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.