Photograph courtesy of Klearchos Kapoutsis

The last six weeks or so have reinforced just how important it is to be on the front-line when a CRM system is rolled out. We’re in the process of going live on an initial deployment to a few hundred users spread across multiple locations, and sitting through training and go live has been particularly insightful.

There’s a lot that can and should be done to minimise the unexpected when you give live. Effective requirements definition, extensive user involvement, agile development, well written and managed user acceptance testing programmes, and well run pilot deployments, will go a long way to ensure that a design stands up in the real world. Nonetheless, no matter how thorough these activities may be, one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that users will surprise you with previously undiscovered bugs, usability problems, misunderstood processes, missing and incorrect data and various other assorted gremlins and omissions.

The interesting thing is that while users will spot a fair proportion of them (and some users have a great talent for this), quite a number were things that I spotted myself, watching people use the system as part of their day to day jobs. Had I not been there, then my best guess is that some proportion would remain undiscovered, passed over by users as just one of those irritating things that you just lived with. It’s perhaps only when you understand how something was meant to be, that flaws become apparent.

So, while it’s important to quickly act on issues when you roll out a system, it’s also critical to have the right eyes in place to spot them. Users are good source, but they shouldn’t be the only source.

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Photograph courtesy of Michael David Pedersen

Over the years many wonderful CRM systems have been built, but rather less have been used, or at least used in a way that generates significant value. Persuading people to use CRM systems in a consistent and structured way, over a prolonged period of time, is challenging. While user adoption is about a lot more than training, training is a key component. If you can get the training part right then everything else is a lot easier. The trouble is that providing effective CRM training is a lot more involved than is often appreciated. The following are a couple of under-appreciated elements that can have a huge influence on adoption.

Focus on process – a lot of CRM training is functionally oriented. This field tracks x, this field tracks y, if you click this button this happens. Functionality though adds value when it’s used to support an organisation’s business processes, and therefore training has to be delivered in that context. So if, for example, one of the supported processes is lead management, we need to convey exactly how the system will be used, by whom, in order to log a lead, score it, route it, track it, develop it, report on it, close it etc. etc. This comes right down to which buttons to press, which fields to fill out, which pick-list values to use for each step in all the processes and sub-processes which will be in place to improve our management of leads.

The problem is that this requires a deep understanding of both the out of the box technology, the processes, and the unique customisations associated with the system. As I mentioned last week, external trainers tend to be knowledgeable about the out of the box technology and internal trainers knowledgeable about the process side. Whichever delivery approach is used, it’s important to ensure that all dimensions are covered if the user adoption of the system is to be effectively supported.

Training has a sales dimension – one key aspect of the training process is to persuade people that the system is worthy of their time and interest. In other words training has a selling role. A critical part is to convey both the WIFM (what’s in it for me) dimension, as well as the broad benefits to the overall organisation (which hopefully in the fullness of time also benefit the user). Not least of the reasons is to conquer the ‘big brother’ objection that stalks many a deployment of CRM technology.

But when we consider how we use CRM training to promote the system more effectively to users, then, rather like any successful marketing strategy, there are many different facets. While what is said is important, so too are more subtle elements such as whether the system is still buggy during the training phase, the quality of the training facilities, the level of documentation, and the willingness of senior executives to sit in. These unstated aspects may indeed have more promotional value than what’s more directly communicated.

If organisations are going to achieve more with CRM technology, then understanding and addressing the challenges of user adoption is essential, and CRM training is a key link in this chain. When organisations start to evaluate their training approach in the context of how it can maximise user adoption, rather than seeing it as a mundane tick-box activity, then it suddenly becomes a lot more interesting.

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Photograph courtesy of PinkMoose

I’m in the process of putting a piece together on training on CRM systems, but as a quick preliminary I thought would walk through some of the options for training delivery, and their relative strengths and weaknesses:

Externally delivered training

This is generally by using the CRM vendor or implementation partner, though training can also be available from other parties and freelancers. On the plus side, the big strength of this approach is that delivery will be by an experienced trainer, who will know the technology inside out, which are not small considerations. On the negative side, external training can be expensive, but perhaps its biggest weakness is that while the trainer may understand the technology, they’re likely to be considerably less au fait with the client specific customisations and processes.

