Why are there so many CRM failures?
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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.
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.