CRM Expert Advisor White Paper

The Customer Relationship Management Maturity (CRMM) Scale: How does your company rank?
A Self-Assessment Guide for Small to Mid-Size Businesses

Maximizer Software Inc., 2008. All Rights Reserved.

Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 3 The Purpose of CRMM Assessment ....................................................................................... 3 Level I Apprentice ................................................................................................................ 4 Level II Professional............................................................................................................. 5 Level III Expert..................................................................................................................... 6 Level IV Master .................................................................................................................... 7 Where are you on the CRM Maturity (CRMM) Scale?: Self-Assessment Scorecard ......... 9 Next Steps ............................................................................................................................... 11

Maximizer Software Inc., 2008. All Rights Reserved.

The Customer Relationship Management Maturity (CRMM) Scale: How does your company rank?
Introduction
Most businesses, no matter what their size, recognize the strategic importance of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), but some especially small to mid-size businesses (SMBs) continue to use basic contact managers or simple spreadsheets to track customers, manage leads, collaborate on sales, and manage customers. While the value of CRM can be clearly demonstrated with improved customer satisfaction and increased revenues, some organizations still perceive the effort to implement CRM greater than the potential benefits. However, the reality is that more and more businesses are rapidly adopting the use of CRM technology due to the concern that they will fall behind their competitors. Across the spectrum of companies that use CRM, there are many processes that have been implemented which have enabled them to achieve more efficient and effective methods to create better customer experiences, more profitable customers and overall more successful companies. In fact, AMI-Partners, a major analyst firm focusing on the global IT market, released the results of its 2007 SMB study which clearly concluded that SMBs who use CRM had higher annual revenues, greater revenue per employee, larger growth over the last twelve months and higher projected growth in the next twelve months than those that did not use CRM. But achieving these results requires more than merely installing CRM software. Upon examining the use of CRM across industries, we have clearly defined four progressive levels of Customer Relationship Management Maturity (CRMM). Many companies incorporate basic CRM processes and technologies first, and then progress up the scale with more automation, collaboration, and advanced processes. This strategy enables companies to achieve incremental success without having to invest everything or tie up valuable internal resources up front.

The Purpose of CRMM Assessment

The Customer Relationship Management Maturity scale divides organizational CRM effectiveness into four levels: 1. Level I Apprentice: Making Contact and Keeping Track 2. Level II Professional: Working Together Better 3. Level III Expert: Best Practices in Action 4. Level IV Master: Performance Guidance As you progress along the scale from one level to the next, the benefits are clear at each turn. So if youre embarking on a CRM initiative, start with this guide as a framework for

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assessing your organizations current CRM maturity level. Then use it as a roadmap to graduate successfully to the next levels.

Level I Apprentice
Essential Data Collection: Making Contact and Keeping Track
At the most basic level, good prospect and customer care stems from good contact and communications history information. Does your company have a single-source database of customer information that your entire team can easily access and maintain? If your company has not progressed to this stage sharing prospect and customer information and communications history and ensuring that it is up to date and accurate you will certainly under-perform compared to competitors.

Hallmarks of Level 1 CRM Maturity

Here are some of the ways you can recognize whether or not your organization has achieved a solid foundation on which to build toward customer relationship management mastery:

Standards: Data collection for contact information is consistent. There are rules for inputting data into the system. Accuracy: There are no duplicates. Interactions: Employees keep records of all important conversations, meetings, and written correspondence with customers. Accessibility: People can access and (if applicable) update information and interactions from any location. Security: Customers are a significant asset to your organization. Your customer information is secure from corruption and theft. Integrity: To maintain data integrity in the single-source repository, a simple to use system of updating and synchronizing field-based information must be available.

The Benefits of Being a CRM Apprentice

The old saying garbage-in, garbage-out has never been more appropriate than with customer information. By making the move to ensuring customer data accuracy, currency and integrity, your company will be building the foundation for excellent customer experiences. Without this, searching for data or flipping through screens to find the right piece of information will slow down customer interactions, making your organization appear unresponsive and complicated. If your customer service representatives can immediately access accurate customer information critical to delivering exceptional service, they will succeed. Accurate information is the key and implementing standards to achieve this is the cornerstone to being a CRM Apprentice.

