Year: 2018

We’ve recently launched our CRM mentoring and coaching service. It’s designed to help CRM sponsors and project managers navigate the potential pitfalls of a CRM project, without the need to commit to a heavy consulting engagement. The service consists of monthly calls to track the project’s progress and advise on Continue Reading

I was asked to review a CRM system a few years ago. The client suspected that there was a user adoption issue. Which indeed proved to be the case. The system was, in principle at least, used to support sales forecasting, but usage was pretty mixed. Some areas of the Continue Reading

There’s one key question that you need to address when implementing a CRM system. It’s a question that needs addressing early, and, unless you want to experience a huge amount of unnecessary pain and expense, it’s a question you need to answer correctly. Before I get to the question, I Continue Reading

The subject of this post was prompted by a discussion about CRM implementation failure that I saw in the CRM Experts forum on LinkedIn this week, which prompted me to summarise my thoughts on the main reasons CRM projects fail. Just to give this a bit of definition, when I Continue Reading

I’ve worked with a lot of clients who have, or have had, home-grown CRM systems. In other words, they’ve decided to develop something themselves rather than buy one of the many commercial CRM offerings. The rationale has often been that they had a very specific set of needs and wanted Continue Reading

I wrote a blog post a week or so back about the merits or otherwise of recruiting in-house developers as part of a CRM project. I put the post on LinkedIn’s CRM Experts Group for comment, and one of the things that got mentioned was the alternative of using contractors Continue Reading

I’ve had a few conversations in recent weeks with organisations who are considering recruiting an in-house developer for their CRM system, rather than use, or solely use, the services of a third-party implementer.  Please note I’m referring to the in-house developer implementing a commercial CRM application such as Salesforce.com or Continue Reading

At some point, either during or after implementation of your CRM system, someone in your company is going to ask you for some reports. Inevitably, the one report they ask for will be the one for which you either don’t have the data or the one that requires you to Continue Reading

A lot of businesses invest in CRM technology, but surprisingly few use it that well. The majority of systems that get implemented sort of get used, but don’t necessarily make a fundamental difference to the bottom line. By contrast a relatively small minority use CRM technology very successfully, and often Continue Reading

When you’re looking at CRM pricing, which is generally stated on a person per month basis, it’s easy to underestimate the long-term cost of a system. £70 per user per month might not sound that much, but over the life of the system it’s going to add up – £420,000 Continue Reading