What criteria should you be looking at when picking a CRM package?

If you're going to ask the question, "What criteria should you be looking at when picking a CRM package," then Barton Goldenberg, President of ISM, and founder of the CRM Evolution Conference is the guy to ask. He literally wrote the book on picking a CRM solution.
In 1989 Goldenberg started testing CRM software across 217 features where he examined business functionality, technical features, user friendliness, and ease of implementation. The end result is a Yellow Pages-sized tome of valuable CRM vendor analysis.
As you're looking for a CRM solution, here are five criteria you should look at:
• Sales -- The basic features of contact, account management, and sales pipeline management.
• Marketing -- How will the solution help with market campaign management and email campaigns?
• Customer Service -- Customer incident escalation and tracking. Can the CRM do this itself or do you want to integrate it with another service? Can the CRM package handle that?
• eBusiness -- How well can you come off the web, for marketing, and sales questions? What eBusiness interface features are there?
• Analytics -- Ability to take data from your existing CRM and make sense of it. How well does it segment your market? Plus, does it show you where you are in the customer service and/or sales pipeline?
Before you leap into a CRM solution ask yourself if your processes are in place on the sales side, marketing, customer service, and production. It's important to make sure you've got those in place. A CRM solution isn't going to solve those issues. It's only designed to enhance it.
Other questions to ask yourself:
• What type of technical environment do you want? On premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid?
• How ready are your people to use and take advantage of CRM? Success of CRM is dependent on what you and others put into it.
"Eighty percent of the success of a CRM solution depends on people and process," said Goldenberg. "Twenty percent is actually on the technology."

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