CRM Team Staffing - Inside or Out?
CRM projects can represent a big investment of IT personnel. But if you're using a SaaS CRM system, when should you be thinking about the implementation team as "staffing-as-a-service?"
Mon, January 11, 2010
CIO —
In the good old days of CRM, the software ran on your servers and needed heavy customization to really work with the rest of your business. The staffing decisions were pretty straightforward: There might be implementation consultants, but the system needed an ongoing team of your own staff. In one of these classic on-premise implementations I came across just last year, the CRM "permanent staff" was 1 development/operational person for every 100 users.
That's a sizable investment for application support, and it's part of the reason for the rush to SaaS CRM. But in that rush, companies may be a falling victim to a serious case of "happy ears," because SaaS CRM is still an information system needing architecture, integration, data maintenance, and system administration.
So let's look at what staffing modern CRM systems needs to look like, because the laws of physics haven't changed that much.
System Development and Deployment
When it comes to SaaS implementation, the configuration and custom coding work can be handled by a much smaller team than in the old days. And for a number of reasons, you'll want a good portion of those implementers in house.
The technical heavy lifting will be in data preparation, migration, and system integration. Even though most of the moving parts will be in the cloud — the CRM system, the data manipulation tools, the integration server — there's still hard work to do in architecture, planning, data cleansing/conversion, and integration coding/testing. That work needs the same sort of skills it always has. And it's typically a good idea to outsource the majority of this work.
While the decision whether to use in-house personnel or external resources for carrying out an SFDC project will depend entirely on the specific needs and availability of talent at your company, there are clear best practices for staffing. In small firms that outsource all of their IT function, the CRM team will likely be outsourced as well. No matter how small you are, the project management and requirements prioritization must be done in house — typically by someone under the executive champion for the CRM system.
Generally speaking, however, the larger your firm is, the more of the CRM project team should be in-house. Why? Because CRM systems are much more likely to evolve than any other type of enterprise application. The business requirements will change, the competitive landscape will get tougher, of the channel will demand something different. Or you'll just get a new VP that wants to turn things around...including the way the CRM system works.
