CHAPTER  [5]

OPINION on SUCCESS or FAILURE CRM

[1] How Sales Teams Should Use CRM
Different positions within a sales force require different functions from an SFA system, and tailoring to fit those functions is a big part of successful SFA strategies. From CRM Magazine February 2006

Corporate professionals can learn a lesson from George S. Patton, the flamboyant WWII general. "I don't expect my men to understand anything more than what's right in front of them, the tactical situation," Patton said. "As general, it's my job to understand the big picture." This speaks volumes when considering how the rank and file and various corporate leaders should carry out their CRM or sales force automation (SFA) marching orders.

In sales, as in any department, when you move up the corporate ladder job roles go from tactical to strategic, so an SFA solution that serves every member of the sales hierarchy needs to address these various responsibilities. For simplicity's sake, let's divide sales forces into three segments: salespeople, management, and the executives. Each segment has unique requirements and functionality necessary to help customize its view of the sales department. What follows are examples of how SFA is used throughout the sales organization.

In the Trenches
Account executives are the revenue generators, and when faced with an opportunity to close a deal, they can't stumble. However, with all the hoops they have to jump through, it's a wonder when they don't. Inside CRM and SFA systems, salespeople spend most of their time punching in customer data and tracking deals. A handsome amount of time is also spent responding to customer questions and preparing customer quotes. It is irksome, then, that the systems intended to help facilitate these efforts often hinder operations, forcing salespeople to wade their way through much complexity. Part of the problem is that salespeople are forced to do too much administrative work.

That's why account executives need tools to respond to customer inquiries faster and more effectively than previous methods. To do this they'll need the ability to easily record, track, and change customer and product information. Plus, they'll need easy access to updated testimonials, sales programs, and competitive data. Naturally, the less complicated the system, the more productive employees will be. When the complexity is removed, salespeople will consider it a tool, not a hindrance, and will update it regularly, which helps managers who rely on this information to make smarter decisions.

Account executives also spend a good portion of their day communicating with management. Besides reporting results for the day, week, month, many companies have processes that require managerial approval for discounts, quicker delivery, or customers with bad credit ratings. Therefore, any system functionality that improves communication between a sales rep and her manager, such as alerts and messaging capabilities, is vital to this process.

Last, any account executive will spend at least a few minutes of company time tracking her commission. For salespeople, there isn't a bigger motivator. Salespeople "are coin operated," says Mark Vayda, executive vice president of global sales and alliances at BearingPoint. "Anything that keeps them updated on their ability to make money is a huge motivator."

Looking ahead, the emergence of handheld mobile devices and wireless technology has been and will continue to be the biggest technological development for the account executive. Depending on the industry, salespeople could spend most of their time on the road, and with 2006 promising to be a big year for wireless connectivity, future developments could have a big impact on how sales executives do their jobs. With the arrival of 3G networks, VoIP, and dual-mode handsets, account executives will have the ability to access and download large volumes of data from an SFA system and interact with other back office systems, transforming their handhelds and PDAs from simple email receivers to mobile computers.

Aside from mobility, some companies are strengthening the bonds between sales and marketing. For account executives this means acquiring basic information about customers who have been deemed hot by the marketing department. Any customer contact info, interaction, or purchasing history--and any marketing information like response rates--helps provide account reps with information to turn a prospect into a lead. "The integration of sales and marketing has the potential to affect the account executive the most," says Wayne Latterell, managing partner and founder of consultancy Portico Solutions. "Instead of entering information many times over, you're leveraging information already acquired by marketing, but companies are still trying to connect the dots and there is still of lot of work to be done with this business process."

SFA for Sales Management
Sales management falls somewhere in the middle of the corporate ladder, whether it's a branch manager in charge of three to four account executives or a regional manager. SFA for sales management must combine the best of both the executive's and the account representative's world. They do so by integrating multitudes of sales, market, and pipeline reports into customizable dashboards. This has enabled managers to gain an unprecedented view of their sales force. The result is, they can manage and allocate resources quickly and more efficiently than ever before. "Sales managers are involved in the deal making," Latterell says. "Their mindset is, What can we do today so we make our goals for the week, month, or quarter? At the same time, they need to step back and focus on the big picture, which for them is their department or region, and allocate their resources accordingly."

