There is a thought provoking post published on Search CRM blog. It is named CRM in the contact center sees little progress and focusing on results of the benchmarks analysis conducted by Dimension Data PLC.

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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.

Why is it so easy to forget that IT technology exist to leverage an organizational change? I just read a blog post “IT to Business: I won’t read your mind” describing “successful” implementation of technology for nor particular reason. Why are stories like that so common?

Nothing improved because no one had tried to improve anything.  The direction had been “throw technology at problems and they go away,” but they don’t.  You cannot solve a problem by introducing technology by itself.  You have to understand the problem first.  The technology was not wrong.  The systems worked great, but they didn’t solve measurable business problems.

One reason I can think of is that IT is miscast to lead Organizational Transformation initiatives. I suppose if you hire an architect to help you with a problem, likelihood is you will end up with a house. Or a court case if you hire a lawyer. Do I need any more analogies to make my point?

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

  - George Bernard Shaw

I would state that many IT initiatives could possibly produce better results without technology being involved at all.