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What to Expect If You Dont Rank as an Apprentice

Companies that do not take the initiative to handle prospect and customer information as a valuable corporate asset face internal and competitive threats. First, if your employees are storing valuable knowledge of customers only on their computer, or in their memories, your customer information is lost as a corporate asset. Second, if your competitors have a better grasp of prospect information, then they are more likely to connect with them in relevant ways, on an ongoing basis; diminishing your ability to win business with them. Third, customers are more careful than ever about the personal information they are willing to share with companies due to increasing incidents of identity theft. Losing customer confidence is a risk no business can afford to take. At the Apprentice level, you form the foundation for CRM success through information consistency, accuracy and accessibility.

Level II Professional
Aligning Teams around the Customer: Working Together Better
Too often, organizations striving to be customer-centric ignore a critical component: aligning the people in the organization to the strategy. One problem that can occur is when the business has no mechanism for different business units to share customer insight. Without that, a business has little hope of reaching Level II of Customer Relationship Management Maturity. However, in a customer-centric organization that has implemented wide spread information-sharing, you can bring the voice of the customer to every level. People working together in partnership, to fulfill prospect and customer needs achieve goals more quickly than those working alone, or worse, at cross purposes.

Indications you have Achieved Level II CRM Maturity

Universal Accessibility: Contact information is shared, accessible and updatable from anywhere across the extended enterprise, including staff, management and reseller partners. Cross Functional: Teams can consist of staff in various roles supporting customers. Non-Hierarchical: Customer-specific tasks can be assigned cross departmentally. Teamwork: Teams work together to find new opportunities and close sales. Sales executives can define and assign a plan for working on opportunities that involve more than one person and more than one department. Marketing managers can define and assign tasks for a campaign. Service and support information is shared with sales and marketing staff. Integrated: Some integration with other systems such as accounting allows customer-facing staff to see the whole picture of customers.

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The Benefits of Turning Professional

When your organization has made it to the Professional level, prospects and customers experience consistently high-quality interaction with company representatives across departmental boundaries. Your service, sales and support representatives demonstrate a high degree of customer intelligence. Employees make fewer mistakes and feel confident making decisions and taking action based on information that is accurate, complete and up-to-date.

If You Dont Make it to the Professional Circuit

Customers today expect organizations to know who they are, how long theyve been doing business with you, what products they've bought, what service issues they've had, and how they want you to deal with them. When customers interact with different departments and divisions of your firm, they want the people they interact with to have a complete picture of their dealings with you without having to repeat themselves. Whether they communicate with you by phone, over the web, or face-to-face, todays customers expect to receive consistent service and accurate information. After all, it is not their concern that a phone call may be placed to one person, yet their email inquiries are sent to someone else. Their expectations for service reside with your company as a whole. When prospects and customers communications with your company reflect a consistently high level of knowledge of purchases, service requests and other interactions, your company gains a high level of credibility. At the Professional level, CRM takes accurate information and harnesses the entire organization around the customer by collaborating effectively across departments and delivering seamless customer experiences.

Level III Expert

Process Implementation and Automation: Best Practices in Action
Over time in a business, you learn what works and what doesnt. Companies that have identified repeatable processes that anyone can follow have a much greater likelihood of continued success. As your organization grows, how do you continue to ensure everyone on the team is focusing on tactics that work? Effective CRM processes start with plans based on industry best practices. However, every company has unique processes that reflect how prospects and customers interact with them. Your goal is to combine industry best practices with your own experiences for the real benefits to emerge. Implementing these practices into your daily operations can take time, but effective CRM technology will reduce your effort by modeling, sharing, and automating your CRM processes.

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Signs You Have Reached Expert Levels

Leader: Your company bases sales strategy and marketing programs on those designed by successful companies or industry leaders in your field. Reproducible: Customer-focused professionals in your organization can follow a clear path that defines how they should approach specific customerrelated tasks. Flexibility: Managers can implement new tactics as they learn what works and what doesnt. Expertise: The right people in your organization take action at the right time to close deals, increase awareness and ensure customer satisfaction. Productivity: New staff hit the ground running with clearly defined, easily understood processes.