SFA or CRM solutions should help management measure and manage the effectiveness of internal processes. This means managers spend a good portion of their time studying dashboards that identify sales opportunities, deal stages, and close rates daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. These performance metrics can also be evaluated by individual, group, or region. Additionally, as companies get more adept at bringing together customer information from various areas, including sales, customer service, accounting, and the supply chain, the job of a sales manager will become more comprehensive. Depending on the industry, deals may require involvement from multiple departments inside a company, such as manufacturing, research and development, or accounting.

By gaining better visibility into other departments, a sales manager will become more of a facilitator, removing internal bottlenecks that crop up or quickly notifying all stakeholders when a change is introduced. "Now the [manager] is utilizing the SFA solution as a tool, as opposed to just a reporting function," Vayda says. "They want a tool that improves their ability to sell, not just something that provides reporting functionality. That's farther up the chain."

Many managers, particularly regional managers, take a more strategic approach, spending their day going over pipeline dashboards and reports to review which pipelines and markets are generating the most money. "Sales managers will be picking out the largest opportunities, the two or three out of 12 that are going to land the big bucks," Vayda says. "They're going to be looking at which accounts are generating the most revenue, where are the biggest pipelines, and which pipelines are growing the fastest."

Managers are also benefiting from coaching tools. In the past, SFA focused primarily on providing management with a reporting tool. Today, many vendors are embedding new, sophisticated ways to conduct account planning. New sales systems place action items around the most important accounts, such as which business processes or steps should be followed, which sales rep should conduct them, and in what time frame. By understanding where the account executives are in the sales cycle and where they are going, management can offer advice or tips to help facilitate selling success. "This promotes more of a coaching and supporting relationship between a manager and his or her sales representatives versus the typical 'I'm just looking at what you've done and if you didn't make your numbers I'll beat you for it,'" says Eric Gist, a partner in Accenture's global sales transformation practice.

The Command Center: SFA for Executives
Any good CEO or vice president of sales continually understands his company's position within the market. While sales management is focused on its own piece of the pie, C-level executives maintain a holistic view of both the sales organization and the company. They're responsible for the investments and distribution of resources and assets throughout the entire sales organization. Their responsibility is reflected in their mindset. A salesperson or sales manager thinks day to day, month to month, or perhaps quarter to quarter, but the mindset of a CEO or vice president of sales is that of quarterly, yearly, and beyond. Still, a CEO or vice president of sales should never lose sight of the tactical picture. "If you're a vice president of sales and you've gotten away from the clients, the deals, and the processes, you've probably gone way too far to the other side of what you should be doing in the sales environment," Vayda says.

So how does a CEO or vice president of sales allocate his time to accomplish these goals? He spends most of the day reviewing, preparing, and presenting reports. He will review dashboards that highlight pipeline growth and forecast models, product trends (which can include cross references by geographies, regions, industry verticals, or markets), and win/loss ratios for certain divisions within the sales organization. This should enable him to determine if success or failure is from best practices at the sales force level or from strategies based at the executive/management level. Last, with such a high priority on forward-looking visibility, a vice president of sales will spend a significant amount of time running predictive forecasts. "An executive wants to know where the company is and where it's going," Latterell says. "Tactically, they still need the important numbers so they can run the business, but in general they're looking for trending information that enables them to better understand the market their company services to better determine where they should make large, long-term investments in the sales department."

Another executive responsibility is ensuring that good business practices and processes are being implemented and followed. Many times, this responsibility can be overlooked. Consequently, an SFA system should have strong drill-down capabilities so executives can take a detailed look at any segment of the sales team and its ability to enter new sales plans, market strategy, or business processes as feedback. Executives need to "take a more outward focus," Gist says. "[A sales executive] needs a tool that will transcend throughout the organization so the organization flies in formation with his strategy. If he can do that, that's really a home run for the CEO."

