CRM Consulting: Process and Skills
Currently, our CRM consulting program consists of me. I’m the sole resource dedicated to working with our customers on getting them up and running in CRM. Not surprisingly, I’m a bottleneck–without any outreach efforts I have projects lined up through the end of the year. So, we’re thinking about how to increase the number of projects we can handle at any one time by working with contractors and probably also hiring staff. If you’re interested in working with me on CRM projects, drop me a line.
In preparation for expanding we’re doing some introspection into what our CRM consulting really looks like. I came up with this visual representation of a typical project:
And here is a diagram of the skills necessary for a consultant to successfully complete a CRM project, along the same time axis:
So lets run through the stages of a typical project and talk about the skills necessary:
Outreach & Qualification
- A consultant has to be able to talk to nonprofit customers and convey an understanding for how they work. She has to use language that is within the experience of the customer–technical jargon, corporate metaphors, and used car salesmen tactics are all verboten. The consultant has to act as a trusted advisor, rather than a vendor. That’s what working with nonprofits is all about.
- Project management is a set of skills that apply to all stages of CRM projects. While it requires the ability to set a schedule, juggle scarce resources, estimate and scope, and hold people accountable to committments, it really comes down to one thing–effectively setting expectations. Do this well with all stakeholders and you’re in good shape.
Process Mapping
- Process Analysis is the ability to identify and document the way people get tasks done. It requires an ability to analyze complex systems, reduce them to an appropriate level of detail, and ask the right questions of the right people to get the necessary information.
- Capturing of current state is followed by a collaborative search for ways to improve process. Effectively including the customer in this effort is necessary for success.
Prototyping, Customization, and Integration
- As the processes are being identified, prototyping in the CRM platform can begin. I have found with Saleforce.com that building the application is so quick and easy that a live prototype is an inexpensive and very effective way to get feedback on the requirements from the customer. This requires the ability to prototype rapidly, and design ratioinal database schemas.
- Integration with other systems requires the ability to quickly analyze the technical methods for integration, and an ability to build out an integration process that is complete, appropriate for the amount of money budgeted for integration, and puts the smallest burden on the customer. Trading off between automated, elegant integrations, and quick and dirty manual integrations must be made with input from customer.
- New processes will rear their heads during this stage, and will have to be discovered, documented, and integrated with the overall project. Also, scope must be managed as these new work areas are found.
- The consultant should ideally have a framework for documenting the system and the technology that gets updated as she works on the project.
Date Migration
- Rarely does a project come along that has no historical data. Data migration is the act of taking whatever historical data exists and getting it into another system in the correct format. The consultant must be able to identify the logic of the data transformations needed to do this.
- The consultant also must be proficient in the standard tools used by customers for storing their historical data: ebase, MS Excel, MS Access, Filemaker Pro, Act, etc.
Training
- CRM systems are complex, as are the work processes they support. Significant raining is mandatory for a project to be successful. The consultant must be able to build and deliver effective trainings, covering the core functions of the CRM system, targeted to the key user roles of the customer.
- Technology training is difficult to do well, especially with a customer base that is primarily non-technical. Presentation and listening skills are very important.
Follow Up
- After the project has launched, the consultant will have to listen to user requests, prioritize them, set expectations about what is possible and when, and integrate any changes into documentation and training materials.
- There is an important balance to be struck between helping the customer succeed using CRM and providing open-ended support.
It’s a broad skill set that touches on lots of different core competencies–I think that’s why so many liberal arts majors go into technology consulting! CRM projects are high-risk in that if you fail in any of these aspects of the project, it’s tough to end up with a successful customer. This becomes a bit easier as you scale up a program and can hire people who are specialists in certain areas. We’re leaning toward hiring a specialist in the process analysis and client interaction areas, but haven’t really decided yet. Salesforce.com gives us a lot of leeway here because we don’t really need to hire someone with specific database platform skills–it’s just so easy to build things out in Salesforce.com.
One thing about doing this work is that it sure exercises all parts of your brain. I find it invigorating, challenging, and rewarding. If you think you would too, I’d love to hear from you.
August 2nd, 2006 at 12:05 pm
Great analysis, Steve–the skill requirements look right on.
I am just getting started implementing SF, so I find it difficult to imagine splitting the main part of this process up among different people. Certainly the outreach and qualification step could be handled by someone other than the developer, so long as she has a good sense of what is possible in SF. But once you get down to the business of matching the customer’s world to the SF world, I think the SF implementor needs to be there.
