A stitch in time...

We have a couple of clients going live with systems at the moment, and we’ve been spending a lot of time working on an area that is frequently overlooked - defining the way the system will be used, and training and hold-holding the users so that these processes are quickly adopted.

I can’t readily explain why so little time is generally spent on this area. I suspect those purchasing CRM systems don’t realise that this is important, because they are unlikely to have implemented many CRM systems before. The software vendors, I suspect realise it is important, but need to draw a line somewhere. So they are in the main happy to sell, install, and customise software – but are wary of getting involved in the fuzzy area of process definition. It’s difficult to do, it’s difficult to quote, and if you were to introduce it as a line item in the proposal it would break a lot of budgets.

But the net effect of not doing it, is that two years down the line someone suddenly realises that the CRM system isn’t doing much for the business. In the absence of clearly defined, communicated, and managed processes, people having used the system as they see fit, the data is scrambled, and desirable outputs such as reports are meaningless. If you want the best out of a CRM system, then getting processes defined up front is crucial – it can be a very hard situation to remedy if you don’t.