Looking Ahead
As vendors continue to expand the capabilities their SFA solutions offer, members of a sales force will be hard pressed not to accomplish more in a single day than their predecessors. Advancements in wireless connectivity will bring mobility to the account executive, account planning and robust reporting tools will enable managers to gain insight into and coach their salespeople like nothing previously seen, and the ongoing development of business process and technology to integrate SFA with marketing and customer service will enable sales executives to equip their organization with a 360-degree view of the customer. Providing each level of the sales force with an application that enhances its ability to accomplish that quickly and more efficiently than before, and to communicate that information up and down the corporate ladder effectively, helps any sales department's ability to deliver profitable results to both the customer and the company. "It's exciting to see how sales technology is adapting the roles of salespeople," Latterell says. "You have cities like New Orleans now offering full, wireless connectivity, vendors releasing new reporting tools. It's challenging the way salespeople conduct business, and forcing them to respond to customers quicker and more efficiently than before."

Contact Editorial Assistant Colin Beasty at cbeasty@destinationCRM.com

Sales Tools by Job Role

CEO
 

 

[2] Making Sense Of Sales

Software to improve your sales process may finally be ready for prime time

Giles Barton knows the frustration of tossing good money after bad. Barton, president of 50-employee Expeditor Systems in Alpharetta, Ga., has poured more than $200,000 into customer relationship management (CRM) software in the past decade. But early CRM products were too rudimentary for his $5 million company, which makes custom lighting panels -- almost like mini-stop lights posted outside examining room doors -- that tell doctors which patients need immediate attention. None of the software ever offered enough customization. "We never really had what we wanted," says Barton, no matter what he spent.

Plenty of small business owners know exactly what he means. CRM products began to appear about a decade ago with the seemingly simple aim of helping companies coordinate their sales processes and improve the bottom line. But the software had glitches and often couldn't be integrated with other systems. In 2001 more than 55% of CRM projects failed to meet corporate expectations, according to Gartner, a consulting firm in Stamford, Conn.

The good news is that CRM software keeps getting better, particularly for small businesses. These days, about one-third of CRM projects miss the mark, says Bob Thompson, founder of CRMguru.com, a Web portal for the industry in Burlingame, Calif. That's still pretty scary, but Thompson says many flameouts aren't the result of problems with the technology. Much of what CRM software does is automate processes, so it's only as good as the procedures you've already established. "What drives success and failure is your strategy, how you deal with customers as an organization," says Thompson. Also important: whether a company has clear goals for the implementation from the get-go.

There are about 10 CRM products geared to small business on the market, ranging from basic contact management for sales pros to multifunction packages that include marketing-campaign management, customer support, and accounting. Most allow you to handle customer contacts and communications in a central location, forecast sales, track leads, and evaluate employee performance. Pipeline management features, for example, show execs which opportunities each salesperson is pursuing. And frequent reports make it easy to determine which salespeople are performing well and to get sales forecasts without wading through reams of paper.

You can buy CRM software either as a desktop application, loaded onto a server, or as a hosted service. Nearly all CRM software makers are now integrating their products with Microsoft Outlook. Some vendors offer easy integration with QuickBooks and other back-office systems. Many provide access through wireless PDAs.

By carefully picking the right package for your company, you can raise the odds of success -- both for your future sales and for the software itself. Your choice depends on the size of your company, your needs, and your budget. Then it's a matter of finding products that sport the features you want.

COMPANIES WITH only a handful of employees can get started with standard packages from GoldMine or ACT! for about $200 a user. These let you centralize contact information, schedule appointments, and forecast and track sales opportunities. If you want to share information among more than five employees, you'll need to upgrade to ACT! Premium for Workgroups 2006 or GoldMine Corporate Edition, which require a server and cost about $400 to $600 per person. Keith Lewandoski, senior financial consultant for Barrell Investment Group, a $1 million, eight-employee financial planning firm in Quechee, Vt., began using the basic version of GoldMine last year after outgrowing Outlook. Lewandoski uses the software to store client contact information, make follow-up notes, schedule meetings, automate mailings -- even send out birthday cards. He spent about $180 but so far he's the only user. Because GoldMine can be used either on the desktop or networked using a server, Lewandoski is thinking about giving the entire office access to help his staff work together better as a team.

Companies whose needs go beyond salesforce automation might consider products that offer marketing, customer service, and support features, as well as some customization, running about $750 to $850 annually for each user. Customer service and support capabilities range from case management and automated routing of calls to service scheduling and service contracts. Marketing features may include e-mail marketing, tracking budgets on campaigns, and lead management. So if a computer company has extra inventory of laptop battery packs, it can dice its customer list and e-mail promotional coupons to target only laptop customers, and then track the response.

