When it comes to choosing the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for your business, it's important to understand all the benefits of a CRM system before beginning your selection process. When you launch a CRM implementation, your choices can impact nearly everyone in your company.

These "Back to Basics" ideas for implementing a CRM program inside a business were collected from executives, managers, employees and consultants who shared their experiences. The goal of this series of articles, appearing over 8 weeks, is to provide you with useful information as you choose a new CRM system.

Now, on to our seventh article and two more ideas:

12. Experience in the wrong sector is very often the wrong experience

A trend in CRM is the movement of enterprise vendors into the middle market space as the larger sites are saturated or locked in with one CRM vendor or another. The solutions and experience of these vendors can often seem impressive, but the question needs to be asked as to how relevant working with a Top 5 consultancy on a multi-million pound project with almost complete soup to nuts customisation is to your company. The realities of the
middle market are very different. Budgets are tight, projects are tightly aligned to ROI, products must deliver a large proportion out of the box and the project cycles are short. In essence they are in many ways the opposite of the project and product types we see at the enterprise level.

• By all means, particularly for larger projects, take time to assess enterprise products in their "mid-market" apparitions but take time to ask:
• What has been delivered in the middle market by this company?
• What does a mid-market product mean; enterprise with features removed?
• Experience of their middle market partners of delivering on time and to budget.
• What works out of the box in these products and what needs to be "customised"?
• Look at the overall cost of sale in particular with a likely extended project cycle.

13. CRM is not for any single department, it's for the whole company

Often, the sales department will be motivated to implement CRM long before other groups get on board. And it can be a great strategy to implement the new software one department at a time. But don't lose sight of your overall goal, which should be to implement CRM throughout the company.

You'll get immediate results by putting CRM into Sales, Customer Service or Support departments. But when you have everyone in the company connected to CRM - when everyone has instant access to the critical information they need to keep driving business forward - that's when you'll see the most exciting benefits of CRM.

It's great to start your implementation with a departmental focus, but keep your larger goals in mind.

Read the next in the series