Strategic Context for the CRM project

Your CRM project is conceptualized in the context of your organization’s customer strategy. It is important for the implementers to grasp and fully appreciate this context – specifically the problem or opportunity that the project is seeking to address.

The strategic intent may be to increase sales, to improve CSAT, improve productivity of the staff, improve the visibility into sales pipelines, bring about consistency of customer interactions across channels or a host of other reasons. Most times, it is the senior executives or a dedicated internal strategy team, or a specialist consultant team conducting such strategic analysis at organizations.

Such analysis yields multiple initiatives, any one of which could be a CRM system implementation, along side changes to people, skills, organization structures, and incentives. For example, at one of our Higher Education clients, the Salesforce CRM implementation has come about as a means of generating more income for college through consistent fundraising campaigns.

The Strategic Context addresses WHY a CRM solution is being implemented in the first place. The CRM solution is enabling a business strategy through systems. Having an appreciation of the strategy serves as a guideline to prioritize requirements or resolve disagreements among stakeholders on what or how to implement features.