According to Salesforce.com, 73% of CRM users do not use 50% of the functionality available to them in their CRM systems. What do you think is the reason for this?

The CRM product usually is general in nature, serves many customers
individual customer will focus on his processes of interest
Typical CRM user uses the system to get the job done, as fast as possible
End users resist using it, as it adds tight control over them
Lack of continuous training strategy, across all levels using the system

I would like to second Will Noble's point and recommendation that customers include the three key points that he raises. Most CRM systems were not designed to help sales people, but to help their management make them easily replacable.

What's worse is that most of them were not even designed to help the organization keep existing customers happy, yet reference customers are absolutely key to increasing sales. The following white paper argues for turning the current metric on its head: http://www.enterprisewizard.com/customer-centric-crm-white-paper.pdf

That’s interesting . I personally work regularly with 2 of the 4 main modules in our CRM. The first is SFA (sales force automation) and the second is Marketing. I am not part of the customer support team so I don’t need to log incidents and I am not involved with professional services so I don’t need to use our project management module or PRM. As I think of the statement more I realize that it is probably true that any one person at any one company will probably only use 50% or 2 of the 4 modules in the CRM.

But to be quite frank - Who cares about that statement, it’s about so much more than just what I personally use in the CRM. The real magic of CRM is that all of the modules “talk to each other” and regardless if I only use 2 of the 4 modules we still need the other 50% to talk to and to be able to pull from, and what if we grow and need more functionality and have a need to scale?

SFDC is an indirect competitor of Aplicor and not a direct competitor as that company’s product (CRM) is a line of business solution only – not an enterprise-wide solution which Aplicor delivers. While SFDC does offer AppExchange (3rd party product directory) for applications beyond CRM, piecemeiling multiple disparate products together with different architectures’, different user interfaces and hosted at different locations – dramatically increases costs and does not achieve the same integration depth, stability and upgradeability as a single vendor enterprise wide solution (such as Aplicor).

I suppose that if a company makes a statement such as "According to Salesforce.com, 73% of CRM users do not use 50% of the functionality available to them in their CRM systems" then they themselves might have a line of business focus and not an enterprise wide focus. This type of statement could be used as a marketing tool to offset the fact that they are not a complete single vendor solution themselves. I don’t know for sure but this is where the logic leads me.

Are they talking about 73% of their SFDC CRM users or all CRM users? I don’t see how they could get an accurate number on all CRM users.

You will find that there are way too many different points of views or definitions of CRM and how it is defined. Salesforce actually defines things it a bit differently than we do at Aplicor. They are biased to their product as they should be. I know of many happy SFDC users and It is a good fit for the right company. They are the 800 pound gorilla and I believe that their CEO is well known as a marketing guru!

Aplicor & Salesforce.com hold the largest hosting/SaaS customers in the hosting industry. While Salesforce.com has “more” larger customers than Aplicor, Aplicor has a much larger concentration of large customers than Salesforce.com (e.g. Salesforce.com’s average customer size we believe is less than 20 users while Aplicor’s average customer size is over 100).

Hope this helps! www.aplicor.com

I spent 5 years implementing CRM systems for retailers.

This issue can have its beginnings when the correct people are not involved with the purchase of the new CRM system. Often you would have someone from IT and a VP involved but no one from the department who would actually use the software would get involved until after the decision was made and the software purchased.

Many times I found the right person wasn't put in place to run the CRM program. Oftentimes, someone with no database marketing experience was given the part time task of using the CRM system. I can't tell you how many times I went to a client site and was told by the client that they wanted to be as successful as client ABC was with CRM. Yet when I would ask them who would be running the system it would be an answer like "Bob , one of our buyers."

Unlike other systems such as sales audit or merchandising where you were introducing a new system to help with the same area of business, many times clients had no previous experience with CRM and didn't know what skills someone needed to be successful in the role. We would tell them, but many times they were not willing to create a new position.

When the right person was running the CRM program I found they would use the core parts of the system like query, campaign management, customer lookup, etc. and it was the reporting capabilities that would go unused because they had specific information and formats they wanted and would instead export the data to create their own reports.

I also found that someone would come into an organization, establish a CRM plan and would then leave and the plan would fall apart. Sometimes it was due to good processes not being created and documented so the next person didn't know what had been done previously and sometimes it was due to a new person coming in and wanting to put their own stamp on things.

I believe a lot of it came down to training as well. We would give an initial 3 day training which was often enough to get people started. However, when you were dealing with training people who had no database marketing experience we would use a lot of our time just explaining basic concepts to them. We offered consulting services and advanced training, but many companies weren't willing to pay for them. That and the original person trained would leave so we would have to go back and conduct another basic training.

From a software perspective, vendors create their CRM packages to try and cover everything from the basics to what very advanced CRM programs would need/want in their system. Sometimes the companies just didn't need all the functionality, sometimes the functionality already existed in another application or their IT department had created something so they would continue to use it instead. You also get situations where customers buy new CRM software, but instead of using new functionality and the best business practices contained in the software, they try to engineer the new software to work the way the old system did.

Some of it also comes down to budget - both money and time. If you only have one person running the CRM software it is hard for them to do everything that is needed from a process point of view, let alone getting buy- in from execs to give them a bigger budget for new endeavors. Having a CRM champion in the organization is crucial for success.

