Painful memories of this issue were awaken again by Chris Bucholtz in his blog and I put some of this content as a comment to the post.

The Enterprise software adoption management of salespeople is probably the most difficult challenge for corporate management:

1. they have no inherent respect for a process, because to be successful they learned to go around processes and focus on a goal and a goals of CRM implementations are not often communicated in specific terms which relate to their goals;

2. they are often recruited as “entrepreneurs” and treated as “self-employed”, but then told to use a system which is designed to be a management tool to “control” them.

3. they are told that the system is to “help” them to be more efficient, but expect them to spend hours doing data entry.

There are many variations of these valid reasons, but the most critical one is - they can get away with ignoring the CRM system like no other business community. There is a limited upside for using it, the most active users who don’t make their numbers are still fired, and no downside, the best sales performers who ignore management orders to use CRM, are still the stars. 

That is the challenge that made me come up with an idea of holistic design methodology, in other words - the system needs to be initially architect with adoption management in mind. IMO the only way to achieve return on CRM investment is to design and implement it in a such a way that all CRM communities WANT to use it and I would double bold it for sales community. I wrote about the strategic options to address this issue in this blog before, so now I will try address some tactical ones:

I had very good adoption experience when it was possible to add (mash) external information about Customers and Contacts automatically fed from on-line subscription services. That could be huge value added for salespeople, who otherwise would need to spend hours researching or fly blind without CRM system.

One of the largest adoption challenges is around data entry requirements, so finding the ways to lighten the load by automation and other technology tools is very important. But that is it’s own subject for discussion and

I wrote about this before.

In the large organizations, cross departmental visibility made available to salespeople, allows them to adjust their pipeline activities to reflect for changes in a Customer credit standing or outstanding support issues. Sales teams need to be exposed to these opportunities to manage their time more effectively, but once they are - adoption improves dramatically. 

There are too many more tactical solutions to describe here, but the important thought is to think about them before design and implementation started.

I have picked this up at Jim Berkowitz’s e-Journal, who focused on five out of 10 Strategies outlined in the Worcester Business Journal by John Graham, president of Graham Communications. I decided to focus on this one because it is often very problematic in CRM implementations:

3. Get serious about database management. Most companies are in total disarray when it comes to managing customer and prospect information, including those using sophisticated CRM systems.

The issues range from inaccurate, incomplete and totally missing information to a refusal by some salespeople to enter any data. Worse yet (if that’s possible), management often is duped into believing all is well, that data is being collected, updated and tested.

Strategy for initial population of contact data base, and keeping it alive and meaningful, is very often missed issue in CRM adoption and change management planning. Those who assume that users will manually populate and manage it are digging a deep grave for success of the initiative. Multimillion dollars investments were wasted because user community judged the new system “unusable” because of the inadequate data quality. It is easy to blame technology, vendors, or IT for results of poor change management.

The best practice is to automate initial load as much as possible, and do it with the least involvement of businesses community. There are various methods IT organization can facilitate this function:

1. Create logical filters to lift contacts from the corporate email servers. Create process to validate relevance of this contacts for business, and automatically upload them into new CRM contact data base preserving relationships of these contact records with employees records. It is relatively simple and inexpensive project.

2. Identify most popular applications users keep their contacts in, and provide support personnel with the tools for export/import. This approach could be short term labor intensive, but total cost/risk ratio is very positive.

3. Provide scanners, software and support for business cards and other data sources for the continuous contact population in a form of central or satellite location/service.

It is very important to formalize and publish Contact information management process or etiquette, otherwise possible conflicts may arise. This information has very short “shelf life” as people frequently change employment and/or locations and corresponding addresses, phones, emails, etc. It was estimated by Siebel Data Steward SME in 2004 ( I don’t remember his name now) that 3% of data per month is getting bad if not actively managed. There are few technological tools were developed to either ping the contact regularly for changes in their information, or monitor their information changes in social network environment and feed updates into CRM data base. I wrote about one of them before.

The subject of Customer data base in a context of B2B, as a corporate entity has another set of challenges which may be even more critical from the adoption management perspective. Complex corporate ownership structures can cause serious challenges to territory management process owners in sales operations and conflicts around account ownership, without well planned Customer Master strategy. The best practices are to leverage third party corporate information providers such as Duns & Bradstreet or First Data, to negotiate potential data conflicts, and to populate and manage the information automatically.

The quality of data in CRM system can make or break users perception of the system, company’s commitment to change, and professionalism of people who lead this change.

Paul Greenberg initiated a very interesting discussion. It is an excellent read in it’s entirety, but I will quote just a part of it here:

the contemporary empowered customer is enmeshed in some way with a network of peers, their expectations are dramatically changed. They are straightforward changes, though. They expect that they can interact with a company the same way that they interact with a friend or a peer who they can trust. That means that they expect a personal relationship to the company, not just to a person in the company, though that may be how the relationship manifests itself a larger number of times. That also means that they expect that the attributes, the characteristics of that deeply personal connection they have to a peer is part of the way that the company interacts with them. That means that trust and transparency have to permeate the company’s DNA. That means that the company has to have something distinct about them. That means that the customer is expecting the company to converse with them, not push corporate hype at them. It’s why you see contemporary marketing so geared toward buzz and word of mouth and engaging customers in conversation through use of social media like blogs, or engaging internal customers in a valued conversation through a wiki.

I also feel very passionately about the possibility of a “real” relationship between the institution and the individual, but I am less optimistic about achieving this state within the life expectancy of CRM 2.0.  There are three major obstacles in our way which imho would take much longer time to overcome:

1. Authenticity - many, if not most, institutions see the customer from the next quarter sales forecast point of view and no technology can change that. There is an opinion that the institution has no social conscience, only individuals that are part of the institution have it, so until there is a very clear, undisputable connection between authenticity and profitability it would be a long time before we see any meaningful change. I know there are exemptions and we all can name one or two institutions which have demonstratively got it, but we need much more - even now the truly successful implementations of CRM 1.0 are still only a relatively small minority relative to the number of attempts. Watch this video for experiencing an example of current institutional authenticity

2. Asymmetry - it is too common of an experience that an institution has a much louder voice than the individual. I can see great promise in current technology to change that, but the model has yet to emerge to the best of my knowledge.

3. Execution - it takes time to earn trust in a relationship, whether it is between people or institutions, time to observe a certain consistency in behavior and authenticity of intent, which I covered above. We all have experienced dealing with individuals who represented their institution in an exceptional way, but building processes and organizational changes to provide such experience consistently, across an institution, is still a huge challenge which is not a technology issue but a cultural one.

All these aside I do believe that change is the only constant and technology is a great tool to accelerate change.