The following are some of the challenges that companies often experience with older systems — challenges that may lead to considering a switch to a new CRM solution:

Outdated Technology

An older contact manager that is either at the end of its lifecycle or that is simply too costly to upgrade may also mean that it will not run on a newer operating system such as Windows 7 and that it will likely not integrate with newer office suites, such as Google Docs  and MS Office 2010.

Support of Data Synchronization

The cost of supporting and maintaining synchronization technology in order to support remote users can be significant.  Before Internet access was as ubiquitous as it is today, many companies used data synchronization to move customer and prospect information to and from remote users.  Popular sync platforms included GoldMine (GoldSync), ACT! and SalesLogix.  With the Internet now accessible from almost anywhere, it is easier and significantly less expensive to deploy a browser based solution to give remote users access to data.

A Flexible Development Platform

Companies are now looking for a more flexible database development platform so they can mold a CRM application to meet current and future business requirements.  For example, many companies want to create custom database tables (or objects) to track data about purchase history, contracts and more.

Customer Service Functionality

Many companies have a need for the kind of interactive customer service functionality that is simply not available in older contact mangers and CRM products.  It’s often desirable to have customer service data accessible by the sales department and other departments, all within one application.

Integration with Legacy Databases

Many organizations want to have CRM integrated with an accounting or ERP database so that sales users can view a customer’s open invoices, credit terms and sales order history.  Integrating this type of data into CRM makes salespeople better informed when they are in contact with customers.

Integration with Third Party Applications

There has been a recent proliferation of cloud-based, third party productivity applications for email marketing, IP telephony and advanced mail merging — just to name a few.  Newer CRM applications offer a wide selection of integrated, productivity apps.

While a new CRM solution represents up front cost, it can cost a lot less in the long run and make staff significantly more efficient and effective.

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CRM Data Migration Approaches

Option #1

Migrate all existing data exactly as is.  This approach can mean potentially migrating:

• Records with stale data
• Records with incomplete information
• Fields which were used improperly
• Duplicate records
• History records that are too old to be meaningful

Users will wade through the same bad data in the new CRM system as they did in the legacy system.

Option #2

Perform a thorough analysis of legacy data.  Make a number of tactical and strategic decisions prior to performing data migration.  Some of the possible actions are:

• Deciding whether certain legacy field should be excluded due to low “density”
• Identifying potential duplicates and merging duplicates
• Transforming legacy data into proper data types
• Normalizing sets of “flat” fields into a proper database structure
• Determining the cutoff dates for notes and histories
• Whether there’s an ROI on migrating attachments

Should Old Motor Oil Go Into a New Car?

Option #1 is the less expensive alternative in the short run.  However, in the long run, this option can end up being more expensive. It’s analogous to buying a new model car and then asking the dealer to remove all the motor oil, coolant, grease, transmission and power steering fluid from the old car and putting it in the new car.

Putting old fluids into a new car would result in unnecessary wear and tear — and an eventual risk of more expensive repairs to the car.

Rather than gumming up a new CRM application with old information, consider how much better a new model CRM could perform with clean data.  The following are some of the benefits to performing a thorough review of legacy data and then taking corrective action before migrating the data into a new system.

• Higher user adoption
• More efficient use of the CRM system
• Better data for marketing purposes
• More meaningful information for management reports

Migrating data properly the first time can cost slightly more in the short run, but helps to provide a higher overall return on investment (ROI) for a CRM implementation project.

A CRM requirements analysis should always include a review of legacy data sources.  This analysis should validate what users are currently asking for in terms of key data fields for profiling companies and contacts.  It should then be determined whether or not users have maintained data properly over time.

If there are data quality issues within legacy databases, such as  inconsistent field values or the absence of values in certain fields, the requirements phase of a new CRM implementation is an ideal time to better understand the reasons for poor data quality and to take corrective action.

Here are some questions to ask:

• What, if any, type of field validation in an new CRM will enhance the quality and completeness of data?
• What are the “must have” and the “nice to have” fields?
• Do legacy fields with a high data population align with what the users are asking for in a new system?
• What are the distinct values in various fields and how do these align with users are asking for going forward?
• How does the legacy data align with the reporting requirements that have been defined for the new CRM system?
• Does all legacy information map well to the new data model or does certain data need to be transformed or normalized?

Data Rules and Validation in a New CRM System

The greater sophistication of current CRM systems provides a number of mechanisms for ensuring clean data moving forward.

For example, there can be business rules that drive required field entry.  Certain fields can be conditionally required based on other field selections.

Contemporary applications can guide users through pick list selections via the implementation of hierarchical pick lists, in which the value selected in one field drives the list of possible values in another field.

A new CRM system is an opportunity to implement more appropriate data types. Legacy numeric data that was in text fields can be transformed into numeric fields in order to drive scoring or calculations.

