CRM programs have a tendency to be driven from the top down. Senior management wants reporting on sales, pipelines, or forecasts and CRMs are seen as the quick solution to getting this information. The issue here is that in order to generate this information, the sales team needs to be entering quality information at regular intervals. Over time, many companies discover that that their sales team begins to move back to their previous methods of developing and closing business and stop entering quality data into the CRM.
During the initial phase of your CRM deployment, it’s extremely important to not only consider the requirements of senior managment, but to ensure that the CRM meets the needs of the sales and service personnel. It has been said that users need to obtain 3 units of benefits from a system in order for them to see value in 1 unit of work that they a required to put into the system. If this is not addressed, CRM deployments can quickly become unsuccessful.
July 19th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
[...] Part 3, I talked about how it is important to ensure that Customer Relationship Managment (CRM) software [...]