I am not a fan of MS. The Apple zealots scary me. The fact that people get so emotional and irrational about a company, a technology or a product, has puzzled me for years. It is surely a testimony of the powerful Software Marketing machine, which turned a preference for tools into a religious war.

Bill Gates is falling a victim to the success of his own business model - “dazzle them with functions and features until they forget about reliability and performance”. Well it worked for a while, but it gets harder and harder to remember why I opened this program in the first place.

I don’t get this blogger’s frenzy about a 3 year old email either. Not that I do not see the irony, but did you really think that Bill unconditionally loves every piece of crap his company has ever produced? Is it a hate for everything Microsoft?

I find most software is designed by people who understand marketing much better than the processes they are suppose to make easier to execute. Personally I do not find Mac any more intuitive than PC, but they sure market much better and I admire that. And is there less hate for Oracle than Microsoft, because Larry got less money than Bill? Or does anyone really think that Oracle Financial’s, or any other Oracle business application, is less convoluted and frustrating for users than Dynamics? You may have noticed that I don’t even want to mention the usability of SAP products.

It seems the Software Giants got themselves into a position similar to the Telephone Giants, they are more interested in protecting their cash flows than innovating and re-building from scratch. If they treat their existing code and architecture as a capital investment, such a strategy makes financial sense, but..

I was writing before here and here about the Contact Management challenges to overall SFA user adoption. There are some exciting news which could help to deal with this challenge.

Jigsaw, a business information provider that relies on a user-generated content model to keep its database of corporate and individual contact information up to date, today announced plans to offer its corporate data free of charge.

“In essence, we’re open sourcing our corporate data,” said CEO Jim Fowler. “Corporate data is close to becoming a commodity. We’re going to make it a complete commodity.”

Designed as an alternative to companies like Hoovers, Jigsaw offers both corporate data, like headquarters, industry and contact information, and contact data, such as direct phone numbers, email and titles for individuals.

Jigsaw users can pay for the contact information via a subscription service and earn additional points for updating records with up-to-date information.

Dubbed the “Open Data Initiative,” Jigsaw is partnering with leading on-demand CRM vendors to bring its corporate data to their CRM systems. Entellium, Landslide, Maximizer, NetSuite, Oracle, Sage and SugarCRM are all making it possible for customers to download Jigsaw’s data via CSV files into their on-demand applications. Microsoft’s CRM online is not part of the program.

Unfortunately it still seem to require some IT tinkering to facilitate proper import of data and subsequent scheduled update in a context of internal Account Management, but it surely is a big step in a right direction.

… 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.

The “mashing” approach implemented in InsideView, I have written about here, is even more attractive and very well worth considering as an important part of CRM implementation strategy. 

I found this in Jim Berkowitz’s e-Journal.

Here’s an article about a subject that’s near and dear to my heart, Businesses Still Failing To Use CRM Software To Its Full Potential:

DMC Software Solutions Marketing Manager Rebecca Haines notes:

The big problem with CRM systems is selecting the correct CRM software for company needs and getting the right amount of advice and training to ensure it reaches its potential. Resources are easily wasted without careful consideration and help, warns CRM specialist DMC Software Solutions.

What Jim kindly calls an article, I would call self promotional press release from DMC, completely fails to address is that many businesses start selecting software before they formulate clear justification and strategy for implementing CRM on the first place. Many “advisors” specialize in implementation of a specific software and consequently do not bother asking fundamental questions like “what business goals do you try to achieve by doing this?” and “how would you measure your success?”.

CRM holds a promise of breaking walls of departmental silos by refocusing peoples attention on a source of “natural” business flow of information - CUSTOMER. That requires some serious cultural change and for the change to take hold an organization, i.e. management has to plan and execute with clarity and consistency. Clarity and consistency are a lot more scarce than “functionally rich” CRM software.

It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.

  - Malcolm Forbes

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.