CRM Navigation Evaluation

As I have men­tioned in a recent post, I have been eval­u­at­ing ​“on demand” Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) soft­ware to offer to my clients in the last few weeks. In the old days, CRM worked great on a desk­top com­put­er. How­ev­er, I have dis­cov­ered that in the paint­ing indus­try, many own­ers are work­ing more remote­ly and spend­ing less time in the office. It is hard to be able to use a CRM that is sit­ting on one com­put­er at the office when you are in and out of the office so much. So, I real­ly feel that a good CRM on the Inter­net is the best way to go these days. The prob­lem is find­ing the right soft­ware com­pa­ny to use. There are some VERY qual­i­ty CRM pro­grams avail­able on the mar­ket but only a small hand full are actu­al­ly easy to use. Most of the soft­ware is either too basic (not enough fea­tures) or too advanced (way too many fea­tures). Small paint­ing com­pa­nies sim­ply do not have the time to use a full fea­ture CRM pro­gram like the one’s I’ve researched. So the key is find­ing one that is easy to nav­i­gate, easy to use and is cus­tomiz­able. Speak­ing of Nav­i­gat­ing, I was intrigued by 3 qual­i­ty CRM pro­grams this week and their top Nav­i­ga­tion bars. These are all big com­pa­nies that have a lot of time, ener­gy and mon­ey invest­ed into there pro­grams. I was test­ing these pro­grams out this week (Sug­ar­CRM, Sales­Force and ZoHoCRM) and real­ized one major prob­lem with one of the pro­grams Nav­i­ga­tion but­tons. I had a very hard time on Sug­ar nav­i­gat­ing my way from Lead to Clos­ing the job. Once they walked me through it, it was not dif­fi­cult, but when I tried it the first time, it was a lit­tle trou­ble­some. I also did not know the dif­fer­ence between an Account and a Con­tact, as most paint com­pa­nies just called them ​“con­tacts.” One of the rea­sons I was so con­fused is because of the way their Nav­i­ga­tion bars were locat­ed. The Nav­i­ga­tion menus are read from Left to Right and Sug­ar­CRM starts with the fol­low­ing: HOME, DASH­BOARD, CAL­EN­DAR, ACTIV­I­TIES etc. Now, there is real­ly noth­ing wrong with this for­mat and struc­ture at first glance. It is nice to start things out with look­ing at your over­all pic­ture (Dash­board) then your Cal­en­dar to check your sched­ule. When it gets tricky is when the phone call comes in with a lead. You then have to scan and look care­ful­ly for the LEAD menu. Then when you want to view Accounts it is not direct­ly next to the LEADS. In a per­fect world, this is the order in which they should be viewed when a phone call comes in with a lead: (left to right) LEAD, ACCOUNTS, CON­TACTS, OPPOR­TU­NI­TY, etc. Check out the way Sales­Force and ZoHo laid out their Nav­i­ga­tion menus and see the dif­fer­ence. Sales­force starts with HOME, LEADS, ACCOUNTS, CON­TACTS, OPPOR­TU­NI­TIES, etc. Isn’t that the per­fect order of a sales call? ZohoCRM was sec­ond best and almost iden­ti­cal. How­ev­er, they changed the typ­i­cal CRM term ​“Oppor­tu­ni­ties” to read ​“Poten­tials.” That was the only word that was con­fus­ing if you’ve used ACT! or oth­er CRM pro­grams in the past. By mak­ing up a new word instead of just keep­ing the stan­dard ​“Oppor­tu­ni­ties” it does cause the user to think about what it might be. Now maybe Sug­ar­CRM has a way to reor­ga­nize their lay­out but on first glance, they def­i­nite­ly con­fused me. How­ev­er, I would say Sug­uar had a lot of strengths (besides the nav­i­ga­tion issue) that make it one of the best CRM pro­grams on the market.  I shar­ing with you this lit­tle eval­u­a­tion and tip so that you know there is always a bet­ter way to do things in your busi­ness. For exam­ple, it does not hurt to get a sec­ond opin­ion in your mar­ket­ing efforts before you go to print or design some­thing online. All three com­pa­nies men­tioned above have there rea­sons why they designed and laid out their nav­i­ga­tion but­tons this way. How­ev­er, one com­pa­ny (Sales­force) lis­tened to their cus­tomers the best and designed the eas­i­est nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem I’ve seen on the web. Now, this does not mean I endorse Sales­Force as the best CRM because of their great nav­i­ga­tion bars, but that, my friends, is anoth­er arti­cle for anoth­er day. If you need help on eval­u­at­ing your mar­ket­ing pieces in the future and enjoy doing most of the work your­self, ask me about my ​“Start­up” con­sult­ing program.