A few years ago, I thought about writing a book called, "True Confessions of a CRM Consultant."
Obviously, that didn't get very far, or you'd be reading about it on Amazon.
I've been delivering customer relationship management (CRM/xRM) systems since 1997, and have come to the conclusion that the Emperor of Corporate America indeed has no clothes. Oh, the stories we consultants could tell... thank your lucky stars we signed that NDA!
I'd love to tell you in detail about the three key principles that I have found that can absolutely guarantee that your CRM efforts will be successful. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are. With over a decade in this field, I've not been able to identify a formula for success, and it frustrates me to no end. I'd love to be able to perfectly control my clients, ensuring that they make the right choice at each turn - but that's impossible. Budgets, politics, market realities, and Truth Itself interfere.
Besides, even wisdom turns violent in the hands of a fool. So in the end, it is your character and creativity that will win your clients' trust and support their efforts.
What I hope to offer here are tools that I and other colleagues have found helpful in consulting with clients and helping them to achieve their business goals with CRM (increase sales, improve forecast accuracy, replace all those &*# %$@# spreadsheets with a relational database, reduce duplicate data entry, etc., etc., etc.).
Lastly, I implore you to comment on everything that catches your eye here - especially if you disagree. Take ownership of this material, criticize it, customize it, and make it your own. Contribute to this conversation. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Do good work.
Christopher Bates
CRM Principal Consultant Ascentium Corporation
P.S. I love Ascentium, but they do not endorse, support, own, control, have influence or claim to the content of this blog.
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I've designed & my company uses a CRM tool which is somewhat primative, yet highly effective. Key areas I struggle with involve data flow and buy-in by key personnel. Surprisingly, there is no magic data fairy populating data fields overnight so harnessing and riding the information wave is a never-ending challenge. As for buy-in, the 80/20 rule seems to apply. 80% and more of key personnel utilize less than 20% of the tool's capabilities. . .which is fine. The biggest issue is vital managers who don't use the tool at all. . .
ReplyDeleteThe key for successful implementation of a CRM--or any enterprise-class solution, in fact--has little to do with the consultant coming in to implement the chosen system. The success of such implementations relies on the company implementing the systems knowing themselves, their processes, and what they really need to increase competitive advantage and become a learning organization. Creating a Business Architecture (BA) is a good place to start, but those can be long and arduous tasks that not many small-to-mid size organizations are willing to undertake. It is likely that they do not take on these projects as it is difficult to quantify the ROI of a BA; the real return is mostly qualitative in nature. However, the real return on investing in a BA will become obvious when it is time to implement an Information System to help the organization along. There's nothing quite like well-defined mission statements, strategies, processes, and workflows to help a system implementation succeed...
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