This is a question that continues to come up and is truly important to understand in order to have success with CRM in your organization. There are many books written about CRM success and they all revolve around three major items that need to be taken into account with CRM within any company:
1. People
2. Process
3. Technology
Before we drill down on these three items let’s address what typical (non-CRM) projects take to be successful – Technology. For example, if you are doing an Exchange migration/upgrade project or an antivirus/spam software implementation, there is no need to get people involved and new processes are not necessarily needed within an organization. Successful CRM implementation, projects and day-to-day usage requires all three of these to be in-place to make it worth the organizations time. After two-hundred plus implementations of CRM over the past ten plus years I have seen many successes and some failures from not executing on these three items at the same time. By the way, if you want to read about successfully implementing CRM systems read “The Project Management Handbook: Building Realistic Expectations and Managing Risk”. This book gives you the good, bad and ugly about leadership involvement, data integration and phasing. It is the best I have read and it has been around for years.
So let’s talk about PEOPLE. Why are people so important to help make a CRM project successful? Many non-CRM projects do not need a lot of people involved in them. They are implemented by IT and then you as an end-user start using it. CRM is NOT this way. First we need executive sponsorship by the business. This means the President of the organization or the VP Sales/Marketing or other C level person in the organization (not the CIO) need to take full ownership of the CRM system. This relates to the implementation process as well as the day-to-day usage of the system. This is key to success and allows employees to feel like they are working in a system that has value to the organization. If employees know that the executive leadership is utilizing and finding value in the CRM system, then they will use it more than any other system they have used in the past. This is a business culture change for most organizations that is critical to reach the full ROI of a CRM system. An important part of this people component is Organizational Readiness. Not only is it important to provide people with great leadership but also to make sure they are part of the process of CRM. This means include people from different geographies, different departments, different levels, etc. early and often. Make sure you provide great training for your people. This includes not only technology training but really process training on how to use the system to be successful at their jobs. This will need to be role based training with customized training materials. There are many ways to deliver training but for now let’s just say you need training at the beginning and throughout the usage of the system. It is important to note that CRM is a journey not a destination which means a good system will evolve as the company evolves over time.
Now that you understand why people are so important, let’s talk about the PROCESS(s). So this can be the hardest part. There is a saying that I heard years ago, something like, “if you have no process and you implement CRM all you have now is organized chaos”. Many organizations think implementing CRM will help them with their process problems but really they need to fix the process issues first and then implement CRM to support them. Besides time (resource commitment) the hardest part about putting new process in place is getting people to agree on what the process should be. Then getting people to buy in and adopt the new processes. This is hard, take a lot of time and can slow some people down initially. If done right, this can revolutionize your business and help you take full advantage of your CRM system.
Once you have your arms around the people and the process(s) then you have the easy part left which is TECHNOLOGY. Implementing CRM from a technology point of view can be the most straight forward of the three pillars. Once you have your people on-board and you have your processes defined and documented, the technology piece will fall in-line. With a strong team (like Perficient) you can bring together good developers, integrators, data migrators, report writers, etc. to make the system do whatever you want to do (or whatever amount of time, money and resources you want to invest). Microsoft has done a great job providing an excellent platform to build simple things from sales force automation to complicated items like Line of Business (LOB) applications. It is very important to make sure the CRM system is customized to your companies business. In order to make this happen you will need to leverage what comes out of the box, customized/configure what is needed and turn off/hide whatever is not applicable.
By no means is this the end-all, be-all in why CRM is so different than other technologies. Nor is it the entire story on how to make CRM successful in an organization. It is a start of a conversation and one that needs to be had regardless if you have CRM in place or if you are about to implement a new CRM system. PEOPLE, PROCESS and TECHNOLOGY together need to be considered to find the full benefits of any CRM system. Of course, Microsoft Dynamics CRM certainly helps make it easier and the Perficient CRM team will help make it more successful but it is really how an organization tackles these three items which will ultimately lead to the best ROI for an organization with any CRM system.
Have other ideas? Don’t agree with my ideas? Let me know about it and share your comments on this blog posting please.
