Facilitating collaborative brainstorming for your CRM
To get buy-in from your team on requirements for your CRM, you may want to engage some or all your team members in a collaborative brainstorming session. It opens the door for you to get a better understanding of requirements and is nice to have for your CRM.
Creating an environment that encourages and enables people to work together and sharing and developing ideas maybe harder than it sounds. A significant part of the challenge is often physical. For example, if people work in different parts of a building, telecommute, or work on teams that deal with different disciplines communication and camaraderie can be difficult.
Fortunately, cloud-based Computing offers numerous software solutions to facilitate collaboration-free and low-cost chat and screen sharing tools. Zoho CRM platforms also have collaboration tools embedded into them as part of the platform you can use everyday.
When you start the brainstorming process you want to maximize the free flow of ideas as much as possible.
If you have the resources to bring your team together in front of a whiteboard that is a great way to facilitate creativity. Encourage everyone to pitch ideas certainly some of them will be bad ideas but suspend criticism during the creative phase. Operate on the premise that there are no bad ideas. You can winnow down ideas to the best of the bunch.
Discussions tend to be run by a few strong personalities. If you people monopolize the session, breakout into teams. Depending on how your setup, you can have Focus functionally, or you can mix and match by assigning members from different departments to each team to provide a multi-discipline perspective.
Collect the ideas and rank them to help identify which ideas to pursue. For example, you can use ease of implementation, impact on the customer, cost, risk to the brand, and impact on the revenue as factors in ranking ideas. A spreadsheet is often a good way to compile the data, but there are other brainstorming and decision-making tools.
