
Before speaking to potential CRM providers, documenting your high-level requirements is critical. Going through this process has three main benefits:
Although many large enterprises opt to define their requirements in detail up front (over say, a 100 page requirements document) and then ask vendors to respond to an RFP, we don't recommend this approach for smaller organisations (or for that matter, larger ones!). A concise 2 - 4 page document should get the key information across.
Here's a basic framework and some thought starters to help you document your high-level requirements:
What does your business do?
Create a brief profile of your business to set context, detailing your:
What's led you to look at this project?
Outline the project
Describe your users
Then, for each user profile:
What does success look like?
When defining your requirements, you often "don't know what you don't know" so it's important to keep an open mind. It's totally natural for requirements to evolve throughout the evaluation as you learn about functionality you never knew existed, or ways CRM can tackle your business problems you may not have considered.
Continue to the next post in this series: To integrate, or not to integrate
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