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02.18.10 Pre-Purchase Buyer Demand Customized CRM Strategies  By Jim Berkowitz Here are a couple of excerpts from an article by Barney Beal, News Director for SearchCRM.com, CRM demos, customization key demands for buyers pre-purchase: Executives at Enpirion, an analog semiconductor company, wanted to know what they were getting before they bought a new CRM system for their rapidly growing business. They also wanted it to map closely to their own business and sales processes. "What I was looking for was an actual demonstration tool that mimicked what I was looking for," said Mark Cieri, director of marketing and business development, with the Hampton, N.J.-based company. "It had to actually run some custom aspects that mimicked internal processes so others, including execs, could look at it from different perspectives. I did a lot of due diligence that the demo I saw had the features I wanted. Enpirion's experience is not unusual, according to William Band, principal analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. The maturity of the CRM market and the rise of on-demand applications or Software as a Service (SaaS) has put a lot of price pressure on CRM vendors. "One consequence is that buyers are in a much better position to demand much more up front work," Band said. "With the rise of the on-demand space, those solutions are actually fairly easy to create demos and mock-ups of the solutions." In the coming year, SaaS CRM will be the default choice for organizations as they see if on-demand can meet their needs better than on-premise, Band predicts. What's more, the vendors themselves are often willing and eager to do some of that work up front to move along the sale. "Vendors prefer that buyers ask for these demos up front, because in the past they traditionally had to go through a whole RFP process that doesn't get them to yes or no. That's costly for them," Band said. "They prefer getting product mocked up in front of buyers and decision makers as soon as possible." In fact, according to a survey of application vendors conducted last year by Forrester, scripted demos and references are the most important elements in their sales process. According to Band, 76% of deals vendors said they were involved in required that they provide references or the buyers called references; 65% said that a scripted demonstration was part of the buying process; and 45% said that some type of proof concept was involved. This is in complete alignment with the CRM selection methodology that we use here at CRM Mastery; The CRM Mastery Method. Comments About the Author: Jim Berkowitz is a seasoned executive with more than 30 years of professional services and project management experience related to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Financial Management (Accounting & ERP) software solutions for small, mid-sized and Fortune 500 companies. As a Sales Force Automation and CRM Consultant, Jim has assisted more then 100 companies with the design and implementation of custom CRM solutions. Mr. Berkowitz is the founder and President of CRM Mastery, Inc.; a company dedicated to serving small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) by offering affordable tools and guidance to help them plan for and succeed with their CRM initiatives. |
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