Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
Warren Bennis
What is the purpose of a CRM practice?
What is the purpose of CRM practices you have worked for?
Its an obvious question you are wondering why I am asking it? The answer influences the actions of the employees in a CRM practice. The answer gives individuals purpose and is the reason they are employed.
Two of the core ingredients to a successful CRM practice are people and purpose. For CRM professionals to be motivated and engaged they need to feel their actions make a difference, they are contributing to something bigger. It‘s the role of the leader to create the vision of the future and enabling the team to deliver.
What is purpose?
Google describes purpose
- The reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.
- A person’s sense of resolve or determination.
- Have as one’s intention or objective
A purpose is what a CRM practice stands for, what’s its vision is, what everyone involved is working to archive.
Here are mission statements for big companies
Disney
To make people happy
IKEA
At IKEA our vision is to create a better everyday life for the many people. Our business idea supports this vision by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.
Starbucks
To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Virgin Atlantic Airways
to embrace the human spirit and let it fly
Lack of purpose
Many CRM practices have managers not leaders. What is the difference?
Managers have people who work for them, Leaders inspire people to follow them. Leaders create a vision of the future and engage people to deliver it. Managers focus on the present, the tasks which need to be done today without thinking about the tasks which will need to be done in the future.
The purpose of a CRM practice should come from leader of the CRM practice, reminding everyone why they are coming to work and what they are helping the CRM practice archive.
Not anticipating the future, leads to not being ready for the future. Managers allow the future to sneak up on them, the danger is what brought you success today might not work tomorrow.
If you are not looking to the future, you cannot capitalise on opportunities arising from changing technologies and customer requirements. Adapting to a changing CRM landscape leaves you scrabbling to catch up, anticipating allows you to profit.
The CRM Practice might win a project but not have CRM professionals skilled in those areas, leading to learning on the job, making mistakes on a live project, not delivering quality projects.
Without a clear purpose you get embroiled in the day-to-day running of a project, the project gets split up into small tasks and everyone focuses on completing their tasks. This is how projects get created which don’t satisfy the business requirements. It‘s easy to get engrossed on the technical aspects of a project, focus on delivering various parts of the project but you should understand what business aims you are delivering.
Technical solutions which don’t deliver business requirements won’t give a positive impact to the business. The purpose of a CRM project is to deliver business requirements, the purpose of the people working on a CRM project is to make sure this happens.
Purpose of a CRM practice
To motivate people you need a vision to give them purpose
A CRM practice’s goal is to deliver projects to help satisfy customer business requirements, solve their business problems, to do this you need
- The right people
- With the right skills/knowledge
- The necessary management systems
- Technical environments
- Project methodology
- templates
- best practices
- Azure machine learning
- Cloud only solutions
- Azure services
- Social CRM
- Mobile solution
- Field Services
Hosk CRM
I talked about my fictional CRM practice – Hosk CRM in the article Thoughts on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Strategy, so I will continue to expand the Hosk CRM practice with a purpose. Ideally you want your purpose linked to your CRM strategy (or vice versa)
To deliver quality CRM solutions aligned to the customers business objectives
The important points are quality and business objectives. CRM projects must be built around business objectives, this can get lost during projects and when delivering the CRM solution. The team ensures the project aligns to the business objectives of the company.
Focus on business objectives reduces projects getting engrossed on the technical side of the solutions. Customers and developers can drawn into the technical aspects of solutions, which causes the project to drift away from delivering the business objectives and reduces the effectiveness of the CRM project.
Quality
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. Steve Jobs
To deliver a quality or excellent CRM solutions you need a team of passionate and engaged CRM professionals, everyone is involved and contributing. Quality is a moving target, it changes between projects depending on the solution and technical.
What you can say about quality CRM projects, is they are hard to define but everyone knows one when they see one. Quality isn’t something you can archive, it‘s a mindset where everyone works in an environment where excellence is expected. Highlighted in these posts
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