Why Become a CRM Expert?

While the competition struggles to identify how to process leads, inquiries, and complaints, you gain a competitive advantage by defining, sharing and automating such critical business processes within your CRM system. Once a process has been defined and tasks assigned either to people or to the system itself, there are fewer errors and lost opportunities. Not only do repeatable processes ensure efficiency and success, but they also increase the ability for your organization to more rapidly train new people. Getting people up to speed quickly improves the overall productivity, customer experience consistency, and ability for your organization to reap the rewards of growth.

Failure to Achieve Expert Status Impedes Success

In the race to win customers, there is no second place. If your team fumbles failing to wow the prospect, or keep the customer, or close the deal the game is over. By making sure that your entire team is playing according to your game plan, your chances of winning greatly improves. Getting to the Expert stage opens your chances of creating winning teams that work together, using set plays and then adapting their strategies as they encounter new scenarios.

Level IV Master
Measuring and Managing Performance: Visibility and Guidance
Your company is aligned around the customer; all sales, marketing and service professionals work together, sharing information and tasks based on expertise. Congratulations. The next step is to ensure that your executive and management team have access to the information they need to measure and monitor performance day to

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day and over the long term. By consolidating accurate and up-to-date information, and serving it up through meaningful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) metrics which your company defines to track progress and measure success and automated notifications, your company moves up to CRM mastery.

Clear Signs of Mastery

Metrics and Monitoring: Managers can access real-time sales, marketing and service KPIs, and other real-time data to make operational adjustments, continuously improving performance and changing tactics quickly. Forecasting: Sales managers can view sales opportunities and see how much revenue the company should expect in the next quarters or year, consistently. Exception Management: Sales managers are notified when anomalies take place abandoned deals, missed leads, or changed forecasts; Service managers are alerted to critical customer situations overloaded cases, unresolved issues, or key account problems. Planning: Executives do not have to wait until the end of the month to understand how the company has performed, allowing them to prepare strategy and operational plans in advance.

Rewards of CRM Mastery

By defining, measuring and sharing KPIs in real-time, executives can quickly identify areas for improvement, and make align tactics to achieve corporate goals. CRM Masters also easily see which areas of business are outperforming benchmarks, rewarding teams accordingly, setting new goals and using the successful model as a template for future success. CRM Masters stay a step ahead of the competition by being proactive with customers.

Why Go the Extra Mile to Attain Mastery?

While your competitors struggle to generate revenue reports and sales forecasts using manual methods, or puzzle why their customer attrition rates are so high, you are able to monitor and be proactive with key aspects of your operations. For companies reporting publicly, it is an imperative dictated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Corporate officers have a responsibility to demonstrate that reporting especially regarding to forward-looking statements is based on the real performance of the business. CRM mastery helps make business monitoring, measuring, and forecasting a science by providing executives the means to formulate performance statements based on reality. Becoming a CRM Master means professionals across the organization orchestrate their efforts to reach mutually determined performance goals that management monitors to ensure both top line and bottom line results are met all the while ensuring the best possible customer experience.

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Where are you on the CRM Maturity (CRMM) Scale?: Self-Assessment Scorecard
Start with this self-assessment to grade your current CRM Maturity level. Use the benchmarks in the guide as a check list to successfully graduate to the next levels. Grade your organization against each of the areas below and add up your weighted score for each section. This will give you your position on the maturity scale for each level. A low score at any level (6 18) indicates that your company could improve before moving to the next level. A high score (19 30) means your organization is ready to move to the next level! Scores 1 = Strongly Disagree 2 = Disagree 3 = Neutral 4 = Agree 5 = Strongly Agree

CRM Level I: Apprenticeship

Features Contact information is shared and entered in a consistent way across departments. There are no duplicate entries for contact information in our system. We train all our frontline staff how to enter customer profile information when they first start and then on a regular basis. All employees make notes of important conversations and meetings; save emails, faxes, proposals and contracts to customer records for sharing. Our customer information is secure. Customer information is accessible from virtually anywhere. Section Total Score