Internally delivered training

The main alternative approach is to assign training responsibilities to an internal staff member – what vendors often refer to as ‘train the trainer’. This tends to be a cheaper option, particularly over the longer term, though this assumes that the opportunity cost (the value the internal resources could alternatively generate if used elsewhere) is less than the external approach. The internal approach tends to fare well for top-up training and for new joiners, because it overcomes any resistance to signing off purchase orders on an on-going basis.

Perhaps the biggest plus of the internal approach is that the trainer will tend to have a better understanding of the organisation’s unique processes and how the system has been customised to support them.

From a negative standpoint, if the quality of training is poor then this will have a huge impact on user adoption. Not all internal staff make good trainers, either because they struggle to understand the technology, or because they don’t have the natural abilities or experience to deliver effective training. Organisations also underestimate how long it will take for their internal staff to get up to speed, particularly when they have taxing ‘day-jobs’.

Mentor training

This is a variation on the internally delivered approach, but instead of putting training in the hands of a few trainers, responsibility is spread across a range of subject matter experts who might be responsible for particular areas or processes. While this has the benefit of spreading knowledge throughout the organisation and lifting the burden from a few individuals, it also increases the likelihood that one or more trainers won’t have the ability or knowledge to deliver effective training.

Remote learning

There are a range of remote learning options. Software as a service (SAAS) vendors in particular have done a great job in making resources like video based tutorials available to users, which makes for a very cost effective and flexible approach to training.

These resources however are set up to support the out of the box functionality and won’t take account of an organisation-specific customisations and processes, and the lack of face to face contact with a trainer may mean questions or misunderstandings are not easily addressed.

In summary

The ultimate decision on which approach to use will be influenced by a couple of factors:

• Are there resources available in-house to cost effectively deliver training of a sufficiently high standard bearing in mind both the time involved in delivery and learning/preparation?
• How important will it be for users to operate the system in a structured and consistent basis? The more process oriented the system, the more sure you need to be of the quality of training delivery.

As a general rule, the more process-oriented the system, the less effective are the remote and mentor based approaches, though these may still play a part in training delivery. I’m particularly wary about mentor training, because on the surface it seems an attractive option, but I’ve generally found organisations underestimate how much preparation is required before someone becomes sufficiently competent, and spreading training responsibility too broadly simply creates too many potential points of failure.

Internal training works well if it’s undertaken by the right people, with the right training, and time to prepare, which, by definition, means it’s not for everyone. External training works well as long as additional time is factored in to ensure that the trainer has the right knowledge of the client’s processes, though this can significantly add to the cost. Either way, the key is to appreciate how important training is to user adoption of the system, and getting the right approach worked out is the key first step. In the next post I will set out my thoughts on the other aspects of successful CRM training.

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Photograph courtesy of Eva Luedin

Anyone involved with implementing CRM systems will be familiar with the conversations that go on in the background. A whole range of quibbles, gripes, concerns, and issues, are answered with the stock standard response, that of course when the new CRM is implemented, then quibble x, gripe x, concern x, or issue x, will no longer be a problem, because when we have CRM everything will be perfect.

While it’s tempting to bask in the warm glow created by the fact that prospective users of the system feel you’re developing something akin to ending global warming, the problem is that dangerously inflated expectations can be perilous when trying to implement a system successfully. When users go live and find the system is nothing like the vision of the perfect CRM system they had imagined, interest quickly fades and the system is written off an yet another IT failure.

These false expectations which are so common to implementing CRM (and I suspect most types of technology)I think arise from a couple of factors. Firstly the forthcoming arrival of a new system provides staff with a convenient means of kicking current issues into the long grass, and, secondly, our imaginations are sufficiently fertile, that, unconstrained by clear vision of reality, we are susceptible to considerable powers of invention.

