A good article related to the importance of user adoption in order to achieve success during your CRM implementation. The best laid strategy won’t work if you don’t have user acceptance, and simply saying “They’ll use it because I will make them” many times doesn’t work as well as planned.
CRM software tools have improved almost beyond recognition over the past few years. Where the old systems were clunky, cumbersome and difficult to use, the latest generation boasts seamless integration with tools people are already using every day. The barriers to successful use are much lower than they have ever been before.
So why do so many CRM implementations still struggle? Several years work implementing CRM in a wide range of organisations points to a single, overarching factor: inadequate change management.
A successful CRM implementation must be an integral part of overall company strategy, driven by senior executives. But that is not enough: it must also pay very careful attention to the needs, desires and work practices of those who will actually use the system every day.
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Good article on the importance of change management, but I always strive to apply lessons from the consumer Web to the enterprise app market. For example, does the popularity and adoption of the iPod, or Amazon.com, or Orbitz.com or any other successful consumer product/site/application require change management? CRM vendors should integrate this kind of thinking into their product design. If an enterprise application has zero viral appeal and the only way it will be adopted is if it’s accompanied by a top-down change management process (which BTW may be more expensive than the application itself), well then you probably don’t have a winner on your hands.
I think a key point of failure with CRMs has been the lack of integration with external information. Without this, CRMs quickly become a data silo (what some refer to as a “write once, read never” application). Think about all of the places your reps go, other than CRM, to gather information about their potential prospects, existing leads, named accounts, etc. In our experience it’s not uncommon for a rep to have 5-10 browser windows open just to do basic lead qualification and account research. They’re going to Google search, Yahoo finance, the company web site, LinkedIn, Hoover’s, maybe Jigsaw or ZoomInfo. It’s crazy, and yet it’s the norm. All of this information should be aggregated and delivered within your CRM, where sales & marketing can actually act on it! This will give sales reps a natural “bottoms-up” incentive to use CRM and it would become their primary source of not only internal data but also external sales intelligence.
Happy hunting!
-marc
http://www.insideview.com/DEMO