A rather low tech breakthrough and the implications for CRM technology...

There was an interesting article on the BBC site – and elsewhere I’m sure – which highlighted a breakthrough in significantly reducing the amounts of deaths and complications resulting from surgery. The breakthrough was not as you might suppose a technology related one, but the simple introduction of a check-list. Apparently the check-list drawn up by the Harvard School of Public health on behalf of the World Health Organisation covers areas such as: Do we have the right patient? Are we operating on the correct body part? Have we left any items within the patient that perhaps shouldn’t be there?

Interestingly this introduction of this low/no tech device has proved highly successful. A study in the Lancet indicated that prior to the check-list there was a 64% probability that one of the procedures would be forgotten, and results of a pilot in eight countries showed a substantial decrease in complications and deaths.

So if highly trained surgeons and their teams operating in a ‘mission critical’ fashion in what you would suppose would be a highly process driven environment could make basic errors, then it does raise the question as to how we are faring in the rather less process driven world of sales and marketing. If surgeons, and probably more pertinently their patients, can substantially benefit from the introduction of a check-list could this have implications for how we market and sell?

I know from my own experience that one relatively unsophisticated, but highly effective application of CRM technology, is to help salespeople and their managers better navigate the sales cycle by providing what is in effect a check-list of things that the salesperson should be asking or aware of. For example, how does the sales opportunity fit with defined qualification criteria? what’s the decision making process? what’s the decision time-line? Who’s involved in making the decision? what’s the compelling event, have we passed out contracts to the legal department for review? etc etc. We found that even highly capable and experienced salespeople overlooked basic information which would give them better control of the sales and a higher likelihood of success.

But that’s just one area – how many other areas of our front office endeavours could be beneficially check-listed? From some of the howlers in scrambled email marketing campaigns of which I’ve been a regular beneficiary, I’d suggest there are quite a few marketing managers that wished they’d consulted a check-list before they pressed the send button. Perhaps the nub here is that if you systemise processes effectively there’s substantial scope to improve what you do, and I believe that CRM technology has a much bigger role to play in this respect than people generally appreciate.

Talking CRM requirements gathering...

Strangely I spent a fair proportion of the weekend talking requirements gathering. An old friend of mine is a senior IT manager at a global 500 company, and we were stuck in the car together for much of the weekend travelling to and from a mutual friend’s stag do. So in between pondering on the complexities of delivering a best man’s speech in two languages, one of which I don’t speak, we got to compare notes on what we believe constitutes good requirements gathering practice. There was – surprisingly perhaps - considerable consensus on what we felt was important. The following are the key points – those that I remember at least:

Good requirements gathering is fundamental to the success of any CRM project. Get this right and you are 70% of the way there.

Most organisations do not do a good job of it. Which partially explains why most CRM projects produce at best marginal results.

The starting point for any requirements gathering is to define the vision as to what issues are being addressed or improvements are sought.

The vision has to be defined by senior executive sponsors. No senior executive sponsors, no project.

Senior executives are unlikely to be able to define the vision on their own, they invariably need to supplement their knowledge of the business with what’s achievable through technology. Education plays a key role in requirements definition.

Not all visions require a technology solution; sometimes the answer solely lies in the area of people and process.

Even if the vision requires a technology solution, the dimensions of people and process are vital (though in the main are generally ignored).

Requirements gathering increases in detail over time as the vision is refined and developed. The vision has to be supported by the detail of the processes and associated functionality required to achieve it.

The requirements gathering process is not a 5 minute exercise, done properly it will occupy a substantial proportion of the project.

Requirements should be continually challenged to ensure that they are key to achieving the vision.

Requirements need to be gathered in context to what’s available from technology otherwise potential opportunities may be missed, or there may be excessive elaboration of requirements where the costs clearly outweigh the benefits.

It’s dangerous to define requirements too narrowly; the benefits of implementing technology can often be wider than is immediately apparent. It’s also important to take account what other systems will impact or by impacted by the project.

Phasing is vital – there’s often opportunity to generate considerable value through a relatively simple initial deployment, and then add capabilities over time.

That said beware the ‘let’s go out of the box’ mode of thinking; any effective system has to be tuned to ensure it encapsulates the business processes required to deliver the vision, and that almost always requires some modicum of change.

Understandable but illogical...

I guess my recent posts about CRM vendor’s improving the quality of their RFP responses suggests we put we put huge store in the quality of response we receive. While the quality of response is indicative of the vendor’s interest in the opportunity, the key thing we are interested in is a vendor’s track record with similar projects.

