From planning to launch, a product may He Tuber go through many twists and turns. At this time, we need to overcome the challenges. In this article, the author combined his actual case of building a CRM system for a B2B company and sorted out the experience and gains. Let's take a look.

1. Establish an alliance with business contacts

The book "Huawei's Digital Transformation" emphasizes that if digital transformation is to be successful, it must be led by a backbone who understands the business. As the designer of the system, the first thing I have to do is to cooperate with this "business backbone", help him understand the company's situation, and collaborate with him to drive change.

The person in charge of this project from the enterprise side is a newly hired marketing director. He has many years of work experience in foreign companies, and has been exposed to leading CRM products such as salesfores and Fenxiang Sales. He recognizes the value of informatization and data. These qualities made us hit it off, and the subsequent cooperation in the specific product research and design process was very smooth. .

However, because he had just joined this company, he was not very familiar with the current situation inside the company and related colleagues, especially many long-established business processes, which also laid a lot of pitfalls for my subsequent work.

2. Do solid research work

When planning customized products within an enterprise, thorough research must be done so that the designed system can highlight the value of "customization." I divided the research work into several steps:

The first step is to understand the overall situation of the company:

On the one hand, drawing an organizational chart can help us find the person in charge of the corresponding module, and on the other hand, it can help us complete the functional design of system permissions, personnel approval flow and other functions.

In addition, we can also know the current staffing characteristics of the company: there are relatively few sales staff, currently only 4 people. The daily work only focuses on signing orders, and other work is completed by customer service.

The third step is to sort out the core business processes:

After interviewing the company's core employees one by one, I realized that what they needed was not a CRM in the traditional sense, but a CRM + order + reconciliation system. I abstracted their business processes into customer management, demand application, and contract management. , order management, and reconciliation management. Then, sort out the specific business processes of each link, and then use these business flow charts to discuss and improve them with their leaders and employees. Ultimately, these finalized business processes become the skeleton of product design.

The fourth step is to identify the system users:

After the core business processes are sorted out, the main participants in these processes will be clear at a glance. Then investigate their daily work content and scenarios to have a more detailed understanding of their positions.

The fifth step is to collect the current pain points of each role:

Conduct detailed interviews with each role that uses the system to collect the pain points of their daily work, and then discuss the priorities of these pain points with the business leadership and conceive solutions to these pain points.

Note: Some pain points can be solved by improving the company's internal workflow, while some pain points must be realized with the help of system functions, so these must be taken into consideration when planning functions.

With the visual prototype draft, it is necessary to fully communicate with the business side, and it is best to involve the other party's users. On the one hand, everyone has a different perspective, and multiple participants can gain a more complete perspective. On the other hand, allowing users to fully participate can also improve their later acceptance of the system.

At that time, we invited a customer service girl who was very active during the research stage to try out the product. She was very serious and responsible and not only raised many effective functional questions. After the system went online, she also became a core user, helping other partners solve usage problems.

After the project went online, customer service staff who had participated in many surveys quickly started using the new system. However, salespeople are reluctant to use it. They give various reasons: affecting the signing of orders, not being in front of the computer, not complying with the process, etc.