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.

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.

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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