A key task for the project team therefore is to ensure that expectation-drift is minimised. There are a number of key aspects to this:

• Involve staff. The more potential users are actively involved in the planning, requirements gathering, technology selection, design, development, and testing of the system, the better the understanding of what the system will and won’t do.
• Make it very clear what we are planning to deliver, what we aren’t planning, and when we’re planning on delivering, and who will be using it. This should be documented, but not buried in a hundred and twenty pages of design documentation. Two pages maximum, and distributed to all potential users.
• Communicate. Communicate. And Communicate some more. Keep everyone informed as the project progresses, particularly if things are changing.
• Don’t succumb to telling people what they want to hear. We all like good news, but if this is at the expense of the truth, then this simply perpetuates false expectations. Don’t over-promise, and don’t oversell.
• Focus hard on the management layer and ensure they have a clear understanding of the deliverables for the project, and are able to communicate these to their teams.
• Make it clear that no matter how maligned and despised the old system may be it will still be better than the new system in at least a few respects.

Controlling expectations may sound like a chore, but, to be successful, it’s important that prospective users reframe ‘when we have CRM everything will be perfect’ to something closer to ‘when we have CRM, items x,y,z will be much improved’.

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Photograph courtesy of jared

There are a number of challenges and unknowns when implementing CRM technology. No matter how thorough your requirements gathering, one or many of the following may occur:

• Users fail to engage with the system
• Additional functional needs are identified to support business processes
• Users use the system in a different way to what was envisaged
• The organisation’s processes have changed since requirements were initially defined
• Capabilities are developed that are found to be redundant when the system goes live

Though to some extent these issues may be mitigated through an agile approach to CRM implementation, where potential users have heavy involvement in the design and development of the system, the concept of ‘minimum viable product’ is also critical, and this can be used regardless of whether an agile or waterfall implementation methodology is used.

At this point, I need to own up and say I borrowed this terminology from Eric Ries’s Lean Startup approach which is documented in his Startup Lessons Learned blog, and recently released book ‘The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses’. The concept of minimum viable product is based on the notion that the best way to test if there’s a market for a new product or service is to release a basic version which is used to test the concept in the marketplace. If it gains traction additional capabilities can be added, safe in the knowledge there appears to be demand, if it doesn’t the company can develop a revised approach based on what it has learned from the market, and without having spent too much money or time pursuing the original vision.

While I’m reframing the concept, it has value in terms of implementing CRM technology. A highly effective implementation approach, in my opinion, is to release a lean initial version of the system that meets a key organisational need. The much loved 80/20 rule comes into play here, in that a small amount of development effort will often deliver a larger portion of the benefit of the system. It’s often trying to deliver that last 20%, where most of the time and costs arise.

Once the system is in, and hopefully adding the intended value, further capabilities can be added safe in the knowledge that the organisation is benefiting from the technology. This approach has a number of benefits:

• It reduces deployment lead time
• It reduces initial costs
• It minimises the down-side if the system doesn’t gain traction
• It reduces the risk of ‘white elephant’ capabilities being produced which seemed like a good idea in the design phase but didn’t prove useful in a live situation
• It encourages further investment in the system because the payback is more apparent
• It reduces the stress on internal resources because of the limited scale of the initial deployment
• It gives the organisation the flexibility to adapt its approach based on real-world feedback

That said, the approach is perhaps not as easy to pull off as it might sound, for a number of reasons. Firstly, facilitating the design of a lean initial system needs a ruthless approach to avoiding additional padding which can often arise for reasons of political expediency – keeping an influential person or department happy by ensuring their pet needs are met.  Secondly it requires a commitment to multiple phases of development, which as I pointed out in this post, is something that few organisations seem to be comfortable with. The key to making it work is that users believe that future phases of work will happen and can as result be persuaded to wait for non-core requirements.

The word viable is also an important part of this approach. Success relies upon an initial system that makes a significant difference. That means there as much emphasis on clear operational objectives, supporting processes, and effective user adoption as with any other effective implementation strategy. The minimal viable product approach is not a euphemism for throwing a few CRM software licences out there and seeing if someone uses them. While this might give the CRM software vendors a quick hit, it pretty much guarantees the project won’t progress.