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CRMM Level II: Professional

Features Our organization is customer-focused. Our corporate strategy is aligned with being customer-focused. We have cross functional teams that access and share customer knowledge across departments. Tasks to accomplish a specific customer-centric objective are assigned across departments. Our customers do not complain that people in the organization do not talk with each other, or seem to work at cross purposes on their behalf. From anywhere, I can access a complete picture of customers, contacts, partners and prospects so that I can make informed decisions. Section Total Score

CRMM Level III: Expert

Features Our system enables us to share and incorporate best practices in sales, marketing, and customer service. We have a well-defined sales process that consists of a number of steps and stages from prospecting through opportunity management to closing the deal. Staff follows guidelines for handling and resolving customer service issues for satisfactory resolution within a specified time period. We can adjust processes and workflow templates to rapidly model our own best practices. We review and update our processes on a regular basis to improve efficiency and customer experiences. Our best practices consistently generate successful outcomes. Section Total Score

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CRMM Level IV: Master

Features Our organization has measurable performance indicators for sales, marketing, and service by which we monitor achievement toward goals. Executives define and have access to real-time KPIs and forecasting information. Managers can define and access real-time KPIs to monitor daily business operations. Managers are alerted in real-time about critical situations, in order to remedy them immediately. Staff members are alerted in real-time about critical situations with their customers. Section Total Score

Next Steps
If you rated 6 18 on any of the levels: Focus on improving your processes at that level before progressing to the next level. Working through the levels in progression will ensure success. Understand whether all the items of the level pertain to your business or not. Some processes may not apply to your unique business.

If you rated 19 30 on any of the levels: You are ready to move up a notch to the next level. Create a plan for achieving the incremental improvements of the next level. Within the achievement areas for each level, prioritize whats most important to your business. Identify areas where youll see the biggest impact for your customers, productivity, and revenues. Involve key stakeholders executives, departmental managers, and staff in defining how to achieve success for each item.

Congratulations! You are on your way to realizing the benefits of being a CRM Master: clear executive insight, greater staff productivity and ultimately, greater customer satisfaction and loyalty that drives increased revenues.

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About the Author

Peter Callaghan, Chief Sales Officer, Maximizer Software, Inc. Peter Callaghan is the Chief Sales Officer at Maximizer Software, Inc. A CRM industry veteran having worked with small, medium, and large businesses on their CRM implementations, Peter has been named to CRM Magazine's list of "Who's Who in CRM," and is frequently quoted in publications including CRM Guru, VARBusiness, and Sales & Marketing Management magazine. With over 20 years of experience in the software industry, Peter oversees Maximizers sales, marketing and professional services in the Americas region. He has held senior positions at Pivotal, Computer Associates, Cognos, and Sybase. While at Pivotal, Peter helped the company grow its revenues from $1 million to $ 100 million over sixteen quarters, resulting in a successful initial public offering on the NASDAQ. Peter has received numerous awards for superior sales performance and holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada.

About Maximizer Software

Maximizer Software is the leading provider of simple, accessible, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, providing the best value for small and medium-sized businesses. Built on a web-based architecture, Maximizer CRM offers sales, marketing, and customer service users and managers their choice of access to customer information through the desktop, web, or mobile device. Maximizer Software has sold more than one million licenses and over 8,000 corporate customers ranging in size from entrepreneurs to multi-national organizations, including: Siemens, Socit Gnrale, HSBC, TD Securities, Lockheed Martin, Brian Tracy International, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, Oxford University Press, and Cathay Pacific. Maximizer Software is a global business with offices and over 400 business partners in the Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa and Asia Pacific.

Contact Maximizer Software

Americas (Headquarters) 1-800-804-6299 www.maximizer.com Australia/New Zealand +61-(0)-2-9957-2011 www.maximizer.com.au Europe, Middle East, Africa + 44-1344-766900 www.maximizer.co.uk Asia + (852) 2598 2888 www.maximizer.com.hk www.maximizer.com.cn

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