Advice on CRM implementation issues and a joke...

There’s an old joke that goes something like this:

A man, driving through the countryside, stops to ask a farm worker for directions to a local town.

The farm worker scratches his head thoughtfully, and after a while, says ‘you know sir, if I was going there I wouldn’t start from here at all.’

This surfaced in my mind when I was asked for advice from a company implementing CRM, but, despite focusing on a simple contact management phase to start, were struggling to gain traction, particularly with some of the senior executive users.

I guess my advice was of the ‘I wouldn’t start from here at all’ sort, and may not have been terribly helpful, but my response was as follows:

Ideally when you deploy CRM, there are a clear set of ‘recognised’ problems that you are looking to solve, and compelling outcomes that you have in mind. The resolution of these issues would ideally have senior level support, and while this doesn’t guarantee usage, it certainly helps.

It sounds as if you are encountering resistance at an executive level though. This is a very difficult situation to overcome. If the executive team don’t support it, then it will be a major uphill struggle.

My suggestions for addressing the situation:

Re-visit the business case. What can you do with CRM that will get senior level support? I’m not convinced just contact management represents a big enough win to capture people’s imaginations. Work out how CRM can grow sales by 10%, and that might get some attention and backing. I’m all in favour of phasing projects, but you can do too little in the first phase and burn out enthusiasm for the project. See here for thoughts on phasing.

Also consider carefully if you have a reasonable chance of deploying process-driven CRM or whether you will have to settle for ad hoc usage per this blog post .

If you get senior level sponsorship and the resources to make the project happen then perhaps use this post to address some of the user adoption issues.

If you can’t get sponsorship, then probably the best thing is to find a small group of receptive users, focus resources on them, and help them transform their part of the business with the CRM system. If you can prove success in one area, that may help you obtain attention and resource for a wider roll-out.

It’s the work you do before the implementation that largely determines success or failure. Effective planning and requirements definition are the keys to success, and they set the tone for everything that follows. If you have a compelling vision that everyone buys into, then you have conditions that a ripe for success, without it’s pretty much impossible to create anything of meaningful value.

Which is why, frustratingly I’m sure, the best advice, when things go wrong, is often to retrace your steps and revisit the planning stage.

By the way if anyone has any other questions on implementing high return CRM systems, feel very free to drop me a line. I’m always happy to give my two penneth worth.

CRM project plans - where does it all go wrong?

For those of you currently planning a CRM project, I thought it might be helpful to indentify some of the areas where things tend to go ‘off-piste’, but before I do perhaps it’s a good idea to suggest why we might care in the first place.

If the CRM project team come under time pressure, either through underestimating the time-line or through unforeseeable disruption, the, not unnatural response, is to try and speed things up. Unfortunately, often with limited things that can be sped up, this leads to cutting corners in some form or another. Commonly this manifests itself in dumbing down the requirements, reduced testing, and rushed training, which in turn invariably ends with user adoption issues which may ultimately prove insurmountable.

Therefore understanding which bits of the implementation process are prone to delay is a key way of effectively managing time-line expectations. So the following are my top six areas where people tend to get caught out:

Contract negotiation – you may have selected your CRM vendor quickly enough, but contract negotiation can be a major source of delay. Once matters reach the hands of the respective legal teams things rarely move fast.

System design – translating your requirements into a final design is a problem area. Not so much the design work itself, but, because what you sign off at this stage is what gets built (whether or not it is what you want), this phase is likely to generate much to-ing and fro-ing as the designs are finalised. This can be a particularly extended stage if requirements are ill-defined going into this phase (see here for my thoughts on requirements definition).

In fact at any key sign off point – the simple act of getting signatories together is prone to delay, for the simple reason that most will have other, invariably pressing, work commitments, and the effects of other events such as holidays, illness, maternity, paternity, or, if in the UK this winter, snow.

Data-load – because the point the data load into the system begins is often the point when it’s realised how bad the quality of data actually is. Data preparation is a time consuming piece of work, and is often not started early enough to avoid impacting project time-lines.

User acceptance testing – is the point where you get to check how well the vendor delivered on their design. This phase is commonly underestimated for some reason – probably through misplaced optimism about the number and easy of fixing bugs. It’s generally the iterations of identifying issues, fixing, testing, re-fixing, and potentially breaking other things that previously were working in the process, that make this a potentially delay inducing phase.

