Over the past decade many studies have highlighted CRM implementation failures. Depending on whom you've asked, and when you've asked them, CRM implementation failure rates have ranged between 18-70%.

In most studies, failure simply means falling short of expectations. 

Michael Krigsman, CEO of Asuret, and expert on IT system failures, highlights three big reasons CRM implementations go wrong on his popular ZDNet blog.

Failure #1: Installing technology without a business strategy.

Building a comprehensive strategy is difficult and challenging. Taking into consideration the full context of any CRM implementation, the technology is often the easiest part. Formulating a strategy that takes into consideration the customer's needs and the company's capabilities, including people and processes, is a critical component of CRM success.

Failure #2: Paying insufficient attention to user needs and benefits.

What's in it for me? This is a key question you should be asking all stakeholder groups. Too many implementations have focused solely on the great information you're going to get out of the system without considering that users actually have to use the system for any valuable information to be captured.

Failure #3: Using ambiguous (or non-existent) measures of project completion and success.

Like any change initiative or project, establishing clear success metrics at the outset is critical to evaluating how you did after you cross the finish line. Are you simply trying to gain visibility into key interactions with your customers? Are you trying to increase revenue? Increase profit margins? Reduce administration time?

You must know what you are trying to measure and achieve before something can fail or succeed.

Congrats! Your sales team is successfully leveraging your CRM system to manage their leads, develop their pipeline and increase sales. But what happens after the sale?

What happens when the order is placed?
When the order is shipped?
When the services are delivered?
When the invoice is sent?
When the money is collected (or sometimes when it isn't)?

What happens when the customer has an issue?
When they want a different product or more services?

All these customer actions/interactions happen, yet often they aren't captured in any system. Or perhaps, they're captured in multiple systems, databases, or spreadsheets that aren't tied together, or "integrated".

How much time do your employees spend trying to understand where things are in the process and communicate those things with your customers? How much productivity is lost due to relevant information being distributed across a multitude of systems and/or trapped in one or two employee's heads?

Leveraging CRM to improve sales productivity and profitability is great. The issue is when it stops there, becoming just another data silo.

Unifying the entire lead to cash process by integrating marketing, sales, service, support, production, delivery and accounts receivable details, enables a more holistic view of each customer relationship. This, in turn, enables your employees to proactively, and responsibly, provide better service to your customers. What would a 5, 10 or 15% improvement in productivity mean for your bottom line?

Instead of spending time figuring out what's going on, employees across the organization can instantly leverage information from every touch point throughout your customer's relationship with you. Your Sales team should know whether a product has shipped, what issues their customers are having and whether bills have been paid, or not. Production knows when the order was placed. Marketing can leverage deeper insights about customer activity to further define more targeted customer segments. 

You've taken the first step of your CRM journey. By integrating front and back office activities, more profits and growth await!

Back in April I wrote a handful of blogs about CRM Selection and things to consider when going through the process. On top of all those things you need to sit down and think about/analyze, you need to look at several different CRM solutions to determine which one meets all of your needs. Likely there will be some that you can immediately toss out and a handful that will make it to your final round. 

Sometimes the most challenging part is where to start. How do you know which solutions will potentially fit your business best? A team of consultants and business analysts at Technology Advisors created a tool called the "CRM Comparison Tool" to assist with this stage of the search. The team did an in-depth analysis of several CRM solutions, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. You can answer as few as 6 questions, or as many as 50+, to get a very detailed analysis of your business' needs and how they fit with specific CRM solutions.

For the first set of questions, you are able to see, in real-time, how each CRM solution handles your needs. If you click-through to the detailed question set, one of our CRM experts will analyze your responses and a 2-page document will be created, and emailed, to you within 2 business days. 

If you need help with the tool, just let me know!

In a blog last week, I talked about some basics of email marketing which should be used in conjunction with the idea of zeroing in that I want to talk about today. When creating your messaging there are 3 key areas you should zero in on:

• Audience
• Purpose
• Message

I'm very curious as to people's opinions on using negative messaging in marketing. I generally try to avoid it at all costs but know of at least one person that really believes in it. Have you used negative messaging? Have you seen results?

I think one of my biggest issues with negative messaging isn't the message itself; it is what someone potentially takes away from it. For example, when I'm reading an email or a webpage, certain words and phrases are bound to pop out at me and then can be associated with whatever I am reading about, regardless of the actual messaging. 