What else could be transitioned to another resource? Training and support could be handled by another person — he would need to understand SF basics but wouldn’t need to be a database expert or SF implementor. Data migration requires a database expert, but all the preparation and data munging could be done by any qualified person who knows Excel/Access, once you explain the format you need for SF.
As far as making the most use of YOUR time, I wonder if you could create exercises or questionnaires for new clients that would push some of the requirements and process mapping work to them. In the requirements phase of the project I’m working on now, we spent a ton of time in meetings with back and forth about all the many implementation options and explaining to them how it will work — in the future, I will try to avoid that conversation and just get them a prototype to play with.
Looking forward to hearing more of your process recommendations. I wonder how the for-profit consulting firms break up these task among separate consultants when doing large SF implementations.
August 2nd, 2006 at 12:24 pm
Great points Evan!
I agree that breaking up a project with more than one resource has it’s own challenges. I’m not sure the best way to do it. I do know that I think where you and I add the most value is the mapping of their needs to the technology. There are lots of people who can build something if they have a good spec, as you point out.
I’ve be using questionnaires and form emails for a lot of steps in the process. It’s worked really well and saved some time. I’m taking the questionnaire work to the next level by using a survey app (search appexchange.com for pollzter) that drops results right into Salesforce.com, so the survey events can fit into my other processes there. Really nice.
There is no substitute for the intense back and forth of process mapping and requirements gathering. We can try to streamline that, but I don’t know if we can ever make it as efficient as we’d all like. With my last customer I spent 12 hours process mapping with them….whew.
August 2nd, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Steve — nice job mapping the process and skill requirements. I agree with Evan that training and to some extent data migration can be ‘outsourced’ or distributed among ‘resources,’ especially those with a particular skill and expertise in those areas.
The two high-intensity/high-time-commitment pieces seem to me business process analysis and based on that, prototyping and customization of SF (even though you actually suggest that this is fast,given the slick and adpatable product).
In that vain, wouldn’t it be fabulous IF we all had more skills in understanding our own business processes better and had greater capacity in articulating systematically what our business pocesses are? I wonder whether this can be scaled by deploying greater DIY process mapping and questionnaire tools (and definitely NOT calling them that!) that would provide a fair amount of the leg work that you do in your 12 hours of hand-holding/high-touch consulting. It might only be a sub-group of orgs that are ready to engage on their own in this process as opposed to being guided through it.
However, I would venture to say that if you have already a fair amount of systematically collected data that orgs do on their own (proving, at the same time a fair amount of SF-readiness…:-) that the time you spend on this is reduced. So, let me pose this: To what extent can we abtract what you know to date and turn it into handy-dandy tools that walk people through a process analysis? Given the 80% similarities of what NPOs need in their CRM, the fact that SF has a given set of functionalities, and that now you have done it a few times, and turn it into a simple SF toolset (Maybe with a nice little grant from the SF Foundation?)
It seems to me that this accomplishes two things:
1. Scales your work
2. Scales the distribution of SF AND increases the full USE of SF (which is lacking, according to SF own data)
3. Screens for readiness of orgs in the process
4. Can be adopted by SF consultants all over
Ok, and to be totally frank: I want it. I am using SF but not to the best of what it is capable off, I know what I need in the abstract, and I do not have time to spend with someone like you — but I am happy to walk through our org preocesses and then turn that data over to you to help me implement SF to its fullest potential.
Thoughts?
Katrin
August 2nd, 2006 at 1:08 pm
Katrin,
I think you’re dead on–my work over the last year and a half (generously funded by the M J Murdock Charitable Trust), has allowed me to build my understanding of the core nonprofit processes. I now have a set of process maps that cover major donor prospecting and renewal, membership cycle, simple events, and some others. I’m in the process of getting these in a format that is shareable, with enough information around them to be worthwhile. I’ll post updates to that status on this blog.
It would be great to expose more of the nonprofit community to process mapping–it’s a toolset that companies the world over use to improve their internal operations. If we all get better at it, we’ll end up using it in our everyday work. We’re using it right now to try to improve the way we do consulting.
Thanks for the comments!
August 2nd, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Hi Steve,
This article is very timely as we are struggling through the exact same issues of scalability of our Salesforce practice. We have worked with partners such as Theikos which has greatly helped us on the custom application development side.
