How to Torpedo Your CRM System

Carl (name changed to protect the guilty) stood in front of my desk, furious. He was clutching two fistful’s of paperwork. If he’d had hair, it would have been on fire. Carl was a salesperson, and had been for years. I was his newly-minted boss, and the target of his fury. And it was all about “my” new CRM system.

Carl was holding prospect sheets, his personal records of years of contact activity. And he was furious that a prospective customer he claimed as his own had contacted the company, asked for a salesperson, and I had assigned the prospect to someone else. Set aside for the moment that Carl’s prospect had contacted us to ask for a salesperson. My assignment wasn’t arbitrary or capricious. My first step was to look for the prospect in our new CRM system. Lo and behold, I found nothing. No record. So I made a decision, made the assignment, and spoke to the prospective customer. Carl found out about it after the fact.

There’s another piece of the puzzle necessary to complete the picture. When I implemented the new CRM system I didn’t require the salespeople to enter their own records. I provided someone to do that work for them. The salespeople had the opportunity to provide their information in any form, including paper records. I did that for two reasons. First, I wanted the database built cleanly and well. Second, I wanted the implementation done on schedule. Carl chose not to provide his prospect sheets for data entry. I don’t know why.

I patiently explained to Carl that the only thing that mattered was what I could see in the system. If it wasn’t in the CRM system, it didn’t exist. Period. This had been made explicit from the beginning of the project, I reminded him. He stormed away, shouting back that he wasn’t going to forget this. It was an amazing display of emotional maturity. A day later he approached the administrative resource for help getting his records into the system.

Under the best of conditions, implementing a CRM system is tough. It’s not for the fainthearted or weak-willed. Most implementations I have seen firsthand were not planned well, done well, or used well. As a result, CRM systems are widely criticized. Salespeople tend to despise them. However, the technology itself is rarely the culprit. For the bad ones I’ve seen, the technology was fine and the implementation itself was miserable. Here’s why:

Lousy planning. If you believe the CRM system is going to be easy to implement, and will require minimal customization, there is swamp land in Florida I’d like to sell you. That pair of assumptions is beyond naïve. Careful and thorough planning is vital. If the system is not configured well and customized before the salespeople are required to use it, noncompliance and chaos will follow.

Insufficient support. It’s foolish to expect salespeople to invest the necessary time to build their own records at the beginning. Wherever those records are coming from, one individual needs to own the task of building the database. Elimination of duplications is only one of the reasons. Accuracy, consistency, and speed are the others.

No ground rules. For any database to work well, every entry in each record needs to follow a pattern. Naming conventions are a great example. One vital ground rule is that no account name (the name of a prospect or customer organization) can include an abbreviation. Therefore, the American Society of Association Executives can never be shortened in a record to ‘Am. Soc. of Assn. Exec’s.” or to ASAE. Never. Otherwise, tracking down and eliminating duplicate records is nearly impossible.

No discipline. This one is chronic. Unless and until salespeople are required to manage their work through the CRM system, they won’t. If sales managers look the other way when a salesperson is managing their calendar, their communications, or their record-keeping outside of the CRM system, the data inside the CRM system will never be trustworthy. Two things cannot be negotiable. First, there is no alternative. Salespeople must use the system and only the system. Second, the simple ground rules must be followed. All the time.

At intervals, I found myself sending a query to one of my salespeople to find out what they were planning to do during a two-week block where they had calendared no activity for themselves. My point was twofold: First, I wanted them to know that I was interested enough in how they were managing themselves to ask. Second, I wanted to leverage the learning opportunity. The most effective time to plan and schedule the next act or activity is when completing the current one. Salespeople that do always have larger pipelines and more deals in development. But they usually need help developing the habit.

Minimal customization. An effective CRM implementation requires some counterintuitive thinking. The best outcome is a system that is clean enough and simple enough to be easy and fast to use. That takes real work in the beginning. It is very easy to add complexity to a CRM system. It is much harder to make it simple. Left unchecked, fields multiply. Lots of things would be nice to know. But there is an inverse relationship between how much information you ask the sales organization to provide and how much information they actually will provide. While marketing and some other managers would love to have extensive data that can be parsed down to the granular level, asking the sales organization to provide it is silly. They simply won’t.

Therefore, there are two critical guiding principles as the system is customized. First, simplicity is paramount. That means most of the “nice to have” or “good to know” fields need to vanish. Don’t gray them out, make them vanish. Ask only for the information vital to move opportunities forward and to manage the sales organization.

Second, begin with the end in mind. Design the reports first. Figure out what information is necessary to lead and manage the sales organization. Keep the reports simple and focused. Make them meaningful, easy to understand, and easy to interpret. Then customize and enable only the fields necessary to gather that information and paint a clear picture. It’s probably much less than you expect.

A perfunctory rollout. For sales organization, this is a very big deal. Implementing a CRM system goes to the core of how individual salespeople work, of how they manage themselves. Therefore, an effective rollout will involve more investment in the salespeople than simply a couple of group sessions to show them the application and answer their initial questions. A good rollout will require group training, and more than one session. A good rollout will also require individual training and support. Some salespeople will not happily put their limited technical literacy on display in front of their peers. That means one-on-one support will be essential as they learn to use the system. And a good rollout will require coaching — sales managers using system data as the context for account and opportunity planning and coaching with individual salespeople. Until they see the data put to use for their own benefit, to make them more effective and give them the opportunity to win more deals, any CRM system will be interpreted as a club. Usage will remain spotty, and compliance will remain grudging.

No ownership. Someone needs to own responsibility for the system and data. That cannot be the individual salesperson. Salespeople are myopic about information, and information sharing. It’s very difficult for a salesperson to understand and hold in mind why information is important to others and how it is going to be used. So corner-cutting (which looks to a salesperson to be a reasonable time-saving measure) is almost unavoidable. Someone needs to police and own the data. The best candidate could be the individual responsible for generating reports from the data. But some of this is organization-specific, and a one-size-fits-all policy is impossible to recommend.

Limited visibility. This is my favorite example of being penny wise and pound foolish: implementing a CRM system for a sales organization that cannot be accessed by anyone else. A good CRM implementation will enable marketing and sales to create a thorough and rich profile of a potential customer and each of the key players in that organization. The entire arc of the deal can be captured and tracked. Every key factor affecting the customer’s decision can and should be described.

Too many times, motivated primarily by a desire to limit the number of seats or licenses, companies will lock out customer service and other workgroups who are tasked with delivering on the commitments made to the customer. In other words, for those who need to deliver the promised value, there’s no access to the understanding of the customer that has been carefully created. No, that is not hyperbole. Yes, it is as idiotic as I made it sound.

If the salesperson has done her job well, not only will she capture the specific commitments made to the customer, but she will also have discovered what, for that customer, are the unforgivable sins — the things we must never do. If we expect the salesperson to know those things, to capture and to share them, why would we not make them available inside the CRM system? The CRM system should be the single place anyone goes to find vital customer information. Always.

Therefore: Choosing the CRM system that is the best fit for a given company is pretty straightforward. The decision factors are obvious: cost, vendor reliability, easy integration with an ERP or other enterprise system, and ease of customization. That’s the easiest part. The hard part is always the implementation. Any good implementation depends on thorough planning, careful customization, and disciplined use. If you’re not planning to make those investments, then don’t bother. No CRM system is a magic bullet no matter what the system vendor might want you to believe.

What do you think?

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Part of my practice is planning, designing and mapping CRM implementations that really work. If you could benefit, call me and let’s talk.