Summary:As we all know buying the wrong CRM can cost a company a lot of money. Here are some questions that a CEO should ask before purchasing a CRM program.

The growth of CRM across businesses of all sizes continues unabated and accordingly the options of CRM systems and products available to businesses are also increasing. The choices can make selecting the right CRM option a little difficult for CEOs.

As a CEO you need CRM software that delivers measurable business growth and enable you to obtain competitive advantage. 

Here are 7 questions that you need to ask before implementing a CRM solution:

1. What do the department heads want from the deployment: What is it that your CFO, IT manager, Customer service manager, service managers and marketing managers require. Cost effective increase in productivity and high ROI on technology investments are what CFOs look at. Security of corporate data, easy access to information, scalability, and ease of use is what an IT manager would want. Similarly, sales and marketing managers require a CRM tool that allows quick access to up-to-date data and the ability to execute marketing communications across different channels.
2. How will the CRM help: What is your core business focus, is it expansion, consolidating your position, introducing new products, etc? If you are going in for a CRM solution, it means you wish to improve your customer focus. Look out for a CRM solution that complements your business focus and one that can be integrated with your business processes with minimum pain.
3. What should I go for: What serves your business interests best? An on-demand solution or an on-premise solution. If you are heading an SMB, then should you go for an SMB product from a large vendor or from a mid-sized vendor that focuses on SMBs? Which is the best industry-specific CRM for you, or are you better served by going in for a generic CRM and then customizing it. You also need to factor in your IT staff requirements. Together these factors constitute technical consideration for your deployment.
4. How ready is your business for the CRM experience: You need to consider how customer-centric you are. Is there a need to make an effort to become less product-centric and more customer- centric? Do you have a value chain in place, is the value measurable, will your CRM value be measurable as well?
5. How do I get the deployment to happen smoothly: Factors to consider include the scalability of the solution proposed by the vendor, your plan for support services, issues to be covered in the service level agreement, and integration of the CRM solution with the legacy systems.
6. What are the compliance issues that I need to consider: As the CEO, you need to take into consideration regulatory risks that you may be facing regarding a software deployment. Your efforts at going live with your CRM depend to a great extent on your readiness regarding compliance matters.
7. Will it live up to its name: Whether or not your CRM deployment lives up to the term customer relationship management depends upon how well you work on the above six questions. Plus, you need to be prepared to add the human level involvement that includes efforts with marketing, sales, and at the front end.

Conclusion

CEOs considering a CRM deployment will doubtless consider the high rate of failure that CRM deployments are prone to. However, by asking the right questions and coming up with the right solutions you can plan, deploy, implement and then reap business benefits from your CRM system.