We are working on several larger implementations and our challenges here are slightly different:
User Adoption: When moving more than just a handful of users to the platform how do we get User Adoption? Salesforce really is a platform which works best when you have an entire organization managing data rather than just a few people. Even though the usability of the system is great, transitioning dozens or hundreds of users has been a daunting challenge.
Organizational Preparedness: While the decision makers may be ready to go, what about the rest of the organization? For large organizations with multiple departments and legacy systems we are exploring phased (department by department) migration to Salesforce while keeping applications in place to synch data between systems.
Reusable IP: Steve, you are great at this, but we are struggling here. We want to capture more of the IP from each client engagement and either share out via AppExchange or some other method. We really want to help empower the entire NPO community with best practices on this platform. Our challenge has been in validating the economics to allow something like this to happen. I suppose we could all work an extra 10 hours a week, but we would like find a sustainable process for capturing and distributing unique IP from different client engagements.
In terms of how to break up the process itself, we were considering most of the client facing work on our core Salesforce Team and then seeing if we can move the following tasks off to other resources:
- Outreach & Qualification
- Data Migration
- Configuration (when it can not be done “on the flyâ€)
- Custom Development & Coding
- Some elements of Documentation & Support
I look forward to reading about more of your thoughts on scaling Salesforce services to the NPO community.
Regards,
Anand
August 3rd, 2006 at 1:10 pm
I hear you on user adoption. It’s a big problem that gets even bigger as organizations get larger. It would be great to start talking about how to deal with the issue–I know we’re all thinking about it.
I’ve run into organizations where preparedness is a big issue. For me it’s less about legacy technology systems, and more about ability/desire to handle a database application on a daily basis.
The reusable IP issue is really easy to solve–just find some money! It takes time to refactor code to be generic (although it really helps to be thinking that way from the start) and documentation and install guides take time as well. We love to share our stuff, but there’s always the trade off of taking the time to do it righ. I think is makes a lot of financial sense if you think about it as marketing–apps on the appexchange are proof that you know what you’re doing. Seriously, that goes a long way. I get all sorts of calls from folks who think I’m an expert just because I have some apps up there. I would say start with your most interesting functionality and package it up. Think of it as a calling card.
John Licata talked on the Salesforce.com boards about how he trained his niece to build out a base install of Salesforce.com for $60. Maybe he’s on to something…
August 7th, 2006 at 8:40 am
Hi Steve,
This is fantastic.
Thank you so much for your continued documentation and sharing of the work your doing around this. It is so helpful to all of us working on these issues!
What I really like about the process you’ve identified is that you’ve started with a kind of best practice databse implementaiton track, and then integrated/emphasized a kind of nonprofit culture layer on top of that. I think the full cycle that you’ve documented is really right on. Training and Followup, inparticular, are things that get left to chance far too often!
Thanks for the great work.
August 7th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Thanks for the comments Leda, but could you be a bit more effusive next time?
I’m really excited about your dotOrganize project and how it will make really cool connections between technology and organizing. And it’s great that you and Sonny are grounded in the fact that it’s the processes that are the most important part and technology must be support to those, not the other way around. Keep up the great work!
August 8th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
Steve,
I like.
I have a different perspective, since I don’t know squat about Salesforce in particular or databases in general (okay, that’s not exactly true – but – I’m not a database expert by any stretch!).
Here are my two cents about what else you might be able to do to gain some efficiencies:
1. As Evan suggested – let someone else do the heavy lifting for qualifying customers – both in terms of timeline, budget, and (perhaps most importantly of all) agency lifecycle and readiness to adopt a new tool. That’s most of my work here at NPower – helping clients understand the landscape, making them do homework, outlining the risks and so on. And I don’t hand them over until they need a technical expert. Of course – this means that you need another body to work with to do that for you.
2. The other thing that I’m noticing (and this is anecdotal, to be sure) is that even though NP’s might have an out of the gate common need for a feature set that is about 80% – they all think they are unique! And, guess what? They are! I’m starting to think that we can (and should) develop template based tools that we can re-purpose – but that we don’t want to reveal those to the customer in a way that feels (to the customer) like we’re asking them to step into that box, if you get what I mean. One of our grant projects last year had a “my first website”, “my first network” and a “build your own whatever you want to apply for” – and agencies that needed their first network and their first website chose the “build your own” box. So I think we can gain efficiences by re-using code and processes and such – but that we have to be strategic about how we present that to customers. We need to be transparent about it – but careful.
