CRM Custom Reporting project
The Task
It’s not an uncommon scenario: a small but successful company has grown using a set of tools designed for a small company. Suddenly those tools aren’t intrinsically capable of delivering the information needed, or the level of integration required, to assist in the continued growth of that company. Replacing those tools could be costly and disruptive, but there aren’t the internal skills to evaluate what’s needed and how it can be delivered within the constraints of the current solution.
The Project
For this project a sales-led SMB engaged our services to evaluate their current CRM solution and to assist in the development of a number of custom dashboards and sales management reports, as well as automating a number of key business processes that were , at that point in time, completely manual.
The Process
We held several workshops with the customer to determine their requirements before we began evaluating the customer’s CRM solution, and how it was being used in order to make sure data was being input consistently into the system. It was quickly apparent that we would need to work with the sales team to streamline their workflow in order to achieve the level of consistency required to get meaningful and useful reporting data. It was also apparent that the built-in reporting functions were cumbersome and did not give the level of control needed to meet the customer’s requirements.
We determined the data would need to be linked to an external business intelligence tool, which would give the granularity of control required to produce and present the data in the multiple ways that were required to support business processes. Additionally, we would need to employ a tool in order to achieve the required level of business process automation.
The customer’s CRM system was a cloud based solution, and they were using Google Workspace as their collaboration tool, which was already partially integrated with the CRM system, so our approach was to extend this integration by using Looker Studio, a solution available with Google Workspace, to provide the business intelligence and reporting, whilst also using Zapier, a cloud based business process automation tool, to provide other elements of the proposed solution.
The result of this is that the customer now has integrated line of business applications, with full visibility of key sales performance indicators, and the sales team has all the information it requires to manage the end-to-end sales cycle.