel and the appropriate work flows. The marketing team should be able to take leads from a variety of sources, and easily input them into the CRM. Keeping this data clean is a challenge, but necessary, so that the same company is not worked by multiple sales reps as well as to maintain privacy. The reality is that if someone opts out of ommunications, the legal environment supports that right. Maintaining privacy will become even more important once GDPR comes into effect, assuming that part of the "large customer base" is in Europe, where this strict data privacy law is going to be introduced this year (Nadeua, 2018).

From the moment that the lead is imported into the CRM, there should be a record of all the communications with that customer, whether an automated blog update email sent by the marketing team, a sales call, or after sales any sort of service call or feature request. All of this needs to be logged into...…The company will handle installation of any hardware if there is a need for hardware at all. Most are built to work with Mac and Windows operating systems, so unless ABC is using something else, there shouldn't be an issue there. In a perfect world, the off-the-shelf solution will be sufficient but many times that is not the case. The in-house development team might have to contribute some integrations or build out specific functionality. The head of the dev team should definitely be involved in all meetings with the final choices, in order to effectively evaluate what the dev team will need to contribute to the project, and whether it has that talent in-house.

Implementing

Implementing a SaaS solution is, more or less, as easy to signing up. In this case it will be a little bit more complex, but not initially. The biggest issue will be migrating the data from the existing CRM, which was built in-house, to the new one. No integration will exist, so the in-house team will definitely need to build one. Any CRM chosen will need to have the right API keys available to facilitate this. That is probably the biggest element in implementation, aside from things like training. Once data migration has been figured out, the sales team can get to work. The entire point of using a third party system is to avoid a multi-month, complex implementation process.

Systems Development Life Cycle

The systems development life cycle should be the waterfall method for this project, where the life cycle is planning, building, testing, staging, implementing and monitoring (Veracode, 2018). When the integration to migrate the data is built, it will need to go through these stages, but it will only need to go through them once. At such point as the data is migrated, the old CRM can be turned off, and the data stored in case it is needed later. Because the solution built is basically a one-off, there shouldn't be the need for agile, or any other iterative form of development. The CRM company might use such techniques, but the entire point of using them is so that they can continue to improve the product, and ABC can free up its resources to work on what it does best build software that isn't CRM.

Conclusion

Building a CRM is, in terms of strategy, insane. There is no logic to trying to reinvent this wheel when the core functionality will be the same as the leading CRMs out there, when the company is small and shouldn't be using developer time for anything other than making the core product better. It might be fun to build a CRM, but it is bad strategy to do so. The dev team might be pumped to do it, but the CEO should not really give it much thought at all. Therefore, most of the work that ABC will need to do on this project is to adequately spec out what they need going forward. The CRM needs to be scalable to a new level of operational maturity for ABC. Furthermore, ABC needs to build an integration with whatever CRM it chooses that will migrate its existing data over to the new system. So the work is not completely without input from the in-house team; they will need to do anything that the third-party solution does not do. So in that sense, there will be some projects here, but the whole point of the proposed solution is to minimize operational disruption, solve the CRM problem in a cleaner, more efficient manner, and get this company to the next level much more…