Every business owner and CEO knows how crucial it is to meet the needs of a changing customer base. A CRM helps manage customers with efficiency, scalability, and best of all—automation, to make that possible. Without it, accurate customer insights are extremely difficult to come by.
As a CRM and digital transformation consultancy, we guide our clients on industry best practices for CRM implementation. Whether you’ve implemented CRM before or are just getting started, the advice for a successful project remains the same: Be strategic. Detail your requirements. Phase your implementation.
This post will dive into the last of those three points: phasing your implementation. Why is it necessary? What should happen in each phase? How do you decide?
Why Phase CRM Implementation?
Everything about adopting software is risky. If you don’t plan well, you add risk. If you don’t have full support from stakeholders, you add risk. If people in your company won’t use the new software, risk abounds. If the project is too complex—you guessed it—more risk!
Phasing an implementation mitigates risk to support a successful outcome. Teams aren’t as overwhelmed by the immense change, it allows for better resource management and budget allocation, and it provides necessary time for testing and adjusting the rollout based on feedback.
The goal of your first implementation phase is to establish a MVP, or minimally viable product. After spending three to six months (on average) planning your implementation, you’ll fully grasp your objectives and have a deep understanding of your desired features. Using this knowledge, you can then phase your implementation to match.
The Formula for Phased CRM Implementation
Phase One of your CRM implementation is when you roll out your MVP. While it may be exciting to imagine everyone in your organization using the new CRM during this phase, it’s often not realistic. Phased implementation keeps risk at bay and helps a subset of users learn what works best for them. Here’s our formula for phasing your project:
Phase One
To roll out your MVP, implement mostly out-of-the-box CRM components. If you are planning integrations, you can add one during this phase as well.
It’s important to keep that integration simple. One example for how to do that is to start with data flowing in one direction. This initial phase is rolled out to a select group of people or departments, not the entire organization. Think of these individuals as your beta testers. They are assessing how the capabilities of the CRM meet their needs and impact their daily work. Their feedback will be crucial for the following phases.
Phase Two
In this phase, you’ll expand on your simple integration. So, if you had data flowing one-way, now you’ll add flow in the other direction. This is also the time to expand the rollout to new groups in your company. Feedback from your Phase One team can guide you on how to present this new software to the rest of your employees and keep everyone excited about its benefits.
Phase Three
In Phase Three (and any other subsequent phases after that), you’ll run through a continuous cycle of adding integrations and features. Slowly but surely, you’ll build the CRM of your dreams and give your users full access to all that it can do.
Each implementation phase should take no more than three months to complete. If your implementation requires more than three phases, that’s OK! The important thing is to incrementally add to your CRM capabilities and features over time.
How to Determine Your MVP and Your Phases
One of the biggest question marks about phased CRM implementation is deciding what defines your MVP. The MVP and subsequent phases should be aligned to your use cases and features. You should already know those use cases because you defined them to help you select your CRM.
More than three decades of CRM implementation taught us that this 3-part approach is most effective to ensure the success of your implementation: MSCW diagram, user story mapping, customer experience mapping.
However, depending on your project timeline and goals, achieving all three isn’t always viable. The MSCW and user story mapping are must-do; the customer experience mapping is nice-to-do because it helps you streamline your processes as you go instead of having to go back and make changes later. Here’s more information on these approaches:
MSCW
MSCW stands for “Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, Won’t Have”. An MSCW diagram asks you to think strategically about which CRM features are truly important during that MVP phase of implementation.
The number one rule of building a MSCW diagram is that you cannot have everything as a must-have. It’s very easy to get caught in this trap! Must-have features are the absolute essentials your business requires to function effectively. Your MVP phase will likely be a mixture of must-have and a few should-have features.
Every company will have some out-of-the-box CRM features they don’t want or need. It’s crucial to make sure those features are marked in your "Won't Have" category and turned off when you roll out your CRM. This way, users can’t play with capabilities that are unhelpful or do not align to your business processes.
User Story Maps
Once you categorize your features according to importance, it’s time to get a little more granular. A user story map takes your must-have features and breaks them down into a series of subtasks based on how users will realistically apply the capabilities of the feature.
For example, a user story for segmented email campaigns may include creating customer segments, sending simple email campaigns to those segments, tracking basic metrics, advanced segmenting based on behavioral data, automating personalized emails, and enabling reporting and analytics to optimize campaigns. Each step in that process is essential to a marketing manager, but not all those capabilities may be a priority for your MVP. Perhaps you would choose to include the first three steps in your initial phase and add the advanced segmentation, automation, and detailed reporting in the next phase. Figuring out the answers to these questions helps define what an MVP looks like for you.
Customer & User Experience Maps
Customer and user experience maps visualize how people feel during each step of your process, and it applies to both external customers (ie customer) and your CRM users (ie user). For external customers, the map outlines their journey with your business, helping you identify key touchpoints to improve customer satisfaction. For internal CRM users (like sales or support teams), it highlights how they interact with the CRM, ensuring the system is user-friendly and supports their workflow. Mapping both experiences allows you to address the needs of all stakeholders in a phased CRM implementation.
As you adopt the CRM, any negative experiences your users have will increase the risk of failure. If they must jump between systems, do too many clicks, or input too much required information, it could hinder their adoption of the new system. A user experience map helps you identify these bottlenecks early on by simply asking your users, "Do you have a good, bad, or neutral feeling about this step?". If it's not meeting expectations, you should explore ways to adjust that feature or workflow to better serve their needs.
Factoring in Continuous Improvement
Evaluating system performance and user feedback after each phase is important. Your CRM implementation requires this continuous improvement to pinpoint which updates will best align your CRM to your business needs and create the most streamlined experience. Making sure the system is set up in a way that adds value to your users is the key to getting full CRM adoption, improving your customer experiences, and ultimately maximizing your CRM’s long-term value.
Concluding Thoughts
Phasing your CRM implementation ensures a smoother rollout, allowing teams to gradually adopt the system while minimizing risks. This approach provides time for feedback, testing, and adjustments, leading to a more efficient and successful implementation.
However, beware of common bottlenecks such as overcomplicating early phases, lack of user training, or neglecting cross-department communication. These can slow progress and limit the CRM's effectiveness. Planning for these challenges will help ensure each phase builds toward a seamless, integrated CRM system.
If you need help planning your next CRM project, we’re here for you. Reach out to us at sales@techadv.com for a free consultation.