Introduction of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) business strategy in an organization represents an implementation project that involves significant change management (processes, technology, people), resource management (time, effort, money) and active high management participation. Consequently, CRM vendors are facing a number of serious challenges while selling their services (CRM implementations to customers) and, at the same time, trying to stay profitable.

This paper suggests the model enabling CRM vendors to cope with most of these challenges. The model ensures transparent, repeatable and consistent approach to the (pre)sales activities and (potential) entrance into a CRM implementation project. At the same time, the model helps to determine whether CRM should be implemented in an organization and (if so) what the required functionalities are, which CRM software would be suitable, what Return Of Investment (ROI) the project would have, how to generate project proposal/contract and how to establish efficient project planning.

The model was built upon the gathered information, based on a larger number of CRM (pre)sales activities, customer experience analysis, best practices of real life CRM implementation projects, CRM software research, Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Discussion Tool and theoretical settings analysis.

The model has been evaluated on a company case study. The model implementation result analysis has proven that model does attain the set objectives, with measured reduction of the internal resources required and the total time consumption, and reported increasing positive customer experience.