Once the data elements  for various objects (Contacts, Companies, Activities, Notes, Opportunities, Cases and custom objects) are defined in the new CRM system, and the fields that will be migrated over to the new CRM application are identified, this information can be aligned with the use cases for the new CRM.  Then, the question becomes, does the number of use cases need to be expanded, or should the data migration be scaled back based on the set of use cases that are relevant to the current business model?

With proper analysis and planning, a new CRM system will provide much more consistent data, which will enable an organization to better profile its prospects and customers and to produce more accurate and consistent management reports.  There will also be a more efficient and consistent user experience.

Companies that switch to Sage CRM from one of the products listed below will receive a substantial discount for all SageCRM user licenses that match the existing contact manager or CRM license count.  Sage is also offering discounts on software maintenance and a credit on data migration services.

SageCRM is a globally popular on-premises, browser-based solution.  It’s designed for companies that would rather purchase their browser-based CRM solution than rent it.  SageCRM customers typically either install Sage CRM in-house, or on a dedicated server in a colo facility or at a managed service provider facility.

Eligible Products

Companies currently using any of the following products are eligible for the switching promotion:

• Salesforce.com
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• SugarCRM
• GoldMine
• Maximizer
• Seibel
• Pivotal
• Onyx

About Sage

Sage is a leading supplier of business management software and services to 6.1 million customers worldwide. Sage provides solutions for companies ranging in size from small start-ups to large organizations.

Mapping Contact Fields to CRM Accounts and Contacts

Since contact managers have historically not had true Company (Account) records, users have had to store company level information within a specific contact record (often by just picking a primary contact record from one of multiple contact records for a company).  If the company level information that’s within primary contact records needs to be properly migrated into a CRM system, it can take time and effort to both decide on logical contact-to-account field mapping and to execute properly on the migration of this data.

Creative Use of Fields in Contact Managers

In some cases, when a contact manager has been in place for many years, fields have gotten increasingly creative usage.  For example, we recently heard of a case in which the Address 2 field was used to hold the name of the Sales Rep for the contact.  Sometimes, the same user defined field (UDF) has been used for different purposes by different users, which results in very inconsistent data.

Runaway Pick List Values

Over time, contact managers can get a lot of bloat in pick lists.  Implementing a CRM solution is normally an opportunity to restore some discipline to pick list values.  However, unlike with contact managers, CRM pick list fields normally require strict values.  This of course, means that decisions need to be made about how to pare down legacy pick list field values – which may involve shedding some data and transforming other data.

Secondary Contact Fields Within a Contact Record

Contact managers have typically employed some “flat fields” for secondary contacts.  In other words, within a contact record, there are fields for storing the names and numbers of other contacts from the same company.  Since CRM systems are by nature, relational, the normally recommended path is to create separate contact records in the CRM system for these secondary contacts.  This, of course, means properly extracting secondary contacts in such a way that they can be imported.

Normalizing Other Flat Data

Since many contact manager versions have historically not allowed for the creation of custom tables, in some cases, users have created duplicate sets of custom fields in the contact record for storing data such as multiple quotation line items. This has to be managed from both the perspective of properly normalizing this type of data in the new CRM system and migrating the old, flat data into a related table or object, if the latter is needed.

Distributed Email Content

Older versions of some contact managers stored the body of emails as file attachments, as opposed to inline text.  Where these attachments lived could be defined by each user — they could have been set to save to a local drive or to a network drive.  Wherever these attachments are located, they all need to be corralled into a single location, associated with the appropriate History record and then imported.

Distributed File Attachments

As with email attachments, file attachments can often be distributed across different folders and drives within an organization.  In addition, file naming conventions can make it a challenge to identify which attachments belong to which records.

Mapping Old Users Into a New System

When contact manager user leaves their company, that person’s name is still associated with Contact and History records.  CRM licensing normally requires that record “owners” are licensed users.  Therefore, a contact manager record owner cannot always be mapped straight across as a record owner in a new CRM system.  In order for the original contact record or history record owner’s name to be preserved in a new CRM system, that person’s name may need to be pre-pended or appended to a text or a memo field.

Multiple Contact Manager Instances

Often when a company is using “a contact manager”, they are sometimes actually using multiple instances of the same application.  Each user may have taken the application down a separate path in terms of field usage and custom field creation.

Duplicate Records

Contact managers that have been in place for a while can have a large number of duplicate records in them.  Migrating data to a CRM system is an opportunity to clean up these duplicate records.

Inactive Data

Sometimes there’s old data in a contact manager that should not be imported.  For example, it doesn’t always make sense to import history records that are over 10 years old.  Filtering out records by date range requires extra time to be allocated to the data import process.

The Need to Adapt to a Security Model

If each user in a new CRM system was previously using a separate instance of a contact manager (or even separate brands of contact manager), now that all the data is in a single, central database, security rules (permissions) may need to be put in place to ensure that a given user only has view or edit rights to a subset of records.