For example if you're trying to sell me a software solution and mention in your messaging that many implementations fail, there's a solid 50/50 chance the word "fail" will pop out at me and my mind will automatically associate it with your software solution. Obviously this was not your message, or the goal of your message by any means, but by placing certain negative words within the copy, the reader has the ability to visualize nearly anything.

Another kind of negative marketing I see is 'consequences of inaction' marketing. For example, "If you don't buy product x, you will not achieve the same success as a person using product x." Is this effective? Perhaps it simply depends on what you are selling? What do you think?

Email marketing is common place. We are inundated with marketing type emails on a daily basis, both in our work email accounts, as well as our personal email accounts. If you're a marketer, like myself, you're also sending these marketing emails out to your prospect/customer base. Because we receive them so much, we know are very aware of what it is like to be on that end of things. This poses the never ending question, how do we get people to open our emails and take the action we want them to take? 

We have to go back to the basics, marketing 101, and keep things simple. 
Let's talk about 3 things:

• The Subject
• Call-to-Action
• Print-ability

Over the past few months, I've been talking about the new features and benefits coming to us in SugarCRM 6.5 and the wait is finally over! The new version, jam packed with changes to the user interface, calendaring and advanced configuration tools is now available.

For a recap of the new release, check out my previous blogs:

SugarCRM 6.5 Enterprise Benefits discussing extended SugarLogic business process capabilities, additional support for IBM software and hardware and many performance enhancements.

SugarCRM 6.5 End User Benefits talking about the enhanced user experience: a cleaner, more intuitive interface and iCal and Outlook integration. Oh yes, and SugarCRM now being the fastest CRM on the market today!

SugarCRM 6.5 What's in it for you? A down and dirty bulleted list of what you have to look forward to.

Are you moving to SugarCRM 6.5?!?! Let me know what you think!

If you are like most small and mid-sized businesses, your marketing efforts and lead generation strategies are diverse and distributed. Webinars, trade shows, direct mail, events, white papers, email blasts, telemarketing ... and a dab of social media mixed in. 

Measuring the results of "what's working" and "what's not" is the key to optimizing your marketing spend and accelerating your return on investment (ROI). But how do we get a better understanding of what's working and what's not?

We track lots of things, including lead sources! 

With email marketing specifically, many people track Opens and Clicks, which are good measurements to track, but what really matters are Leads and then Closed-Won deals.

You can have hundreds of Opens and Clicks but if you're not converting those into customers, they're not as valuable to you. 

Tracking the lead source of all leads, but especially yours Closed-Won deals will help you to see which campaigns are working best for your organization. You can also assess which campaigns are not leading to any won deals and change or drop those campaigns. More to come!

Every year people decide whether or not they'll go to their CRM vendor's customer/partner conference. Sometimes we can't afford to take the time off work so it is not realistic but if we can afford the time, here are some great reasons to attend this year's Sage Summit, August 12-14 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville, TN.

• You've made the investment, get more from your Sage solution
• Solve real business problems
• Get answers to your questions
• Achieve hard-dollar savings
• See what's next in business technology
• Build your network through face-to-face interaction
• Educate your entire cross-functional team (group discounts)

Register now!

A little while ago, a discussion and demo were held showing how easy it can be to do a data migration from Salesforce to SugarCRM, using Starfish ETL™.  You can watch the full recording on the Starfish ETL™ website, CRM Migration: Salesforce to SugarCRM, but I wanted to take a couple minutes to talk about the benefits of the Starfish ETL™ data migration and integration tool.

Starfish ETL™ was created by Technology Advisors, Inc. (TAI) to improve customer efficiency. TAI saw many clients, and potential clients, needing to do complex data migrations, but not wanting to break their banks to do so. Starfish ETL™ was born. Starfish ETL™ quickly and efficiently facilitates data migrations and integrations. 

If you're switching CRM systems and need to move your data from your old system to your new system, Starfish ETL™ can do that for you. Many pre-built maps already exist, such as a map moving your Salesforce data, into SugarCRM. If you visit the Starfish ETL™ website and don't see the specific map you're looking for, one can always be built for you. 

Starfish ETL™ can also import and export data, both at scheduled times, and/or in real-time. Many clients use Starfish ETL™ to integrate their CRM and ERP systems. Starfish ETL™ can also be used for data cleansing, data integrity and duplicate checking.

At the end of the day Starfish ETL™ can save you effort, money, time and headaches when trying to migrate data or get your systems talking to one another.