CRM products have been around for more than 20 years, The SaaS vendors have been selling their CRM wares for nearly a decade. Despite all that experience, powerful myths and misconceptions about CRM still can catch customers by surprise. While much of this article's advice applies to any CRM system, we've focused on the specifics of SaaS systems such as Salesforce CRM.
1. The CRM system is less important than the data it holds. Even with all the most marvelous features, a CRM system without real users and real customer-facing data is just an empty shell. Don't be hypnotized by features and CRM functionality; instead, fixate on the credibility of the data asset building within it.
2. User adoption and percentage-of-business represented are the only metrics of CRM system success. There's a virtuous cycle in CRM systems: the more users adopt the system, the more data that will be entered. The more credible and meaningful the CRM data, the more valuable an asset it is for all users. The more valuable the asset, the easier it is to get more users leveraging, and contributing to, the system. Even if some users are spectacularly effective thanks to CRM usage, if you only have pockets of usage, most of your customer situations are not represented in the database. Broad usage is more valuable to overall collaboration, as compared to deep but spotty use of the system.
3. You will probably have to spend a bundle on data quality. Even if you're doing a greenfield implementation of CRM, you will discover data quality problems that are irritants to every user and poisonous to the system's overall credibility. Data quality needs to be attacked at three levels:
Never let data, whether an initial migration or a subsequent import, into the system without cleaning it up.
Spot sources of data pollution and systematically correct them. You need self-healing data.
Identify business processes that corrupt the semantics of CRM data. Your team may be causing subtle but important changes to the meaning of data. In particular, watch out for business processes that span departments with different objectives or metrics.
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4. There's no such thing as a siloed CRM system. Nearly any interesting CRM system must give users access to data that's beyond the purview of the CRM database. So integration will be essential, and it won't be as easy or inexpensive as the initial CRM project. Integration almost always exposes data problems that were hidden or tolerable in siloed system operation.
5. Most of the time, a "CRM problem" is really a disjointed process, a policy conflict, or goofed data.Sometimes, a CRM system is just inadequate to the task -- and you really do have a "CRM problem." But the most visible and important CRM problems are the ones resulting from holes or redundancies in business processes, contradictory business polices or rules, or hopelessly polluted data. Identify and troubleshoot these before you even think about doing a system replacement: you'll need to solve these other problems before there's any chance of CRM success.
6. The benefits of CRM really come from improvements to process enabled by, and in conjunction with, the system -- not from the CRM system itself. The twin purposes of CRM are to: Build customer intelligence (what they want and what are they doing.)
Improve your ability to profitably satisfy their needs (collaboration and ability to execute.)
While CRM functionality plays a roll in achieving both these purposes, it's really about enabling your people to see better and react sooner. If you don't change your business processes to take advantage of CRM, your workers will just be doing dumb things faster and with less waste. Said another way, you'll probably need to change some processes and business rules to leverage CRM for maximum advantage.
7. Making a CRM system truly
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