While it might seem to be an unlikely source, I think the lean start up movement has a lot to teach us about implementing CRM systems, and Eric’s book is a perfect starting place.

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Chris Bucholz has done an admirable job over the years of collating an annual top twenty CRM blogs, firstly at Inside CRM, then Forecasting Clouds, and now at CRM Outsiders. So, if you’re looking for additional blogs in the CRM sphere, then the Top Twenty Blogs Of 2011 is the place to go. This blog was listed at number 6, for which we feel appreciative, but, as ever, rather unworthy. Thank Chris!

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If you’re a good freelancer or consultant working in the CRM space in the UK, it may well be worth you passing your details on to us. We’re regularly asked for recommendations or to point people in the right direction, or we may wish to involve additional people in the projects we’re working on.

If you’re a CRM project manager, CRM trainer, freelance developer, integration expert, business process improvement consultant, email marketing guru, to name but a few, then feel free to drop me a line – my email address is in the right side bar in the contact section. I can’t guarantee anything but we may be able to pass on an opportunity or two.

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Photograph courtesy of Paolo Camera

Once upon a time there was a small department in a much bigger business who were exemplary users of CRM technology. They used their system to help manage all their key processes. The marketing team used it to precisely target relevant communications to prospects and customers to generate new leads. Those leads were logged, managed, and nurtured within the system to help maximise conversion rates.

Sales people had access to a wealth of tools and collateral to make them effective and productive as possible. Potential sales deals were managed through the system to give better visibility of future orders and to help the sales management identify which opportunities needed additional help and support. When an order came in, the complex procedures which supported its fulfilment were all managed through the system rather than the collection of spread-sheets it replaced.

The department had seen a huge improvement in customer satisfaction levels as it increased its speed and quality of delivery. The team however were ever alert to customer issues and made sure each was logged and carefully managed. Customer retention rates were as a result getting better and better. Sales people, aided by a better understanding of the products each client was buying, which came from a simple integration into the finance system, were becoming increasingly successful at cross-selling the company’s wide range of products and services.

The success of the department was not missed by others in the business. The Managing Director soon decreed that every department could benefit from the use of CRM technology, and the IT Director was asked to roll out a new system to all parts of the business.

Roll forward two years, and the new CRM system is now live. Pretty much every part of the business are now users of a brand new, multi-million pound deployment of CRM software. Our exemplary users however were no longer exemplary users. The new system didn’t really support the way they worked anymore and most of them had stopped using it. In fact, the team were very quietly developing their own new system to replicate what they’d had before. In fact across the business as a whole, usage levels were low. Most staff paid lip service to the system rather than actively used it. While no one cared to say it too loudly, the company had just invested in a very expensive white elephant.

This particular tale of course is fiction, but I suspect there will be plenty of real-world examples in the coming years. In my CRM trends for 2012 piece, I noted the increasing number of larger, more complex, CRM projects, designed to replace multiple existing systems. Though the objectives of such projects are highly laudable, it’s important that organisations consider a couple of things: Firstly, to understand what makes successful existing systems successful, and the clue here is generally it has very little to do with the technology. Secondly, as different parts of the business may well operate in different ways, the tasks of either standardising processes, or tailoring the system to meet those individual needs, are challenging ones. Without some appreciation of these dimensions, then success may prove elusive, and the cost of failure will include all that was bull-dozed to make way for the hoped-for brave new world.

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Photograph courtesy of Takomabibelot

It’s been an interesting year on the CRM vendor front. Salesforce.com alone ensured it would never be a dull 2011. It felt like hardly a week went by without them buying another company.  Acquisitions included Heroku, Dimdim, Assistly, Model Metrics, Radian6, and Rypple. They clearly have a bold vision of the future and it’s going to be interesting in 2012 to see if they can harness these acquisitions and break out from their traditional CRM roots.