PRODUCTS WITH these broader capabilities include server-based software, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, and hosted services, such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite Small Business. Salesforce.com is a good bet for growing companies. That's because it has offerings for very small companies as well as those with more than 100 employees, saving you the trouble of converting to a new product as your company grows. NetSuite Small Business is the only product that offers accounting features and Web site management. Two others -- Sage CRM and Sugar Professional -- are available as either a hosted service or as server software.

While the previous version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 1.2 was plagued by problems, including limited functionality and difficulty installing the software on servers, the company and its resellers claim those kinks are gone from Microsoft CRM 3.0, released in December, 2005. "I can take a customer who is using Outlook and very easily transition their business to Microsoft CRM without a lot of pain," says Anne Stanton, president of the Norwich Group in Norwich, Vt., a technical consultant who is a registered Microsoft partner but also recommends other brands.

For many months, the five employees of TonerZone.com had to manually reenter customer information into their ordering, shipping, and customer service systems because those products couldn't integrate with ACT! In 2003, Ilan Douek, president of the Los Angeles company, began using NetSuite Small Business instead. "Now when an order comes in we don't have to manually enter information again, all the way to printing the UPS label," says Douek. His salespeople segment the customer database using transaction history to create targeted marketing campaigns for such products as Hewlett-Packard inkjet cartridges. They can also determine whether the customer owns products such as a Brother fax machine or a Canon copier and try to cross-sell or up-sell.

Douek says revenues have soared from $1 million in 2003 to more than $5 million in 2005. Without NetSuite, he estimates he'd need four more employees in customer service, five more in fulfillment, and one additional IT person. That, he says, would cost about $16,000 in salaries each month, easily justifying the service's monthly fee of $1,800.

Other fast-growth entrepreneurs may eventually need a more advanced CRM system that can be heavily customized. In August, 2003, Barton's Expeditor Systems began using such a package -- Sage CRM SalesLogix. As with other high-end packages, SalesLogix requires a full-time administrator on staff as well as someone to customize the software. But Barton says, "it runs so well that we have one administrative person responsible for it, and she's not a computer person." He's even more pleased that his employees can parse Expeditor's customer list to track down the status of an order. "We want to manage the customers by who is in line for installation, and now the installation and service department can work from that point of view," he says.

SalesLogix sells for a one-time fee of $995 a user. For a company with 50 employees, that's a significant chunk of change. But Barton says his company is running more efficiently. "We got a return on investment almost instantly," says Barton. It was a long time coming.

(Please see  Making Sense Of Sales. Software to improve your sales process may finally be ready for prime time. From BusinessWeek.com, spring 2006 )

[3] 11 Ways to Ensure CRM Success
We asked consultants to list some common CRM mistakes, and to then advise readers on how to avoid them.
by Colin Beasty

From CRM Magazine December 2005

What we found was that no matter the type of company, good CRM practices are often applicable to companies in many industries. One shared tenet, our experts suggest, is customer centricity. "Companies must instill a customer-centric sense throughout the entire organization to find success with a CRM practice," says John Freeland, then global managing partner of Accenture's CRM Services (now president of worldwide operations at Salesforce.com). This means, essentially, that companies must not only focus on cutting costs and improving productivity, they must also enhance experiences across all customer touch points.

One strategy sure to cripple any CRM initiative, experts find, is leading with the technology and not a legitimate business case for implementing a CRM system. To achieve a 360-degree view of customers, CRM project leaders need to gain a 360-degree view of their own business first.

Consider all the stakeholders affected by the system. What do they stand to gain or lose? What business processes need to be rebuilt or simply need a little touch-up and a little paint? The technology is often rock solid; what derails CRM initiatives very often is the lack of focus on people and business processes.

Some of the tips below were also featured in CRM magazine's June 2005 issue in the story titled "100 Proven Ideas--Successful and Disastrous." It, too, offered pointers based on mistakes made over the years. Here, however, the consultants we spoke with maintain that the following tips address common mistakes their clients continue to make, and the consultants' advice has been fleshed out.

