Out of the box CRM hosts various mechanisms and features around products. They tie into opportunities, quotes, orders, and invoices allowing for sales automation scenarios. What’s nice about it is that it provides a lot of functionality that most businesses might need such as working with various price lists, discounts, automatic calculation of order totals and such. Coming in CRM Carina there will even be additional functionality in regards to related product suggestions for up selling and cross selling. As great as all this is there is one challenge with the concept of products in CRM and that is it is focused on the sale of physical goods, but perhaps there may be a way to work around this and play nice with the out of box platform behaviors.
The majority of my CRM project experience has been in the financial and insurance industries. I’ve also done XRM projects that really has nothing to do with sales management and in those cases products weren’t a concept in the system. For all my other projects not once have we ever used the out of the box products entities. Why? Because we weren’t selling physical goods. We were selling service based products. The challenge was that we would end up having to try and fit the concept of a service based product into the paradigm of what CRM considers a product. In all cases we generally determined that we would ultimately have to fight the platform and it wasn’t worth pursing. I’ve always felt this was a shame because we ultimately gave up a lot of work that was already done for us, but trying to fit that square peg in a round hole may have exposed us to some unexpected or undesired platform behaviors around products.
If you think about it makes sense that the CRM product team would focus on physical goods because it’s an easier concept to manage. The customer makes a widget that has a combination of fixed and variable costs. It has a retail price of X with potential special discounts, taxes, shipping costs, etc, but what if my products aren’t as straight forward?
Take for example a typical insurance product scenario. We have an array of products, but each product may vary in cost and/or configuration based on the state/region it is sold in and a number of additional options. Each product can also be a series of components with potential different prices based on who it buying the product. Smokers over the age of 60 may have different rates and available option a than a 20 year old non-smoker for example. Typically there is some pre-existing home grown system that manages these complexities and generates the final price quote.
The typical thought when it comes to CRM design is that there is no way this works well in CRM and in and of itself that is correct. As I’ve mentioned in each project we chose to discard CRM products in favor of a custom products entity, but in the back of my mind I always wondered how could we get the best of CRM out of box products and customizable service based products?
In my past projects we may have been able to come up with a hybrid approach to what we work with products in CRM by customizing how we work with them. The seemingly easy answer is to just create everything custom. Another possibility is to make the out of box products display a read only view with customizations that provide a product configuration interface. This would allow for the various possible options that make up a custom product that ends up with something that can be translated into CRM out box products. Perhaps it becomes a single product with a quantity of one or maybe it becomes a series of products and add-ons based on selected options. This product configuration interface could be presented in an iframe or an external window that would know what object it is working against such as an opportunity, quote, etc..
So the obvious question becomes why try to manage products this way? It really comes down to trying to work with the platform the way it was designed. When you have all the various possibilities for what a product is it can be difficult to understand the details of what exactly is selling and in what combinations. If the customer manages all this in an external system then there is extra works that needs to be done to combine that data into what is in CRM. But if we can translate that into a base set of things that can be represented in CRM that allows us to do a better job of tracking the telemetry of what custom products and their major categories are selling in certain scenarios. We also can operate more inline with platform features because we are working with products in a fashion that is suitable for CRM.
Technically service based products is not a first class concept in CRM, but I think with a little work it is possible to be compatible. I would love to see some effort by the product team to make the custom or service based products scenarios easier to work with in the platform, but I won’t hold my breath. I have yet to try this out in real life so I don’t know how well it may work in practice. I just know that how to deal with products is always going to be a conversation in most customer projects.
