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!

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!

The attention of our prospects and customers has become the scarcest resource of all. 

Regardless of the content or technology being used, you have only a few seconds to capture the attention of your buyers, or they quickly move on. 

In order to cut through the barriers of "attention scarcity," the content of our interactions must resonate in order to earn and keep our audience's elusive attention. In order to resonate, those interactions must be highly relevant - and preferably delivered at the right time.

But how do you do this in a way that scales? Your customers and prospects have varying backgrounds, roles, titles, logical and emotional drivers, priorities and motivations. Each of them also has a different understanding, perspective and history with your company. They purchase different products and services, in varying quantities.

This is where database segmentation plays a critical role. The ability for you to interact with your audience in a way that's timely and relevant is directly correlated with your ability to define specific audience segments. The narrower the segment, the more targeted, and thus, relevant, your interactions with them can be.

Segmenting individuals and organizations based on demographics, purchase history, sales cycle stage, CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), web interactions, lead source, or any number of other variables significantly increases the potential of providing the perfect message that resonates with your audience, leading to a deeper level of engagement, and ultimately larger and more sustained levels of value exchange. 

• Want to know how many customers in Southern California have spent more than $10,000 with you in the last year?
• Want to invite your most loyal customers to a hosted networking event?
• What about sending a survey to those who have had more than 5 customer support issues with you in the last year?
• Perhaps you'd like to introduce a new complimentary product or service to previous buyers of a certain product? 

There are many people and websites trying to do CRM reviews to compare different CRM applications. The problem with relying on CRM reviews from other sources is that reviews are about CRM systems in general. The fact is, 80% of CRM's have the same feature set. What I mean is that all of the major players, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SugarCRM, Sage SalesLogix, Sage CRM and even ACT!, do most of the same things. The real question is, how do they accomplish the same thing? For instance, if you are going to review the top CRM's in regards to activity tracking, a CRM review of activity tracking will only tell you if the feature is included in the product.  

However, a CRM Review will not typically tell you that creating a call for a contact will take you x steps in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, x steps in SugarCRM and x steps in Sage SalesLogix. Why do you care how many steps that it takes to schedule a call in a CRM system? If you are not the person that has to schedule calls all day long, then you probably don't care. If you are the person that schedules calls all day long, there is a huge difference in the number of clicks. However, it's not just about the number of clicks, it's also about the time that it takes to wait for screen pops, particularly if you are on a web-based version.  So, how do you learn from CRM reviews? CRM reviews are just a glance at the different CRM packages. Comparing CRM solutions must come down to how you will, and  how you should, use a CRM system to meet your needs. There is a big difference between someone needing to schedule 10 calls a day and someone scheduling 50 calls a day. The best thing you can do to compare CRM packages is to first determine who your users are, and what types of features they need. The process of doing this is called a requirements gathering. If you have not determined what your requirements are, then the chance of your CRM implementation failing is huge! Are you willing to bet your job on a huge chance that you will fail? If not, I highly suggest that you (or someone else) determine exactly what your company needs.
 
Once you know exactly what your company and users need, take those requirements to each CRM application and do your own review. Would you ever buy a car without doing all your homework and then insisting on driving it yourself? Of course you wouldn't buy a car without driving it. A car is a huge investment, as is buying a CRM solution. Do your own CRM comparison and the chances of your CRM implementation succeeding will double.

Beyond the entire process of choosing an actual CRM solution, you need to determine how you are going to deploy your selection. The good thing is you have options. The bad thing is you have options.  You can deploy your CRM solution On-Premise, On-Demand (Hosted) or in the Cloud. Each have their advantages and disadvantages, it all depends on what is most important to your business. 

Do you need your CRM solution deployed immediately or do you have some time to work with? Do you have an IT staff that can support your CRM solution internally? Would you prefer to pay more upfront or more over the long-term? Do you need to integrate with other systems? Will you require many customizations? 

Let's drill down into some Pros and Cons of each.

On-Premise CRM Deployments

Pros:

• Greater control of software and hardware
• Better data security
• Easier to integrate with other systems
• Easier to customize
• Lower lifelong TCO (total cost of ownership)

Does entering data in CRM take time? Yes, it does. So here's how you deal with it.

• Make the data entry easy
• Make the sales process easy and automate whatever you can
• Do not keep any data outside of CRM (except in an accounting system that should be integrated)
• Make sure that the salesperson understands how data entry today can help them make sales in the future

The reality is that salespeople are typically talking to somewhere between 30-100 people, doing between 50-200 calls and sending 100-300 emails, per week. It is impossible for anyone to keep all of the details straight.