User adoption – is nearly always an issue because the amount of effort required to make it happen isn’t generally appreciated. It takes a long time to break old habits and establish new ones, and it can take many months of effort before this is achieved. And this can be many months more effort than was originally allowed for.

Then of course there’s the less foreseeable. In a recent project, pretty much the whole of the vendor project team were made redundant, which was more than mildly disruptive. These situations are not easy to cater for, however making reasonable allowance for the standard phases of an implementation is key to staying away from potentially perilous route of trying to deliver on a project plan that was never achievable in the first place.

CRM set to be a commodity? Interview with Raju Vegesna at Zoho

The following is an interview I did with Raju Vegesna at Zoho Corporation. Some interesting thoughts, particularly on CRM software as a commodity:

[RB] Could you give us an introduction to Zoho Corporation and your role?

[RAJU] Zoho Corporation (formerly AdventNet Inc) was founded in 1996. The company is headquartered in Pleasanton, CA and also has offices in Austin & New Jersey in US. Zoho also has offices in India, Japan, China & UK. The company has over 1200 employees, is private, profitable and never raised any external capital. Zoho is a comprehensive suite of award-winning online collaboration and productivity applications for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as consumers. I am currently the Evangelist for Zoho.

[RB] What’s the typical profile of one of your CRM customers, in terms of things like size of organization, number of users, geography etc?

[RAJU] Companies with tens or hundreds of users use our CRM app. We also have many free users using the free version of our app. Our users are geographically well distributed. 50% are from US and 50% from rest of the world. The usage is high from countries that have good broadband connection.

[RB] What lead you to enter the CRM market-place?

[RAJU] We initially built an installable product to meet our own needs. It eventually evolved as a SaaS App which we use along with many users. We wanted to provide a good set of feature-rich apps for SMBs to run their business online at an affordable price. Obviously, CRM is an important part along with other apps we offer. When all these apps knit together well, it can be a compelling offering to SMBs. That is our vision and our CRM app is one key component in our application portfolio.

[RB] You’ve been pretty visibly targeting Salesforce.com users with your Zwitch programme, do you consider them your main competition?

[RAJU] Yes, Salesforce is our main competitor when it comes to CRM application. Customers are starting to see the value we bring to the table with a rich set of features, a good price, and integration with our broad set of apps.

[RB] How does Zoho CRM differentiate itself from other CRM vendors?

[RAJU] Our Zoho CRM differentiates in three key areas - features, integration and price. The application has breadth and depth at very attractive price points. Given the fact that users can start using a fully featured app for free is a great plus (the app is free for the first 3 users). Also, its integration with our other applications (Like Mail, Meeting, Writer, Sheet, Show etc) is unique.

From my own review work I found Zoho CRM had a surprisingly comprehensive set of functionality, you’ve also got a very broad suite of other applications, how do you as a company maintain that sort of rate of development?

[RAJU] Every application has a dedicated and passionate team focused on that market. The mandate for each team is to be the best in that category. In CRM, we want to be the best CRM out there for SMBs. This is the case for every single app. We have frameworks that take care of underlying plumbing so that individual teams focus on the application and features. Once an app reaches a certain level of maturity, teams work together to integrate them to work harmoniously.

[RB] The use of CRM technology to harness social media seems to be the hot topic of the moment. Are you releasing functionality in that area?

[RAJU] We are working on some improvements to CRM which will also include integration with social media. Unfortunately, I cannot provide additional details on this at this time.

[RB] Is there news you can share about your roadmap for Zoho CRM with us?

[RAJU] Zoho CRM will continue to improve as an application with additional features and improvements. Integration (with other Zoho apps) is going to be an important theme for CRM this year. We will also integrate CRM with external apps as well. We might launch a new application complementing CRM this year.

[RB] Other than Zoho perhaps, who do you see as the winners and losers in the CRM market over the next few years?

[RAJU] I don't want to name any vendors, but as general themes, I see CRM becoming a commodity app for businesses. This means, vendors charging an arm and a leg will bleed users. Vendors that integrate with other existing systems will win. Mobile will play an important role in CRM and vendors will have to embrace it. I expect CRM will continue to be an active market in coming years and we will see many vendors succeed.

Where do you see Zoho as a company in five years time?

[RAJU] Five years is eternity and it is tough to see where we will be. The fact that Zoho itself didn't exist 5 years back shows the rapid evolution in the market. We think SaaS will commoditize software and we will no longer see the margins we see today. We want to be one of the important companies around, innovating and serving our customers well.

