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CRM implementation strategies are often decorated with goals like establishing “Holistic view of the customer”, “360 degree view of the customer”, and “One-stop shop”. These are ambitious goals when you consider everything that is required to effectively identify, secure, service, and maintain a customer. Ambitions should not be squelched by the enormity of the effort, but keep in mind that it is always better to work smart than it is to work hard.
In anticipation of building the perfect system for your sales organization, it is important to manage some common risks.
People don’t like change
I admit that this is a generality, but chances are there are a number of salespeople in your organization that fall into this camp. There are very few sales people that are excited to change the way they work in favor of a new process or new software that is going to change their life, particularly if they have not been exposed to CRM before. Whether they embrace change or not, there is a practical limit to the amount of change that can be absorbed at one time, so maintain sensitivity to this with a solid communications plan, a prioritized roadmap, and lots of training.
An inch deep and mile wide
By trying to incorporate a lot of functionality into your CRM tool, there is always the risk of sacrificing richness of functionality just to get everything under one roof. As the saying goes, “If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well.” This is not to say that you should spend time over-engineering your system, but rather invest the time to understand what features and functions are most important to your users and ensure that they are incorporated.
Artificial intelligence
There is a balance between building a system that helps your organization effectively manage their customer relationships and that which completely eliminates the possibility of human error. You customers cannot be managed solely by technology, so avoid the trap of trying to build a system that is laden with alerts, email blasts, and security that is targeted at preventing users from ever making a mistake. Trying to anticipate every possible user error is guaranteed to slow progress and introduce technical over-engineering. This time would be better spent on your change management and training plan.
Reinventing the wheel
Some systems and applications just work well and are not worth the effort to rebuild or re-engineer into a single tool. For example, most CRM tools come with some ability to send email through the application; this does not mean that you should make plans to rid your salespeople of their email system. In the same way, spellchecking ability should not be a queue to get rid of your word processing application. Instead, look for ways to integrate your legacy applications to leverage what they do best while making for the most intuitive use-model as possible for your users.
Replicating data
In the world of the web, the term integration does not always mean replicating data. Sure, there are some valid reasons to use ETL tools to move data from one data store to another, but each integration case needs some analysis. In the SaaS world, it is faster, cheaper, and more effective to integrate at the user interface layer through mash-ups and dashboards. When possible, leave the data where in the data warehouse or the system of record, and leverage services to access the data and visual tools to represent the data in your CRM application.
You CRM system can be a powerful enabler for you sales people and your organization as a whole. A solid vision will be a valuable tool in guiding the path to long term success, but consideration of these stumbling points should help accelerate your progress.
