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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.