How to implement CRM technology - an easy way and a hard way

One of the first projects we undertook after I set up Mareeba was to review a client’s call centre. The call centre supported computer equipment across the UK, and was something of a victim of success, struggling to cope with a series of large orders that the client had recently won.

One of the key issues the client had, was that they struggled to appropriately prioritise and action issues that had a high impact on their customer’s operations. As a result they were struggling to meet their service level commitments, creating ill will within the customer base, and incurring significant penalty payments.

As a solution we helped them develop new operational processes and implemented a new CRM system to support them. We developed and supervised a customised training programme, and then, after initial hand-holding, left them feeling rather good about what we’d done.

When we returned two weeks later though, we got a bit of a shock. Yes, the system was being used, but by everyone in very different ways. There was no consistency to which fields were filled out or how they were filled out. One user might set a case as high priority, another user would define the same issue as low priority. The use of the ‘on hold’ function to stop service level timers, and the routing of calls to other service teams seemed pretty much random.

In short, while we had developed a ‘solution’ to a major client business issue, it wasn’t actually a solution to anything because the users weren’t using it in a way that created any value. Sure the issues were being logged, but all the great stuff we wanted to do like cut the resolution times for high priority calls, or reduce call volumes through better identifying trends, simply wasn’t happening.

Fortunately with a major commitment of additional time and resource we were able to steady the ship and the call centre becoming one of the cornerstones of the client’s subsequent growth. The point of the story is to expand on a theme I began in my ‘CRM is complex’ post, is that the process oriented usage of CRM is tricky to pull off, because you need to get all users to consistently follow the process in order for you to get results. And that, as the above example might suggest, is very difficult to do.

What’s interesting is that you will generally get some level of value from a CRM system even if usage is inconsistent. So in our call centre example above, all calls were being logged and attributed to the correct customer, so the client got some measure of benefit from being the fact those calls were being recorded and handled. What wasn’t initially being achieved were our aspirations for things like the quicker handling of high impact calls, because that required a more process driven approach than we could initially achieve.

So if you went out today and purchased a CRM system and you weren’t too concerned about everyone using it in a consistent and systematic way, then you would still derive benefits such as:

• Improved follow up of opportunities through the ability to set call backs
• Better retained information about prospects and customers
• Improved coordination between different sales teams
• Easier transitions when staff leave or change role
• Improved productivity through better access to information and collateral
• The ability to launch, albeit very broad brush, marketing campaigns
• Better centralisation of customer information through integration into other systems

However these benefits are generally comparatively slight compared to those driven by a more process driven approach which might, in a business to business sales and marketing situation, include:

• More effective lead management
• Improved lead generation through highly targeted marketing campaigns
• Improved communications to customers and prospects
• Improved cross-selling and up-selling capabilities
• Better control of the sales process
• Improved sales forecasting
• Better account retention and development process
• Enhanced major bid control
• Improved allocation of pre-sales resources
• Enhanced sales margin control
• Improved account planning
• Enhanced major account development
• Streamlined order processing and fulfilment
• Improved customer on-boarding
• Improved management of customer facing processes
• Better visibility and management of client issues and complaints
• Enhanced reporting - sales activity, conversion rate, marketing campaign ROI, lead source, pipeline, forecast, customer satisfaction, competitive activity, win-loss reasons, etc.

The problem, however, is that these are much more difficult to achieve for the user adoption reasons I outlined earlier. Which is why I smile, or maybe it’s a grimace, when I see on my Twitter feed someone tweeting from a vendor conference somewhere something along the lines of ‘wow, company x, rolled out product y to 5,000 users in two weeks!!!’. This may or may not be factually true, but assuming it is, then barring the use of a fairly large army of implementation personnel, and the addition of a minor miracle, then I would wager the usage pattern will prove to be of the ad hoc and inconsistent variety.

The more process driven the goals for the system, the more resources are required to be successful, but the greater the rewards if you are successful. The problem is that people badly underestimate just how much resource is required to achieve consistent and systematic usage patterns, which is why properly planning a potential CRM project is so important. If you can nail down precisely what’s involved in achieving a given set of goals, then you can make a considered decision on what are appropriate objectives. It doesn’t really matter whether you spend a little for a lower return on investment ad hoc approach to CRM, or spend big and go for the high return process driven approach. Where you don’t want to be is somewhere in the middle, spending big, but not big enough to pull off the process driven approach, and achieving as much as if you’d spent virtually nothing. A near miss is as good as a mile in this respect and that can be a very uncomfortable place to be.