When should you rely on CRM consultants?

Figuring out the What

What is the substance: what do you want to achieve? Maybe there’s a change in your sales process, a new product or service to sell? Perhaps the new fiscal year has brought you new KPIs to follow and you’re not quite sure how to get the numbers out of the CRM. A new team entering the CRM will often bring changes to the environment, too.

Whatever these are, you need to clearly understand what you want: the new process designed, metrics defined, etc. After that, it’s only a matter of executing!

Alright, but how to do it?

Here’s when the actual work in your CRM starts. Now you know what you want to get out of it and your team is ready to go – only the CRM is holding you back.

There are always two routes to take: do it yourself or get CRM consultants to do it for you. If you have the skills, you need to consider if you have the time to do it. If you do not have the skills, you need to consider if you first have the time to learn how to do it AND then do it. The learning curve varies system by system, but it’s always there.

DIY is like a box of chocolates

If you know a bit, it can also be difficult to judge if you know enough to DIY. Sometimes you realise halfway through that it was, in fact, more complicated than you first anticipated, and there’s quite a bit more learning to do to finish the CRM tasks. Sometimes you realise that your initial plans were not great after all, and you have to pivot everything quickly. It’s life, and it happens.

Bringing in a CRM consultant who knows your CRM system through and through will most likely end up costing you less than DIY. And we can honestly say without hesitation, after seeing countless CRMs that, on the surface, seem fine but do not produce the results customers want and need.

Sometimes you know the thing isn’t working, but you have no idea why and how to fix it. That’s our cue.

What brings your company the most value?

Asking a CRM consultant for help is a shortcut. We make it our day job to know the system and the best practices. We know what it can do (and what it cannot do!). We know the tools to complement your CRM ecosystem, the best way to create integrations and the best bang- for-buck-ratio for all of these.

Even if you want to learn your system properly (and we definitely encourage you to), tailored training will be a useful shortcut. Sure, you can watch online videos and tutorials and read knowledge-base articles – but they most likely will be generalisations, and you must do the customisation to your needs yourself. You quickly spend a whole day researching while everything else, the actual productive work, is neglected.

Even a single workshop with a CRM consultant will enable you to focus on what’s most important to you: which features you must master and which can be priority 2, how to draw your CRM development roadmap and confirm that your setup is catering for your needs.

CRM Consultants want to see you succeed

We at Zimple never want to make you dependent on us. We want you to be on top of your CRM and to be able to develop it as new needs arise. We think you achieve that best by training you, giving you support, introducing you to useful features, creating integrations to other systems, etc.

It’s not a bad idea to include us already in the “what” phase either – insight on how the CRM might help you achieve your goals can be invaluable, and any wrong assumptions about the CRM’s capabilities can be tackled immediately. After seeing hundreds of sales teams operating, we can even help figure out your sales process. In any case, knowing where your process comes from will help craft the CRM to your way of working.

All in all: asking a CRM consultant is worth the money – doing and then re-doing is the most expensive way of working. Get it right the first time; ask us to help!