Data is God in CRM systems!

The one common mistake committed is to have some data put into the CRM system, sometimes. No wonder CRM is blamed for failures.

CRM does not have the intelligence to keep you abreast of the happenings. It is a tool and it is a tool which is fed data by you to analyze and give you reports that you can plan/execute upon. So the efficacy of your plan is directly proportional to the quality of data in your CRM system.

Find out what is the level of granularity that you want your data to be tracked in. Figure out how good your data needs to be, then find someone to validate it. The first is the easy part, the latter is the hard part. It is a tough and boring thing to do but once the system is in place, you can swear by the CRM system.

Everyone has different metrics on what is the latest data for him - Hurricane Ike's occurence may be the latest data for someone who studies Hurricanes, the last time Mt. Etna had a blast couple of years might be the latest for someone who studies volcanoes, etc. So come up with what is your metric.

Remember, in all these cases, the age of the data is a known metric and is adhered to as the standard. Come up with something of that sort for your system too! It may just be a few minutes/seconds if it is some SOS system or days if it is some sales data that you need to track. This will help you get an understanding of what reports to generate and what you understand from the reports.

Archie