1) Get executive buy-in--If management doesn't believe in a new CRM system, why should employees? Support throughout all echelons of upper management affirms the company's commitment to the project, which will motivate all stakeholders below management. Many times the difference between a successful CRM implementation and a waste of money is a manager who realizes the value of the product, understands the problems it's going to solve, and dedicates time and energy to making it happen. "Many will give you lip service," says Izzy Franco, CRM leader for North America at Cap Gemini. "They'll sign the procurement orders, spend the money, and attend the meeting once a month, but that's simply not enough. They need to be hands-on and involved directly. It's incredibly important."

2) Align departmental strategies--Each department, whether it's a call center, marketing team, or sales force, has its own requirements and goals. They are also, however, all part of an entity that should communicate a consistent message and brand experience across all customer touch points. "One of the keys to a successful CRM implementation or strategy is aligning your enterprise and all the customer touch points within that enterprise," Franco says. "If you want to get to the bottom of why many CRM implementations have failed, there was no alignment between the customers and the enterprise."

3) Strategy first, technology second--If executives learned anything from the Y2K tech wreck, it should be that technology is not a good driver of a CRM strategy, but reorganizing business process efficiencies and bolstering revenue are. Find out how your company's customer touch points can maximize those ideas, then give customers applications that work with them.

"The software is only there to enable implementation of a CRM strategy, not the other way around," Franco says, "If you try it vice versa, you're going to find that down the road your implementation is going to be missing some of the key opportunities you could be taking advantage of--or failing entirely." Freeland agrees: "CRM isn't about picking the technology. Technology is a pillar of CRM success, but it's only one pillar. There are other things that are just as important."

4) Minimize financial risks--It's important that executives come to grips with the fact that CRM is not a one-time expense. Long-term services and maintenance fees will outweigh the price of licensed applications by a ratio of nearly 3:1, according to industry analysts. Consider expenses over monthly, quarterly, yearly, and three-year periods. By assessing the risks and understanding the cost of implementation and long-term services along with the financial benefits, organizations may conclude that a hosted delivery model's quick implementation and low start-up costs are an alternative.

"By understanding the financial impact the company gains a better understanding of what sort of an application they need and how big the implementation should be. Many times they realize it becomes silly not to," Freeland says. "Oftentimes, organizations are deterred from CRM because they view it strictly as a cost."

5) Look for quick wins--Many pre-Y2K failures were largely due to companies biting off more than they could chew. The multimillion-dollar implementations of yesterday required a significant investment in people and process changes. Because companies weren't ready for this, CRM applications became expensive shelfware. CRM project leaders learned that smaller, more manageable projects can yield quick wins, more momentum, and higher end-user adoption.

"You're building a holistic approach, but on a step-by-step process," says Martin Schneider, enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group.

6) Consider migration paths--Understand where your company is heading. Maybe you only need a sales reporting tool now, so you buy an SFA solution that's cost effective, but lacks the ability to integrate an e-commerce system, for example. Can the vendor you've selected provide that additional functionality you might need in two or three years? Select a vendor that will enable your products to grow as your company grows. If an organization doesn't plan ahead, time and money can be wasted on additional add-ons and modules that could have been avoided from the beginning.

"How much over the long haul is it going to cost you to buy from another vendor, do an implementation, and then integrate another module?" Schneider asks. "It takes a lot of money to keep buying point products."

7) Scrub the data--Behavioral data is the lifeblood of CRM. Make sure your customer data is accurate. Many organizations overspend on technology implementations and bypass this critical first step in gaining an accurate view of the customer. Before implementing a solution, bring the data into a unified database, cleanse it to remove multiple entries for the same customer, ensure that the data is accurately distributed to all customer touch points, and standardize your databases so customer information is presented accurately throughout the entire organization. Vendors like DataFlux, FirstLogic, and Trillium Software all provide data-cleansing software. In addition, a general rule of thumb is companies should balance their server space to maintain 13 months' worth of customer data, and at least three years' worth of contact data information.

"Don't overlook this critical step," Freeland says. "Getting the data right and doing it in a way that isn't some monolithic, data-warehousing exercise is critical. People tend to have too much data so they aggregate it, but when they aggregate data, [they're] losing it somewhere."

8) Plan for disruptions--Companies change. They make acquisitions or they get acquired, sections are sold off or outsourced, and executives get replaced. When making a CRM implementation, these are changes that management must be ready for. A firm can reorganize its sales territories or replace its CRM project leaders, which can have a significant impact on its CRM strategy.

