In this Jungle of Systems, which is the best for us?

“I know by now that we definitely need a CRM system. But how do I find the best systems for us in this never-ending jungle of different solutions?”

Of course, this is always the golden questions when the workshops are drawing to a close and the process descriptions have filled the digital books.
The current state has been worked through and a certain target state has been derived. But how do I find out now which system suits my company best?

One thing should be clear: No company should ever just rent anything without thinking it through and “just see how it runs”.
This may work well at the beginning, but it can quickly happen that the system has already been filled in a time-intensive manner and then reaches a limit that would otherwise have been a clear knock-out criteria in the system selection process.
This can happen even with good advance planning, but nevertheless such a risk should never be taken negligently.

So you compare. And how? With a certain matrix of weighted criteria, a so-called utility analysis.

The meant company compiles the 10 most important criteria and weighs their importance against each other.
For example, the team compares “usability” with “integration” and then decides that integration capabilities may be more important than a perfect usability.
In this way, each criterion is compared with each other and the company receives a percentage weighting of each criteria at the end.

Then, each decision maker on the project team can rate the systems according to their own discretion on a scale of 1 – 10.
Offset against the percentage weighting of each criterion, each system provider thereby receives an individual score for each criterion and finally also an overall score.

Since each decision-maker completes this analysis individually, the average value across all decision-makers must also be calculated for each criteria.
In this way, the project team receives a neutral score for each system for each criterion and also a clear overall score per system. And this takes into account all decision-makers.

Sounds complicated, but it’s actually not that big of a deal.
In the IT environment, Excel is often the “biggest enemy”, but in this case, analyses like this one can be prepared very well in Excel and summarized again later.
It still has its reason to exist after all.

We also have our own templates to perform such an analysis and have already accompanied this with many of our customers.
Reach out to us if we can help you in any way.