Choosing the Right CRM for Your Precast Business: A Comprehensive Guide

With a network of over 200+ precast concrete manufacturing companies, we have the opportunity to talk to many people in our industry who are trying to overcome challenges and grow their businesses. Lately, amidst difficult labor markets and inflation impacting the bottom line, precasters have been reaching out to see if we can help them navigate the fast-paced tech world to help provide efficiencies.

Specifically, many precasters have reached out to learn more about CRM (customer relationship management) tools – whether their business needs one and where to start when evaluating the tool to buy. Having recently completed our own CRM project at Aster Brands and Truemont Materials, we want to share some insight into the process – because a daunting statistic we found while doing our research was that 50 percent of CRM projects fail.

This guide contains all the information we wish we had known before selecting and implementing a CRM for our precast business.

Prep-work - Know What Business Problem(s) You’re Trying to Solve

The first thing to recognize about a CRM is that it won’t magically solve your business problems just because you’re paying for it. Even with the wizardry of AI and the robust suite of possibilities most CRMs offer, it will be a precarious path forward if you’re unclear about what problem(s) you’re trying to solve at your precast business.

So, the first step in your chance of success is clearly defining the problem you are trying to solve with new software. Reaching out and having conversations across your organization will help you identify the hiccups in your current work processes and what you might be looking for in a tool to solve them.

If you’re a small to medium-sized business and anything below is on your list, a CRM might be just the tool you need to help rectify it:

• Leads are slipping through the cracks and not getting followed up with
• Each salesperson is doing their own thing and there’s no uniformity of process
• Your sales cycle is long and it’s hard to remember when you need to follow up
• Data is siloed across individuals and/or teams, which makes it hard to work together and get a clear picture of your customers
• You don’t have the data you need to help you make better business decisions
• Your sales team is growing and you need a way to manage them more efficiently
• You’ve tried a CRM tool before and had poor adoption

We also recommend gathering a team of stakeholders early in the process to help prevent some of the later pitfalls of projects like this. If you don’t know who could help with this process, keep it in mind as you’re talking to people at your organization to identify the problem above. And, including staff members across different job roles – sales, finance, IT, customer service, and leadership – you can ensure that each department’s needs are being heard and hopefully met with the new tool.

As you talk to the various stakeholders, you’ll want to consider what other tools in your tech stack need to be integrated with the CRM? Do you have an ERP that you’re using for inventory? What tools are you using for accounting and billing? As you evaluate the potential for a new tool, you’ll want to have a good idea of what is currently working for you that you absolutely don’t want to change, and what are the areas of your business process that you’d be open to changing if the new solution might provide a more streamlined option?

Finding a CRM champion among that group of stakeholders early on will aid in the project's success. Someone who not only believes in the benefits of CRM but is also willing to do the nitty-gritty work involved in the process is important.

Once you understand your business problem and have found a champion or a team to help throughout the process, there are still some steps and questions you should answer before you even start Googling CRMs so that you ensure you’re targeting your search at tools that are a good fit for you and your organization.

Many SaaS (software as a service) providers use the BANT method or a similar sales process to identify the leads that are worth pursuing, so you’ll want answers to these questions ready for your initial calls.

• Budget: What budget have you allocated for the purchase? Oftentimes, SaaS companies want to know up front that you’ve already cleared the hurdle of budget allocation and that your range fits within their price point so that they’re not wasting their time.
• Authority: Who at your organization has the authority to make the final decision? If they’re not speaking with that person currently, they want to make sure they include them early enough in the process to avoid surprises later in the sales cycle.
• Needs: What urgent business pain points are you trying to address? They want to make sure they’re presenting the right suite of offerings to best help you solve your problems.
• Timeline: When are you looking to make a purchase? This helps them know whether to pursue the partnership and at what pace they need to move to secure the deal.

Evaluation–It’s a process. Picking the right tool, not too big and not too small, is key.

Once you have solidified what business problems you’re trying to solve and what processes and tools you’ll want to integrate with the CRM, you’re ready to start your evaluation process. And, it’s a process with some key steps you won’t want to skip over to ensure you’re not part of that 50% failure rate, but it also includes some steps you might not anticipate as the SaaS companies try to validate that you’re a good fit for them, too.

1. Create a List

Once your worksheet is complete and you have a clear idea of your goals and objectives for bringing in a CRM, you can search for options online.

Search the web for a list of options to get a high-level perspective on whether they fit your business needs.

• Check out Reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra.
• Generate a list through ChatGPT

Talk to other precasters you know and trust to gain perspective in what tools do or do not work for them that you might want to add to your short list.

Considerations for precast companies when searching for the right tool:

• Does the company specialize in working with manufacturing and distribution companies?
• Does the tool specialize in B2B companies?
• Is the company known for working with small to mid-sized companies?
• Does the tool include or connect with inventory management tools?