Over the years we’ve worked on a lot of projects with vendors and we get to know their strengths and weaknesses. One thing I would observe is that performance is often inverse to the quality of the sales approach. In general if the salesmanship is slick, the quality of the implementation has turned out to be rather ordinary. Conversely there are companies that we’ve decided to go with despite severe misgivings through the sales cycle, who have proven to be outstanding implementers and people to do business with.

Perhaps this reflects the fact that most CRM vendors aren’t entirely balanced, they are either great at selling, or they are great technically (though there are also a lot that are far from great at either). Inevitably though most CRM purchase decisions are driven by the quality of the sales approach. This is entirely understandable but also entirely illogical given that the salesperson invariably isn’t going to feature much in the client’s life once they’ve cashed the commission cheque. It’s much better to select vendors on the basis of their technical and support organisations because you’ll be relying on them for the life of the system.

So if you accept the observation, then perhaps the secret to a harmonious working relationship with your CRM vendor is to find one who’s technically capable, well respected, and profitable but whose salesmanship leaves a lot to be desired.

Go hard or stay home...

There was a point that I missed when I did my ‘9 ways CRM vendors can improve their RFP responses’ post the other week, and that’s ‘go hard, or stay home’ (as an old athletics coach of mine was fond of saying). In any batch of RFP responses we receive there’s normally a few where the author’s heart clearly wasn’t in it, and while they had taken the time to respond, it was clearly something of a token effort.

It intrigues me why people do this to themselves, after all a poor RFP response is still time-consuming to put together, perhaps not as time-consuming as a good one, but there’s probably not a lot in it in relative terms. Perhaps it’s a triumph of optimism over common sense and respondents figure that at least if they get something in however poor, there’s a chance that all the other competitors will get struck by lightening, or similar freak accident of nature, and they’ll win by default. In many cases it’s clear some poor sole or reseller has been dumped with the task of responding, however pointless they feel the exercise maybe, and go through the motions simply to tick the box with their boss or software author that the task has been completed.

Given that few organisations are going to purchase a CRM system from a vendor who hasn’t taken the trouble to craft a credible response I figure vendors could save themselves a lot of unnecessary effort if they took a more clinical approach to determining if an opportunity is worth chasing. The most successful organisations I’ve worked with pick their shots carefully, and once they’re satisfied its business they want and can win, they’ll throw everything at it. Saying no to an opportunity is not a sign of weakness, and CRM vendor selections exercises are not (generally) lotteries.

CRM - it's not about the customer...

I get to read a fair number of articles written by CRM software vendors. Generally you can tell how new to the organisation, or how close to the front-line the author is, through the number of references they make to customers. If there’s lots of reference to ‘knowing your customers better’ etc it’s a reasonably sure sign the author knows little about the real world application of their technology.

While on the surface the term CRM technology would suggest it’s all about improving customer management – it’s in the name after all - in reality I’d suggest CRM technology is principally about process improvement, and ultimately, and perhaps counter intuitively, the benefits of process improvement may have little to do with the end customer.

I work on around a dozen CRM projects at any one time. If I pick a fairly random selection of core business processes I’m currently implementing, these include:

Management of pre-sales resources
Sales process management
Order process management
Order fulfilment management
Lead logging and tracking
Marketing campaign management
Anti-social behaviour management (local authority)
Complaint handling
Contact management
Account management and planning
Contract renewal management

It’s not that these processes don’t touch the end customer, and in many cases may improve the customer experience, but the reality, rightly or wrongly, is that most organisations purchase CRM technology because it helps them manage their business processes more effectively to generate operational efficiencies. Improving the customer experience is often a desirable side effect, but is not the main objective. Organisations can often significantly increase profitability through the use of CRM technology without moving the needle significantly in terms of what the customer experiences.

Take lead management for example. In many organisations there is no systematic approach to handling sales leads. Often if the opportunity is not short term the lead gets forgotten about and the opportunity is missed. Effective lead handling systems and processes ensure that a higher proportion of leads are converted, increasing sales and profitability. Yes, the customer should have a better experience of working with the company – they didn’t get forgotten about after all - but these systems are implemented because companies want more sales.

Anyway, I’m not sure it’s a hugely insightful observation, but it does strike me there’s a huge gap between what people really buy CRM technology to do, and how it’s portrayed in the media, and I suspect that’s part of the reason so many organisations have failed to embrace it effectively.