Finally – when it comes to the requirements gathering phases – it seems like we might start to “know” much earlier than the customer what solution, what platform, what architecture, what code set, and so on. And we might be able to tell them. BUT (also anecdotally) – if they don’t dig in and go through that tedious process (what do you want the database to do when your client doesn’t have a street address?) of defining at a field level what they want it to do – if they rely on us to do that for them – we lose a certain amount of buy in, and a lot of the understanding of how the tool is going to eventually work.
Keep up the good work!
pcs
August 9th, 2006 at 7:01 am
As always, many great points, Patrick. I really like calling out every nonprofit’s desire to get the custom, hands-on solution. I present my services in a way that it’s clear they’ll be getting something tailored exactly for them, even though I have a whole lot of stock functionality I’ll repurpose along the way. “Website – Small” is the kind of project description that shouldn’t leave the office!
And I’m down with your last point on the process being really important. As projects get more complicated (networks to websites to databases) getting a big investment from the customer in the requirements phase is more important. One thing that I probably won’t be changing in the amount of time I require of the customer at the beginning of the project doing process mapping.
As far as the Sorting Hat role that you play at NPower, we’ll probably do something similar, but since we’re a nonprofit it will be unique to us… We’ve got regional project managers who develop deep relationships with the environmental nonprofits in their area. Those folks will probably be doing the qualification for groups since they were the ones who helped build the group’s website, and go to same meetings. Right now I’m doing all but the very first level of qualification (”So you want a database? Talk to Steve”), but we’ll start pushing that out soon, I think.
Thanks for the great perspective!
August 24th, 2006 at 7:09 am
[...] I talked earlier about my desire to expand our capacity in the program and I got lots of good feedback from you all. Thanks again! Michael has a long background in technology consulting. What was the most interesting to me was his work at Tangoe where he helped telecommunications clients model their provisioning processes in Tangoe’s software. Have I mentioned that process mapping is an important part of my job? [...]
February 27th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
[...] We’re swamped with demand for database consulting work. So much so that we’ve decided to expand the team here at ONE/Northwest. My colleague Steve Andersen, our Database Program Manager, has the scoop: I’m not so much looking for someone to work for me, but with me. I want these kinds of skills to help us build our program beyond the 10 implementations we’ve done to date. We’re going to be very focused on meeting the needs of the small environmental groups as well and looking at sharing data between groups, as well as sharing data up to coalition efforts. The voter file is an interesting data set that we’ll be working with extensively this year. We’re doing some cutting edge work, things Salesforce.com hasn’t ever done before. It’s really fun.ONE/Northwest is a great place to work. Salesforce.com is an amazing platform to work on. The Northwest (and Southwest Canadian) environmental movement is a movement that is winning and making change. And because Salesforce.com is web-based, I’m happy to consider remote office arrangements. The only drawback to all of this is you would have to work with me. Drop me a line if you want to chat: steve at onenw.org. [...]
February 27th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
[...] ONE/Northwest is a great place to work, my best job ever. My colleagues are truly brilliant people. Because of that, we are a very flat organization–I’m not so much looking for someone to work for me, but with me. I want these kinds of skills to help us build our program beyond the 10 implementations we’ve done to date. We’re going to be very focused on meeting the needs of the small environmental groups as well and looking at sharing data between groups, as well as sharing data up to coalition efforts. The voter file is an interesting data set that we’ll be working with extensively this year. We’re doing some cutting edge work, things Salesforce.com hasn’t ever done before. It’s really fun. [...]
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:57 am
hi steve. great job on this blog. are you in any position to share the process maps you mentioned to katrin in your aug 02 posting? i’m currently heading up a DAM & workflow system implementation at united way of mass bay, and we will soon launch a CRM project as well. if at all possible, your process maps would serve as a great baseline resource. thanks.
January 23rd, 2008 at 6:58 am
Hi Steve –
Your process and skills document is right on: thanks for sharing it. I am a federal civilian agency government employee struggling to find the most inexpensive CRM product available to help us manage Outreach activities. Our focus is relationship management, not sales management, and I have not found a product in the 3-5K range. Am I looking for prodcut that does not exist ? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.