Click here to listen to a podcast featuring TrackVia’s CEO, Chris Basham, and CTO, Matt McAdams, discussing rolling your own CRM.
CRMs come in all shapes and sizes. I’ve seen a PR agency whose CRM was a cork board with index cards stuck on it with thumbtacks, and the cards were moved from place-to-place as they progressed through the agency’s workflow. And I’ve seen a non-profit food bank whose CRM was a set of file cabinets with hanging folders. In other words, although the modern usage of CRM has come to mean a software application that tracks sales leads, it can actually be just about any system that an organization uses to track its interactions with people.
As for the software-based CRMs that people are most familiar with, these are simply databases that have some pre-built structure on top of the database. The nice thing about an “off the shelf” CRM is that it’s relatively easy to just jump in and start using it. The downside is that, as a pre-built product, it’s not flexible to accommodate the specific ways that your company operates, and rather your company has to adapt its operations to fit into the CRM.
So, what if you could use a database to design your own CRM that’s a perfectly tailored fit to your operations, and that you’ll never outgrow? That’s what I’ve helped many of our customers do, and as a result, it’s how I’ve learned some lessons about how to “roll your own” CRM from a database. Here are 4 tips:
1. Just jump in. Don’t try to perfectly design the CRM before you start building it. The beauty of building your own is that you’ll know how to tweak it, whether in 5 minutes or 5 months.
2. Build it to accommodate both structured data (dates, statuses, contact info) and unstructured data (your “scribbled” notes about each conversation). A good CRM has to handle both, so that you can 1) know the next time you need to follow-up with a person, and 2) read the person’s history so that you know the whole story, not just the facts.
3. For structured data, err on the side of specificity. If there are any fields that have multiple parts, split each of the parts into its own database field. For example, don’t create a mailing address as a text field. Split it out so that the zip code is a field, the state is a field, etc. This will build-in a lot of power for you to search and slice & dice your database into usable pieces.
4. If you’re already using a software application as a CRM, you can bring your information into a database. It’s not always easy to find, but almost every application today has a feature to export information in .csv (comma separated values) format. So, don’t feel like you have to start completely from scratch.
Click here to listen to a podcast featuring TrackVia’s CEO, Chris Basham, and CTO, Matt McAdams, discussing rolling your own CRM. Don’t forget to subscribe to future podcasts in iTunes.