"Many times projects are planned to be completed in 90 days, but all of a sudden it's day 120, because at day 45 there was a shift in the nature of the business," says John Norkus, a principal at Deloitte Consulting. "That's nobody's fault, it's just a part of doing business. It's going to happen, but executives and management in charge of any CRM implementation have to take this into account. They can't plan in a vacuum."

9) Don't leave training till the end--Training is often considered the last component of an implementation. Training receives the least funding and results in end-users receiving a new application at the last minute. Give your end-users as much time as needed with the new solution before going live--it makes the transition that much easier. Training should begin immediately following integrator and software selection. The sooner training begins, the sooner end-users realize they're part of the process and the quicker they realize the benefits of the application. Also, the training curriculum needs to mirror the business processes of each department.

"Training should begin as soon as the vendor is selected," says Suda Harvard, CRM specialist for Global Knowledge. "The more time to train, the better off you are."

10) Choose a champion of change--When making a full-suite implementation, start with a single department and let the dominos fall into place. Choose a department with a manager who's behind the implementation, realizes its benefits, and whose department will also find the most success early on. Nothing jump-starts a CRM implementation more than a manager who always has that can-do attitude. Once other departments begin to see this success, they should follow suit. Just like hitting in baseball, CRM success can be contagious.

"The key to this strategy is choosing a department manager you know can make it happen," Franco says. "Other departments will start to think, 'Hey, that looks pretty good. Why can't we do that?'"

11) Ask the expert--When faced with a problem, whether it's customization, functionality, or deployment strategy, companies often assume a new product needs to be purchased or another module integrated. Instead, look to leverage current applications to gain new functionality or services.

"A lot of times people--because of management changes, IT turnover, and all these real-life things that happen--lose sight of what they have and what they've already purchased," Freeland says. "Many times, there's a lot of functionality and potential with what you already have, and you don't even know it."

(Please see 11 Ways to Ensure CRM Success.  We asked consultants to list some common CRM mistakes, and to then advise readers on how to avoid them. )

[4] Barriers to CRM Success
Tech obstacles to CRM success can be considerable, but others include process and people concerns--read here about two companies' experiences.

Aside from her lack of CRM knowledge, Johnson also faced one of the oldest barriers to CRM success: no user buy-in. She needed to convince a team of more than 20 salespeople--a team accustomed to using spreadsheets, card files, and financial/accounting systems--to switch to a shared data repository. To make matters worse, the company's power user and person responsible for training new salespeople asked, "Why are we changing from something that is working for me?"

Educate Yourself First
The first barrier Johnson had to overcome was her own ignorance about CRM. She began to learn the merits of CRM systems by attending an industry conference in the summer of 2004. There, the limitations of WWW's existing data-gathering methods became clearer to her: The 70-employee insurance company offers property, personal, and marine insurance for businesses in and residents of Florida. The sales team is divided into two groups, one for business insurance, and the other for residential insurance. The existing customer-data system of paper, spreadsheets, and accounting applications was limited in CRM functionality and lacked the ability to share customer information. Also, when employees left the company their customer contact information left with them. When WWW had to replace a salesperson, the new employee was advised to rummage through the predecessor's desk to find any "workable leads," Johnson says. "The goal with purchasing a CRM system was to enable salespeople to sort through leads. Also, there were many cases that involved a member from each sales team. The lack of a unified customer system inhibited this."

Safety in Numbers
Johnson also quickly identified at the conference another barrier to CRM success: a financially insecure vendor. With all the merger-and-acquisition activity in the CRM industry, one of her biggest concerns was that "while this would work now, the vendor would eventually fizzle out and there would be no support, no new updates, nothing. We would be up the river without a paddle."

What she learned at the conference helped Johnson to overcome two more common barriers to CRM success. One was limiting information resources to only CRM vendors. She needed unbiased opinions on each vendor's products and the vendor's staying power: "I went by [other customers'] comparison list on which vendor was going to be around for a long time and which was well respected." The next barrier was cost--the manageable monthly payments of the on-demand delivery model appealed to her. However, because she was not sure if WWW would eventually bring the CRM system in house, Johnson wanted a product that would give her the option to do either. She selected Sage Software's Sage CRM SalesLogix.

