Seven Key Questions to Ask Your CRM Vendor

When it comes to CRM, there are few issues as important as selecting the right vendor. Here are the questions that you should be asking before selecting a vendor or renewing your contract with your current vendor:

1. What is your industry experience? While there are common elements to the sales process as it takes place in various industries, there are also significant variations. For example, in the medical devices industry, a sales rep might carry a hundred thousand dollars worth of inventory in the trunk of his car. If your industry has peculiar sales practices, you’ll need a vendor that already has some experience with them.

2. What is your technological experience? In most cases, you’ll be installing a CRM system that will need to integrate – at least to some extent – with whatever systems you already have in place. You’ll therefore want a vendor who understands whatever technology is already in use. There are very few things more discouraging than watching vendor experts scratch their heads when confronted with a system that’s entirely new to them.

3. What are your reference accounts? A solid CRM vendor should be able to provide references that match your business and the requirements of your sales organization. And those reference customers should have achieved measurable results and be able to articulate them to you. What you don’t want is a generic reference that just says superficial nice things about the vendor. Demand specifics!

4. Can you help us manage change? To make the best use of your CRM system, you’ll need to make adjustments in personnel, goals, direction, compensation, and so forth – a process that many organizations find challenging. Since your CRM vendor is leading the charge on this technological transformation, they should be able to help you with the changes that will need to take place within your sales organization.

5. Can you provide us the right training? CRM always involves training and retraining your employees. Unfortunately, many CRM vendors seem to think that their software is intuitive and that users will need no instruction. That’s never the case, so you want to be certain that the vendor has the right stuff in the classroom. And be sure that the training expense is included when you determine the cost of the software!

6. Do you understand our business model? For an implementation to prove successful, the vendor will need to focus on the people, process, and best practices that can help you to reduce risk and accelerate benefits. You’ll want to work with a vendor who understands “what’s in it for the sales rep” and can share best practices in driving user adoption such as data quality, communication, training, measurement, management reinforcement, and business alignment.

7. Will you give us back our data? If you’re working with an on-demand vendor, you should make certain that you’ll have no difficulty getting control of your customer information once their contract expires. You should also make sure that the contract provides a way for you to ensure that, if you leave the vendor, there aren’t still copies of your customer information on your former vendor’s system.