These are just a few of the possible complexities that can be encountered when migrating contact manager data into a CRM solution.

Contact Managers

Contact Managers were originally designed for use by a single user or small team to track all the people who they communicated with and to store the specific communications (calls, meetings, emails) in one place.  As contact managers grew in popularity, companies using these applications began to stretch the capabilities of the applications beyond what the original designers of those applications intended them to be used for.   For example, in some organizations, database sizes exceeded the intended limits.  The number of users who were set up to synchronize their local databases to the back end database was well above the number of remote users that the applications’ designers had envisioned.

Since the original design of contact managers did not allow for the adding of custom tables and business logic, companies had to rely on applications such as Microsoft Access and FileMaker in order to develop custom, business productivity applications.

Over the years, some of the long time players in the contact management space have some added on some more advanced functionality such as Opportunity Management and Case Management. However, these added functional areas tended to have limited, hard-coded functionality.

The original contact managers were contact-centric, which means that each contact within a company was a separate record, and these records were not connected under a company record.  This meant that users had to pick one contact that would be the store for company information such as annual revenue or products owned.  Communications with multiple contacts within a company did not roll up to a master, company record.

The most popular contact managers were originally designed to run on Microsoft Windows, which required software installation and upgrades on each users’ computer.  Over time, third parties and the publishers themselves began offer thin client access options such as “bolt-on” browser capability.

Customer Relationship Management Systems

When Customer relationship management (CRM) applications first came along, the main advantages that the offered over traditional contact managers was:

• The addition of Accounts and Opportunities
• Scalable back-end databases
• More robust synchronization
• Customizable business logic

With an account-centric application, businesses that sold to other businesses (B2B) now had a much better picture of their prospects and customers, as they now had the top down view of companies and each company’s related contacts.  Individual activities with each contact rolled up to the company level.

As CRM applications evolved, their publishers allowed for the creation of custom tables (or objects) and the ability to create relationships among these tables. With this enhancement, business productivity applications that formerly had to be designed on a separate platform could be completely designed within the CRM application.

While the initial CRM systems were mainly Microsoft Windows based, virtually all CRM solutions that currently available on the market are 100% browser based.  This means that no software, other than small plugins for features such as Outlook integration, needs to be installed on users’ machines.

Browser based applications reduce, and in some cases eliminate, the dependency on Microsoft Windows on the local machine.  This means that whether a user is using Windows, OS X or Linux, that they can easily access the CRM database.

Migration from Contact Management to CRM

Over the past decade, there has been an ongoing wave of migration from contact managers to CRM systems.  While some contact managers have evolved with businesses’ needs, others have remained relatively static in features and functionality.  Many companies that have been using the latter type of application reach a point at which a CRM solution would provide them with enough incremental benefit that it makes sense to move from a contact manager to a contemporary CRM solution.

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Each option has its pros and cons.  If a company owns or is considering owning a Windows-based contact manager or CRM solution, the primary option for remote users is to allow users to synchronize data from their local machine to the server that’s running the contact manager or CRM.

CRM Synchronization Advantages

The main advantage of synchronizing CRM data is that it lets users access their organization’s CRM database when they are not connected to the Internet — in areas where there is no mobile coverage. Some users also find that a local application can run faster and be easier to navigate than a Web based CRM application.

CRM Synchronization Disadvantages

The advantages of synchronization are generally outweighed by synchronization’s disadvantages.  The main disadvantage to synchronization is that software has to be installed and maintained on each remote users’ computer.  It can be very time consuming for IT staff to have to configure a CRM client on each remote laptop, particularly when users are geographically dispersed.  The time and effort required to support software on remote machines becomes a bigger issue when a remote computer’s hard drive fails and a new drive needs to be configured.  Also, when an organization has remote users with local software installations, software upgrades have to be performed on every computer.

Real-Time Web CRM Access

Real time Internet access has made synchronization much less important than it used to be.  Internet access is available almost everywhere, including on some airlines.  Web access allows a user to log into his or her CRM database via a browser while connected to the Internet.  Web access eliminates the need for creating, installing and maintaining separate databases on each remote computer.  Upgrades only need to be performed in one place — on the server.  This significantly reduces IT support and related expenses.  If there are users who need CRM access while on the road, purchasing wireless air cards for those mobile users is generally less expensive to an organization than supporting synchronization.

CRM users who have offline access to Outlook, with its email, appointments, tasks and contacts, often can effectively work until re-connected to the Internet.  In addition, mobile device access to the database may be available, further reducing the need to synchronize data.

Given the above factors, why would a company choose a CRM system that requires sync versus choosing a Web based CRM?  The answer is, because the main advantage of synchronization – offline access to the entire database.  With the alternatives mentioned above — offline Outlook, easy Internet and mobile device access — the total, long term cost of supporting a synchronization environment can outweigh the advantages of synchronizing of data to a local CRM database.  Web browser based CRM provides an easier and less costly to maintain environment.

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