One of my favorite quotes is “Happiness is expectation management”, and nobody knows better how to mismanage expectations like software marketing and sales people. However it is important to remember that it takes two to tango, and CRM purchasing decisions are often influenced, if not made, by sales and marketing executives. Add to this group some IT executives, who are famous for buying “silver bullets” every now and again, and you get very potent team of Kool-aid creators and consumers all in the same package.

It is interesting to hear the typical responses, when you ask a CRM executive sponsor about their expectations.

The top 3 answers usually are:

1. We need to improve our salespeople efficiency, so they have more time to make sales calls;

2. We need to get more leads to increase sales;

3. Our competitors “installed” CRM, so we cannot afford not to.

The only common theme in these three responses is that they predict a very high probability of failure.

Chris Bucholtz in his Inside CRM blog wrote recently:

I wonder at times whether CRM vendors have created their own fantasy lands, where customers’ CRM systems spit out leads and marketing people sit around pushing one big button that does everything for them. When you set expectations like that, there’s no way vendors can deliver.

I would like to site another quote. This one is from JP Rangaswami, the italics are mine:

Project failure and success seem to depend on saying, “Are you able to accurately articulate and honestly collect what the requirements are?” and “Are you able to express the right estimates?”…. Too many times, the collection process is weak, because the customer is not easily able to articulate [his needs] in language the people [on the project] understand. [S]oftware estimation is not a trivial exercise; it is still an art rather than a science.

[F]ailure is usually a characteristic of unwillingness to recognize change and to cover up….It’s like a salesman putting forth a forecast to management…without ever talking to the customer. Management [is] blissfully unaware of the fact that the information is false.

Ben Worthen of WSJ Business Technology Blog reported about adoption problem experienced by SureScripts.

Doctors are reluctant to change the way they’ve always done things, Rick Ratliff, SureScripts CEO, tells the Business Technology Blog. That’s why more than 26,000 pharmacies across the country — including major chains like CVS, Walgreens and Wal-Mart – are now marketing the e-prescription program directly to consumers. The hope is that enough patients will ask their doctors about the programs that doctors will be forced to use them.

This story illustrates a cost of ignoring cardinal law of holistic application design - WIITFM (What Is It For Me). Considering that the appeal of SureScripts for the pharmacies is no-brainer (shifting a burden of data entry to doctors), what would motivate the doctors to change the way they do things?

Many business applications project investments were written off because of this failure. CRM initiatives are probably the hardest hit segment. However the attempts to correct this by bullying people into adoption, as Mr. Ratcliff is quoted to suggest, will likely produce even more waste and anguish. Perhaps honest and creative review of the system would produce an improvement, which would motivate doctors to use the e-prescriptions because it save time for them - like allowing them to dictate a prescription.

“Win-Win” is a popular phrase for Sales motivational trainers, but it is probably even more important concept in “Design for Adoption”  business.

Sales Force Automation applications are often plagued by low user adoption rates. There are a few reasons for this phenomena, however one stands out - salespeople are expected to do a lot of initial heavy lifting by entering  their contacts’ information into the new application without any apparent value added for them. Traditionally, salespeople have associated great value to their "Rolodex" or list of contacts and still are quite reluctant to share this information with others, perhaps discounting  the value of the relationships they have built with these people, which is not as easily transferable as data. One of the best approaches to solve this adoption riddle is to pre-populate a newly implemented SFA application with a full compliment of relevant contacts for salespeople use.

Yesterday I had an opportunity to talk to Marc Perramond who is the Product Manager for InsideView of San Francisco. The company’s SalesView product is utilizing semantic web tools to harvest critical information the support the sales process. The pro-active, intelligent Contact Management system is one of the most practically valuable applications I have seen so far that is made possible by following the Enterprise 2.0 vision. Contact information is a highly "perishable" commodity with a very short "shelf life" as population and careers are more mobile than ever. SalesView is monitoring, based on business rules, a number of public social networks and private (available by subscription) data sources to keep sales-critical information where and when you need it - "mashed" with your SFA managed pipeline.

Unfortunately I did not have a chance to see a live demonstration of the SalesView yet, but Marc’s explanation of user configurable business rules for people and event alerts and other functionality, has my mind racing with a number of opportunities for meaningful improvements to sales leads qualification processes and "sniper rifle" marketing campaigns.

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