Differences between CRM for small business, implementation and CRM adoption (Part 1)

An interesting title, I’ve taken from an article in the latest issue (May) from CRM Magazine. In these days analyzed with some of our project leaders to the fact as demonstrated success in implementing various projects of CRM and SFA to manage jointly with our customers, but also the concerns about that in some of these projects, the level of adoption by the user community of some functions of the system has not been as deep as planned and desired.

Therefore, it is interesting to analyze in greater detail which can be the causes of one project to another, with relatively similar objectives, present large differences in the final results of a CRM implementation and even within the same organization, presented significant differences in the achievements of two or three roles within the company that have adopted the use of a CRM for small business system.

As leader of a CRM project, we face the fact we were able to complete and stabilize an implementation of a CRM initiative (not just CRM software, which is only a support element, a tool to support strategy centralization on the client), thus we consider our mission accomplished. The problem arises when over time starts to become evident that the project has not achieved the results and functional areas have “adopted” the components of the CRM initiative in their work everyday.

The fact is not implemented in time, budgeted cost and scope (if it does, anyway my very sincere congratulations). And this is where much of the problem lies. It turns out that in the course of time, after putting to run a CRM tool is concluded does not. My conclusion in this regard is the following. The only thing that is failing, it is probably the tool or software. What usually fail is the orthostatic vital components of a CRM initiative, business processes, culture and training of people running those processes and data that support the tasks to be executed.

Let me illustrate my point with some examples.

Users of the area of marketing do not use the CRM system and its area director is not the way to achieve the adoption of the use of such a tool in the execution of the work of relationship marketing.

These processes are executed in accordance with the criteria of each officer and use the tools that they seem more comfortable. There is no monitoring of compliance and documentation of activities in these processes of relationship marketing.

The indiscriminate use of spreadsheets and unstructured databases is the common denominator. When asked the reason for not adopting the use of the system in its work, the issue comes out that the data included in the central database is not reliable. Finally a couple of officials indicate that there were not worked at the company when it made the implementation and received the charge with a very basic induction using the tool.

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