IT resources, roll-out priorities, and data migration

Mail call! This month, our CRM mailbag is still full of even more Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM implementation questions, so get ready for another round of important CRM implementation tips!

Let’s take a look:

Q: We don’t have internal IT resources at our company, but our external sources have asked what they will need to do on a daily basis in order to help maintain our CRM instance. Can you please shed some light on what their role may be in the new system?
– CoordinatorCam 

A: The great news for your budget is your IT resource will need to do very little to help with CRM.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales and for Service, everything is done in the cloud. So Microsoft is responsible for backing up your database on a nightly basis, performing the upgrades you schedule (so you won’t need to hire a consulting firm to help you out), and maintaining the servers that house your CRM and its database.

You may need your IT team to deploy things like the Outlook plugin or other local applications (usually just upon implementation). But your IT needs should be pretty minimal, and they shouldn’t be ongoing or regular.

Q: We love that CRM can handle customer service issues and will use this feature in CRM, but may not need it from the start. Is it a good idea to use CRM minimally at first, or should we take advantage of the customer service feature asap? 
– TwentyFourSevenEvan 

A: We get that question a lot. At Azamba, we’re big fans of crawl, walk, run. The best way to approach CRM is by starting with the basics and building from there.

So if you’re a sales-dependent organization and you’re getting CRM to help in your sales department, start there. Then ease the service team in over the long haul.

Or, if you’re a service-dependent organization and you’re getting CRM to help with your customer service issues, start with customer service, then bring sales in.

Start small, build up some success, and then bring others into CRM and build on that success. We’ve done this with hundreds of clients, and it works great!

If you have more questions on this, give us a call, and we can walk you through our proven methodology with you.

Q: Our management team has decided that they no longer want us to use our current CRM, and we’re switching over to Dynamics full time within the next 90 days. Is there any way to get our data from the old system to the new one without doing a full data conversion project? We have had several quotes and they all seem out of our budget.  
– MayTheForce 

A: This is also becoming a frequent question. We get a lot of people coming to us from well-known platforms like Salesforce, for example, who want a better fit from their CRM.

Where data conversions become costly is when people try to convert all of their data. If you want to do a full data conversion, there is going to be a cost, unfortunately, because a lot of other entities need to be mapped and cleaned, and you’ll need a trial data conversion first.

But if you want to do it on a budget, just start with the company and the contact details and that should get you what you need.

For most systems out there, there’s already mapping in place for Dynamics 365, so you can convert those entities over pretty easily. You can export your data from your current system, and then just import it to Dynamics 365. It’s pretty low cost, and it’s pretty easy to do.

The best advice, though, is to review your plans with a seasoned implementation expert so that you don’t turn one system off without knowing exactly what you need and importing it properly into Dynamics. Give us a call if you need help with that.

That’s it for this CRM mailbag. Thanks for joining us, and hopefully we’ll see you next month for some more CRM questions and answers.

If you have questions, please send them to us. We’re always happy to help out, and we might even feature your question in a future episode!

Set your CRM implementation project up for success

CRM is not a magic wand. It takes planning, focus, and buy-in to ensure your CRM project is a success. And although CRM is much, much cheaper up-front today than it was ten years ago, you still want to get the most from your CRM investment as soon as possible.

That’s where the OnTrack CRM Success System comes in.

The OnTrack CRM Success System is a structured approach to CRM implementation, training, and adoption built upon a proven methodology more than a decade in the making:

Plus, OnTrack is a fixed-price service with a 100% money-back guarantee, so you won’t get blindsided by any nasty billing surprises!