Oracle seemed keen to avoid Salesforce getting too much of the limelight. Firstly by cancelling Marc Benioff’s keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, then by joining the acquisition trail with the purchase of RightNow for $1.5 billion. This should set up a tasty showdown between the two companies in 2012, with more acquisitions to come I suspect.

Microsoft launched Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 early in the year, which might otherwise have been known as Microsoft Dynamics CRM V5.0 had it not been for a change of branding which may yet come back to haunt them. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the release was the extremely aggressively priced online version which could have major implications for the software as a service (SAAS) CRM market.

It’s going to be extremely interesting in 2012 to see how serious Microsoft is about attacking the likes of Salesforce.com, or whether it will lapse into its more traditional new version every three years approach.

At the lower end of the market Sugar and Zoho seem to be making decent gains, and I still think there’s room for more companies to gain a beachhead in the entry level market before going on to challenge the larger, more established players. I wonder if 2012 will see some exciting new contenders in this space.

On the implementation partner side of things, there seemed to be a fair amount of consolidation in the UK market with a number of familiar names being acquired. I suspect it’s been a tough few years for the CRM reseller community.

That said we were ludicrously busy over the summer, hence the paucity of blog posts during this time, and speaking to a number of implementation partners they also saw a surge in business. I suspect this partially reflects the arrival of Microsoft CRM 2011, but also that organisations were starting to spend again following the first financial meltdown.

How the market will fare in 2012 with a European recession likely, and the Eurozone crisis far from resolved will be interesting. I think organisations would be well advised to keep a weather eye on their implementation partners. A dip in performance is often an early indicator they’re struggling and it may be time to explore other options before things degenerate too far.

Returning to the vendor theme again for one moment, I rather laughably predicted in the wake of Entellium going under a few years back that other SAAS based providers could follow suite. This proved to be wildly inaccurate, but I can’t help but feel that the number of SAAS CRM suppliers isn’t sustainable over the long term, particularly if we do head back into recession. Users of SAAS based services would be wise to at least ensure they have some sort of workable contingency plan if the worst did happen.

On the implementation side of things there seem to be a lot of big complex CRM projects kicking off using mid-market CRM tools like Microsoft and Salesforce.com. These have frequently sought to fold multiple systems into a single platform and are often have a multi-national dimension as well. Without wishing to be the perpetual voice of doom, I suspect some of these projects will really struggle given the lack of depth of relevant experience in the mid-market implementation community. Will 2012 see a return to high profile CRM project failures as some organisations try and deliver too bold a vision?

The final emerging trend was that all of a sudden I couldn’t have a conversation about CRM implementation without the work agile cropping up. Coincidentally perhaps, our own preferred approach has evolved from pure waterfall to perhaps what’s best described as waterfall with agile elements, and we will be exploring the agile approach in more depth, and doubtless be writing more on the topic in due course. My early conversations with people who know what they’re doing with agile indicate that while it can be very effective, if it’s not managed well, then it can create one hell of a mess, which is a bit perturbing given how badly some implementation partners have messed up using the apparently more straightforward waterfall approach.

So, in summary, 2011 has proved to be pretty riveting, and I suspect 2012 will be even more exciting! Happy new year everyone.

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Out of idle curiosity I’ve just been checking Google Analytics and worked out a top ten ‘The CRM Consultant’ blog posts based on number of views in 2011. It should be noted that not all were actually written in 2011 (one was written back in 2009), and that this list may well reflect more on how the post has been indexed by the search engines, and, if that’s not already too many ands, those written earlier in the year will fare better than those written later etc, but nonetheless here goes. In reverse order:

10. How to manage the CRM selection process

9. Nine things the CEO should know about implementing CRM software

8. Six common CRM requirements gathering faux pas

7. The six most common CRM feasibility and planning snafu’s

6. CRM 101 – the benefits of lead management

5. 18 ways to speed up a CRM project – part 2

4. 6 tips to surviving CRM design hell

3. The hidden costs of CRM software and why you need to understand them

2. How worried should Salesforce.com be about Microsoft’s cloud based CRM offering?

1. The 15 key new features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

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