Momentum Killers: What you need to be aware of in implementing and maintaining a CRM System
Posted by Sid Lejfer on Wed, Feb 17, 2010
A dropped fly ball in baseball, a fumble or interception in football, or a turnover in basketball, all can be momentum killers. It is difficult to regain your momentum when a negative change happens in a positive pattern.
The same is true with implementing and maintaining a CRM System. You can take all of text book steps for selecting, implementing, and maintaining a CRM system, but something unexpected happens. Let me give you a few examples and suggested remedies in regaining your CRM momentum:
1. Change in the executive management team. One of the important steps in getting approval of a CRM system within an organization is executive sponsorship. As an organization, you want to make sure you have broad based support for a CRM system so if any one executive leaves, your have organizational commitment to move forward with your CRM system.
2. The CRM advocate who initiated and drove the project leaves the company. As noted above, the key is to get broad based support for your CRM initiative throughout your organization. If one person leaves, other people within the organization will step up and drive the process.
3. Major shift in the way your business goes to market. With the pace of technology and changes in the economy, business needs change all of the time. You can protect yourself by selecting a CRM system that is flexible and can be modified very easily.
4. You are acquired or merge with another organization. Again, if you have selected a CRM system that is flexible and modified easily, you will be able to make rapid changes to adjust to requirements of your consolidated entity.
5. You company has financial issues. This is a difficult one to address. Depending on your contract arrangement with your SaaS solution, you will be able to decrease the licenses you have on a yearly basis. This will allow you to control the cost. In addition, the maintenance cost of a SaaS solution is less expensive than an on-premise solution and upgrades are included. SaaS solutions definitely give you more flexibility if your company goes through a financial issue.
6. Technical issues with your system. Solutions like Salesforce CRM provide a company with a solid technical solution with great up-time. The key is to take a phased approach to your implementation, have a pilot program and address any technical issues that come up, and properly train your staff. This approach will avoid any momentum killers.
7. Poor data quality. You can have the very best CRM system in the world, train all your people properly, and have an initiative that fails because of poor data quality. People get frustrated when they are working on a system that does not provide them with accurate information. To avoid this momentum killer, you need to address data quality issues before the data is imported into the new system. There are a variety of data cleansing solutions and approaches to addressing this issue.
8. Poor end user adoption. One of the biggest momentum killers is the final step - poor end user adoption. This can occur for many reasons. You need to make sure that end users are involved in this process from the beginning, the system addresses their day to day needs, and easy to use. If you address these three steps, you will have good end user adoption.
By being aware and limiting your momentum killers, you will have a useful and productive CRM System.