CRM Strategy vs CRM Tactics: What Does It Mean for Business?

Talking about the role of CRM in business, you will definitely come across both admire and blame. Why? Some companies succeed with this initiative due to a developed strategy, and another fall by the wayside with dubious tactics.

CRM: Implement and Forget?

CRM initiative isn’t one-and-done project. If your business lacks a defined strategy and a team is suspicious about the coming changes, the CRM platform won’t bring you any efficiency and play its role only as a data storage.

To retain the strength of brand, many vendors are caught up at the crossroad of CRM strategy vs CRM tactics. Here one may be far from super smart at selecting because these notions aren’t mutually exclusive either.

Considering the problem in depth, CRM isn’t a magic wand to fix the problem. Yet, either you have already implemented CRM or just preparing for the initiative, CRM strategy or tactics should bother you as they are a crucial part of the project, despite its stage.

Essence of Goal-Oriented CRM Deployment

Before meeting a clutch of difficult challenges, business owners expect from the CRM initiative (a) a single view of customer data, (b) customer insights for decision-making, (c) improvement of customer management, and (d) enhancement of data quality management. However, they often forget that at the core of the CRM deployment are

• Strategy is a basis for your success. Start with the defining your business objectives and apply them to CRM goals, and then outline KPIs and metrics to collect in the solution. As a balancing act, get support from stakeholders and executives to receive resources and project prioritization.

• Process. Before getting down to business process designing, figure out specific requirements your company and team have. Unpack the needs to user experience, reporting, integration, scalability, and mobility.

• Technology. Attempting to bridge the gap between data problems and functional shortfalls, select a CRM with end-to-end processes and agile deployment. With the right groundwork, you may create a data migration, acquisition, and quality management plan.

• People are the last, but not least part of CRM strategy. To eliminate the slow user adoption and timely business culture aligning, you may assign and distribute roles and responsibilities to pay more attention to CRM initiative and team training.

What’s Behind CRM Strategy vs CRM Tactics?

Running into the CRM deployment, we find the place for CRM strategy, yet no word about CRM tactics. Your business needs to grow, evolve, and change - sometimes rather quickly on a budget. This is where CRM tactics will come to rescue. Picture the difference CRM strategy vs CRM tactics:

Strategy requires time, efforts, and resource for development and proves to be effective in s long-term perspective, but it’s more expensive.

Tactic is a solution applied to a timely problem; it’s rather cheap in comparison to the strategy, but it also less effective.

In some cases the CRM tactics are the most suitable way out, however, it comes along with the low user adoption, the rejection of the new software functionality and, therefore, wasting time, money, and losing customers. To shape the pros and cons of CRM strategy vs CRM tactics, spend a moment to check out the next points:

• When You Need More Data

Within a strategic approach, you will question why some additional type of information is required, and what kind of reports your CRM needs to generate. Besides, consider how this information will be related to the existing entities and whether it is necessary to create new custom fields.

The tactics come with a lot more simple solution - you just add into CRM a new set of fields and entities to get a place for more data.

• Dealing with Record Import

Getting ready for a CRM migration, you extend the strategy to a new point - let’s call it data importing. So, working with the team, you create a list of criteria and data that will end up in the new CRM. The next steps are cleaning and deduplication.

In the tactic approach, the key point is to transfer data to a desired platform. The questions of duplicates and dirty data are taken out of the top priority list.

• Updates and Manual Work of Your Team

From CRM strategy point, you evaluate the time your employees spend on data entry and records update. In case it takes too much time and efforts, you can develop a custom page to view specific information and speed up the updates.

Within a tactic line, you are solely relying on the existing UI of the CRM solution. The customizations are coming with the additional expenses.

• Approaching Workflow Automation

Optimization is a part of any business strategy, and CRM strategy includes it too. You need to start with defining the main tasks, time and responsible people, and then create automation rules to this specific process.

During the tactic mode, your team makes the same manual actions of a certain business process again and again.  

Final Point

One of the leading values in the CRM enhancement is placing a customer at the forefront along with the inside team work facilitation. In this light CRM strategy vs CRM tactics come as a challenge, yet it all depends on what results and in what perspective you are waiting for.