Implementation Day 22 – CRM Phase 1 complete
I woke with a new motivation today! It’s amazing what a positive comment or two in response to these meandering writings of mine can do.
I was on a mission to get to the next stage with the CRM and I’m very happy with where I got to. Setting up a CRM system seems to me to be like trying to put a square peg into a round hole. The square peg is your current data, in whatever format it may be in. The round hole is the shiny new CRM system just waiting to consume it all.
The data cleaning bit is about turning the square (or irregular star shape depending on how organised you have been previously) into a triangle, with rounded edges. This change doesn’t loose any data. It’s just optimising it and moving things around ready for it’s new home.
Then the CRM configuring is about taking that spherical hole and pushing and pulling 3 points out of it until it’s the same shape as your data. As soon as they match, you’re in!
It’s not the fastest process, but my data cleaning is now completely finished! The more I did on it, the more optimised and logical it became. The usefulness of the process is showing it’s self to me before I even get to the new system.
I’m now actually excited to plug this finely honed chunk of data into the new CRM. I certainly wasn’t expecting that! I have hoped all along that the CRM would be very useful and efficient, but I don’t remember ever thinking that I’d get excited about the thing. I guess it’s partly just because it’s something that I have put off for 2 or 3 years now and to finally have everything set up to go feels like a huge development.
So, the data is cleaned (I have a beautifully sanded round edged triangle). Next is to pull the CRM it’s self into the shape I want!
I also sent out a last batch of emails today. About 65 of them. Those emails over the last two days have already generated a fair few enquiries. Need to get on top of the admin from all of those tomorrow.