So, how can accurately tracking the activity/history in CRM help a salesperson sell more? 

• Save Time and Impress Prospects
  
  The first full prospect phone call averages 30 minutes. By capturing all the details for a new prospect, the salesperson can achieve 2 things.
  
  
  •  The next conversation that happens some weeks, or months, later, will be short thereby saving the salesperson another 30 minutes. If the salesperson does 10 prospect follow-up calls a week, that translates to saving 300 minutes or 5 hours a week. This follow-up call then becomes more productive.
    
    
  • The 'devil is in the details' - by quickly recounting the details, the salesperson is projecting several things:  the client is important enough to know all of the details, the salesperson wants to respect each other's time, the salesperson is very organized.
    
    
• Improve Customer Retention
  
  Customers are no different; they want someone that cares, someone that is thorough and efficient. The main reasons customers leave are a lack of caring, follow-up and attention to details.
  
  
• Save Time By Not Having To Do Reports
  
  By tracking activity in CRM, a salesperson should never have to do a call report or any other report for that matter. Call reports typically take a salesperson between 30 - 90 minutes a week. If you are requiring sales reports outside of your CRM, then your system is broken!
  
  
• Take Vacations Without Fallout or Whiplash of Returning
  
  Vacations are good for morale and quality of life. However, business does not stop just because someone goes on vacation. If a salesperson is tracking their activity history, other people in the company can help when an issue arises by reading the history and acting appropriately.

We all should! Seriously, regardless of your role in your organization, dashboards are an excellent, quick view of the information contained in your CRM system. We take the time to put the information into our CRM system, why not allow it to present the information we want to see most, back to us, in a clear, concise manner.

I’m a Marketing user and I have a plethora of dashboards I view on a daily basis, but my top choices are:

• Leads by Lead Source

• Opportunities by Lead Source 

• Actual Revenue by Lead Source

For me, it’s important to see that:

A) My department is generating leads

B) The leads we’re generating are warm enough to become opportunities

C) And that we’re closing leads and can calculate a positive ROI

For Sales, dashboards are very important from both a sales management reporting perspective, as well as a sales user perspective. Here are some examples of useful dashboards for sales:

• Pipeline Charts

o Opportunities closing this month, next month, this year 

• Opportunities by Product

o Opportunities closing this month, won opportunities, lost opportunities 

• Sales Leaderboards (to see how your entire team is doing)

• Top Customers

• Actual Revenue (by month, by quarter, by fiscal period)

• My Open Leads or My Open Opportunities

For those in the customer service area, dashboards provide a compact view of your tickets/cases and allow you to prioritize your efforts. Some customer service centric dashboards include:

• Tickets by Priority

• Tickets by Customer

• Tickets open more than 30 days

All users have the ability to go in and create any dashboards they want and then share them with whomever they’d like. For example, a CEO could share their high level dashboards with the rest of their management team, or the VP of Sales could share some with their sales team, or individual users. The bottom line is, all users can have many dashboards and create, delete, share and hide whichever dashboards they see fit, making dashboards very effective for each individual user.

If you have specific dashboards you think others would benefit from, please share them with everyone!

Why On-premise CRM Deployments Need Cloud Computing

Many on-premise CRM vendors like Sage Saleslogix are now offering a cloud option.   Companies who want an in-house solution usually ignore these options. Here are a couple of reasons why you should consider a cloud offering.

Testing -- to effectively manage your CRM system you need a test system, if not a test and development system.  These systems require software licenses for operating systems, data bases, and system utilities.  They require back, management time and IT support time.  Cloud computing provides a lower cost alternative to managing your CRM test / development system because you rent the cloud environment only when you need it.    Places like Amazon charge a few dollars per hour for these systems.  Companies can have a managed test environment which they only need to turn on when they are testing and have accessibility from anywhere.  The cloud can do all this while keeping costs down. 

Disaster Recovery --  Cloud computing provides an option for company who are looking for a disaster planning.  A company can set up and maintain a complete environment for about $250 and maintain it for a monthly fee of about $50.  Back up services can push a copy of your CRM data to Amazon for a few dollars a month or when disaster strikes you can migrate up a back-up copy of you data base.  Assuming you make back-ups.  Cloud-computing is a virtual environment,  so you can ramp you the processor, memory and disk space on the fly to meet the needs of your production environment.

So on-premise user before dismissing cloud computing you might want to reconsider how you are doing Disaster Recovery and development / testing and see if these provide money saving alternatives.

After this Wednesday, March 31, 2010, SugarCRM will no longer provide customer support, maintenance patches or bug fixes for Sugar 5.1.0.

Check the End of Version plan to learn about the upcoming End of Version dates.