2. Outreach

Once you have a shortlist of CRM tools you’re ready to evaluate, you can begin the outreach phase to engage those companies. While the response you receive from each company may vary slightly, these are the key milestones we found common among SaaS companies we evaluated.

STEP 1: Reach out. Complete a form on the CRM website that you would like to learn more about.

STEP 2: Putting out feelers. An associate sales rep will contact you to schedule a 15-minute call to collect high-level information about your company and what you’re looking for in a CRM. Your Worksheet will help you be prepared for this step.

STEP #3: The real sales call. The following sales call will be with a rep who will most likely be with you throughout the evaluation process. They will likely review the information you discussed in the first meeting with the associate rep and then ask additional questions about your goals and what you’re looking for in a tool.

STEP #4: More and more and more calls. And maybe a demo along the way. The sales rep will probably schedule follow-up calls that include other members of their team who have experience with the technical side of the platform. They will also set up a demo of the program based on how they expect your company to use it.

Step 4.5: Implementation Meeting. Most CRM platforms will outsource the implementation of your CRM to third-party agencies. They will typically provide options and recommendations for these agencies so you can select which one you want to choose. You’ll have to go through some of the same questions you’ve already been discussing with the CRM platform sales teams (yes, it’s REALLY annoying), but they can give you more unfiltered feedback on the platforms and if they’ll truly solve your business problems. *Note: This step may happen before, during, or after the demos

STEP #5: Demos. Create a small group of people in your organization to demo the platforms you’re evaluating. You’ll get that group of people together, and someone from the company you’re evaluating will do a demo walkthrough with the team and set up demo access for everyone. These people are likely going to be your heavy users of the CRM. It’s crucial they are engaged in the demos because you don’t want to select a tool that no one likes to use.

STEP #6: Demo Feedback. Schedule a meeting with your demo team to get their feedback on the tools.

STEP #7: Select your Tool & NEGOTIATE Throughout the demos, your CRM project champion should be working with the sales reps to get more accurate quotes. You’ll get a quote from the CRM software company AND the implementation company if applicable.

Implementation - It’s just the beginning.

After you’ve selected the tool, you might be breathing a huge sigh of relief, but you need to recognize that the real work is just beginning.

Most of CRM failures happen during the implementation phase, where the tool:

• Doesn’t end up doing what you need it to
• Isn’t adopted by your staff
• Runs over budget and over timelines

Implementation can look very different depending on whether you’ll be using a third-party agency, someone within your organization will be setting it up, or the CRM provider themselves will be helping. However, a good rule of thumb is to keep things as simple as possible while still achieving the business objectives you set out to achieve from the get-go.

CRMs vary widely in their features and benefits, so your implementation will be specific to your tool and your organization.

A few steps that will likely happen across all platforms you might decide to go with:

• Building the infrastructure (fields, custom objects, workflows, pipelines, etc.) within the tool to support your business processes
• Migrating your existing data into the tool, and don’t forget that you likely need to clean up your data before you migrate so that you’re not starting with bad information
• Testing the system once built with a few super-users who can help fine-tune and work out any kinks before attempting to onboard your entire staff
• Training and onboarding your staff will be an ongoing process, as this is likely a significant change in how they previously worked, and managing that change process is pivotal to success
• Maintaining and updating the system over time as your business evolves, scales, and grows

Top 4 things you should know heading into the implementation phase of your project:

1. You’re going to get into the weeds. When building a CRM infrastructure to support your business processes, there will be a lot of in-the-weeds questions. You’ll be discussing the minutia of the data you have and the minutia of the data you want to capture, so make sure you have someone involved in this process who is strong at execution, understands the nitty-gritty details of your business, and doesn’t just have the big picture ideas in mind.

2. Good Data In = Good Data Out. Something that you can begin working on as you narrow in on a solution is compiling and cleaning up your existing data. If your sales reps were previously working from the contacts on their phone or a Google Sheet, you should consolidate all of the data to create a uniform structure to import into your new tool. In this process, be sure to merge duplicates and maintain visibility of IDs from other software systems you will be integrating with.

3. Crawl. Walk. Run. When onboarding your team, you’ll be tempted to throw everything at them at once. However, a measured approach to introducing the tool and managing the change in smaller steps is generally a better approach. As you introduce teams, do it based on their job function so that you’re only showing them the most important parts of the tool for their role. As they get comfortable implementing those components, you can begin rolling out more features. But, if you dump it all on them at once, they might find themselves overwhelmed and not having the time to learn the new tool while continuing to do their job.

4. Be sure to share the benefits. Once you have some team members up and running, relay the benefits that the organization is seeing back to those individuals. The tool is meant to help them do their jobs more effectively, which in turn helps the business grow and thrive. Ensure you’re explicitly connecting the dots for them so they continue to see the value of using the tool.

Phew, that was a lot, which is why we’re here to help. Having just gone through the implementation process at Aster Brands and Truemont, we’d be happy to discuss further with you if you want to reach out and schedule a time to discuss your desire to bring a CRM into your business.