The implementation began in November of 2004 and the system was up and running within two months. To begin converting the sales force, she blocked salespeople from using the old financial/accounting system and forced them to run and file activity reports through SalesLogix. If the reports weren't filed through SalesLogix, they were considered not filed. "That pushed everybody to use it," Johnson says. "If there's no driving force behind it, people can ignore the new system for as long as they can."

Johnson then encountered staff resistance to the project. "We had at least eight or 10 guys [telling] me the sky is falling," she says. "They had complete doubt about whether the software would handle all the information, if information would be lost, or if the whole thing was just going to blow up.
Everybody wanted to do things their way. They were looking for SalesLogix to fail." To make matters worse, the company's biggest power user wasn't adapting the new system. He's one of the company's most successful salespeople, and was also responsible for training new recruits. He continued to use the legacy financial/accounting system, content on placing customer notes into the old system, printing out summary reports, and then having another employee shuffle through the reports so that each set of notes was in the proper sales zone for the corresponding customer. "He told me, 'You can have all the new guys change, but I'm not [going to],'" Johnson says. "That only added fuel to the fire. Other salespeople in the office started asking, 'Why do I have to use SalesLogix?'"

Johnson realized she might have a mutiny on her hands. Most sales, marketing, and customer service departments don't appreciate receiving instructions from the IT department. Johnson sidestepped this barrier by letting the sales manager address the matter. "He went into [the power user's] office and laid down the law," she says. "The power user had to buy into SalesLogix or face some potentially serious consequences." The power user began using SalesLogix, and finally saw its benefits. "It had a wonderful effect on the entire implementation," Johnson says. "He has become a champion of change. It was really important as both a power user and as a motivator/mentor to the rest of the sales team."

WWW has seen dramatic improvements thanks to Johnson's persistence. Besides streamlining its sales department, the company has created a new marketing department. "SalesLogix has consolidated business operations across the board. The staff has come around. They accept that this is an improvement over the way things were previously done."

A Final Hurdle
Johnson overcame one last barrier by realizing early on that CRM training is a continuing process. She continues to educate the sales force by distributing daily emails to the staff with updates about additional functionality. "We keep an eye on the staff to see how advanced they are on the system and send corresponding updates each week to show them how to accomplish something new. It keeps them happy," Johnson says. "In hindsight, this initiative came down to communication--communicating and working with people."

Contact Editorial Assistant Colin Beasty at cbeasty@destinationCRM.com

Common CRM Success Barriers
 

(Please see Barriers to CRM Success.   Tech obstacles to CRM success can be considerable, but others include process and people concerns--read here about two companies' experiences. )

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1. 11 Ways to Ensure CRM Success.  We asked consultants to list some common CRM mistakes, and to then advise readers on how to avoid them.    
2. Barriers to CRM Success.   Tech obstacles to CRM success can be considerable, but others include process and people concerns--read here about two companies' experiences.  
3. 100 Proven CRM Ideas, Part 1. ...successful and disastrous: 90 bright ideas for your CRM strategy and 10 dim ones to avoid. Edited by David Myron   
4. How Sales Teams Should Use CRM  From CRM Magazine February 2006
   Different positions within a sales force require different functions from an SFA system, and tailoring to fit those functions is a big part of successful SFA strategies.
5. Making Sense Of Sales. Software to improve your sales process may finally be ready for prime time. From BusinessWeek.com, spring 2006
6. Data miners dig a little deeper. By Michelle Kessler and Byron Acohido, USA TODAY. Posted 7/11/2006 10:11 PM ET
    
7. Answering the Call. Everyone's had a bad experience with a call center. But now companies are investing in advanced technologies and at-home agents to connect with customers, not put them on hold.
8. Basics and Information on Customer Relationship Management From KnowThis
9. Call Center Management  From KnowThis
10. Customer Value and Micro Marketing   From KnowThis
11. Data Mining, Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence   From KnowThis
12. Database Marketing Basics, Terms and Concepts   From KnowThis
13. Retail and Point of Purchase Kiosks    From KnowThis
14. Sales Force Automation and Sales Technology   From KnowThis
15. Target Marketing and Market Segmentation      From KnowThis
16. Viral Marketing, Referral and Buzz Marketing     From KnowThis

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