CRM for your business or your sales force?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a big issue for any successful business. The better you manage your relationship with your customers, the more successful you will be at keeping them as your customers. This is why many software companies are in the business of selling software to help you do this.

IF CRM is so important, why is there such a high failure rate in CRM projects. I speak to many people who attempt to implement CRM, and most have the wrong approach. They look to the software as the solution and ignore the people.

In a recent discussion with a sales person, I found a very frustrated individual. The company had decided to implement CRM. He hated it! It created more work and didn't help him do his job. That doesn't sound like it will be a successful project.

To address this problem, you have to understand what CRM is all about. The purpose of CRM is to collect data, so that you can understand your customer better. If you collect bad data, you will have bad information about your customer. If you have bad information, you have no chance of satisfying your customer. If your sales people are frustrated with the CRM software and don't see the value, they will not collect valuable information. There is an old saying that I learned in my early days working with computers: Garbage In, Garbage OUT (GIGO). It applies to the CRM project.

There are two things that you need to do:
1) Define a very clear goal. Show how what you are doing will help you achieve your goal.
2) Ensure that what you are doing with the software will make it easy to capture the information to help reach the goal. The more difficult it is to capture, the less chance you have of reaching your goal.

This means that your sales people and your sales support people need to clearly understand and support the activities. If you don't, you will fail.

You may be able to get your support people to "follow the rules". You will have more difficulty with your sales people. They rend to be independent and are measured differently. Do your assessments of performance measure them on the "new Rules".