Sales (or anyone for that matter) will only use a feature or function that helps them meet their needs, other than that it's in the way. Buying a CRM package with all the bells and whistles when your sales team is doing well and expect them to use it 100% generally turns out to be a waste of money for the enterprise.

The thing that leaps out at me from the comments here is that one fact has been overlooked entirely, and is conspicuous by its absence -- CRM systems, by design, are intended to serve management, not the salesperson or the customer.

Before implementing any system within a business, you should be asking yourself three questions:

1. Will this serve our customers (enhance their experience)? If so, demand proof from the software company.

2. Will this enhance our sales efforts (make it genuinely easier to SELL)?

3. Will this genuinely enhance our bottom line (in other words, will this product actually pay for itself, and then some)?

Most of them fail dismally on all three accounts.

______________________________

"Quants" (techie-types who love to spend hours in front of a screen, parsing sentences, entering numbers, and the like) love CRM systems.

Salespeople don't. The reason? CRM systems are usually in the way of selling, not enhancing the process.

Let's turn the situation on its head. Ask the question, "Who benefits from the statistics, numbers, and other things? The obvious answer is 'management'. That's why when I've run a sales team, I've allowed the salespeople to do some simple tracking - spreadsheets were fine. I collated raw data and analyzed it. My projections were usually spot-on.

I worked for an international distributor which tracked 11 states worth of sales activity at the $100M+ level using this method. No CRM. Minimal input from the sales team. Management did its own collation and analysis of data.

Now, I'll cheerfully add that this is a pain. However, that's the job of management - it's not the job of the salespeople.

Their job is to sell - and be the 'face' of the company to its customers.

Anything which gets in the way of that task is not only a waste of time, but counteproductive.

o increase versatility of the application, all requirements that are envisaged in a fully developed and organised business are incorporated in CRM suites. I feel some of the reasons for the features being under utilized are
1. All organisations are not fully matured to use complete functionalities.
2. The CRM is built on conceived best practices which may not be existing in the organisation, thus the functionalities are not utilized.
3. There's rigidity in organisation to go though an alignment of processes to CRM functionalities (and BPR); before the CRM implementation.
4. In processes involving outsourced/third party vendors, who are not wiling to be flexible in tweaking their processes, companies find it difficult to induce processes in the CRM suite. Offline data and information transfer continue.
5. Lack of logical understanding and functionalities of application by company reps for optimum utilization.
6. Rigidity of company workforce to use CRM for small processes which seem easy to be handled with offline data /control sheets. This breaks the information link for including complete organisational processes in the the CRM.

The system is highly customizable, and to the point of others, many companies will only need certain functions enabled depending on their size and complexity. The thing that no company wants is to get caught in "analysis paralysis."

The difference is made in selecting a true CRM expert consultant, that like any expert, will identify gaps and needs and suggest the most streamlined but effective applications to adopt.

I have personally been involved with two full scale CRM implementations, and another re-implementation -- all of which were successful in meeting the stated business goals. One of the key problems with CRM implementations, and subsequent user adoption, is that the expected business goals and outcomes are not defined prior to selection of software. CRM is an enterprise level system, and while it does provide data to management as many have suggested is its sole purpose, it also does provide actionable information and workflows to support field sales, field support, sales forecasting, and marketing programs. I have found that the key point of resistance towards CRM system utilization post implementation is an inadequate end-to-end process analysis from the customer and internal functional perspective. This leads users performing some function under the umbrella of customer relationship management (pre--sales, service & support, etc...) disenfranchised from the enterprise CRM strategy. The underlying cause of this is usually either a lack of a customer-centric strategy and culture, or a siloed organization with poor cross-functional "end-to-end" process definitions.

As Howard Dresner, noted enterprise performance guru says about the culture of performance, "People will trump process and technology every time." You need to engage all levels and all potential users early on in the process of establishing a customer centric strategy, defining customer centric processes that span departmental boundaries, and selecting appropriate technology solutions. Key users, such as sales, need to be involved in these processes as well -- and the days of the vagabond salesperson closing deals without anyone having prior knowledge are a thing of the past --- sorry if I burst some bubbles with that comment. Realistically, though, product life cycles have shortened, inventory turns have increased, and manufacturing times have compressed to reduce costs throughout the enterprise -- all of this activity is dependent upon a timely and reasonably accurate forecast, and also prior data on forecast accuracy so the rest of the enterprise can accomplish its objectives to meet anticipated sales demands. Some of the creative things I have used are adjustable commission scales depending upon whether or not the sales opportunity was forecasted in the system. Some instances, there has been a penalty against commission for opportunities not closed through the system, and other times there have been rewards on top of commission. Every organization and sales compensation structure is different, but they key point is that, in my experience, sales forces must be lured through incentives, or avoidance of penalty, to use the system.

People first, processes second, and technology as the enabler. I do agree with the prior post about stripping it down to bare essentials, but in order to accomplish that you have to have an agreed upon enterprise perspective of the processes you are supporting and the involvement of the people engaged in those processes.

I would guess the same is true about MCIFs as well (Marketing Customer Information Files). Don't know this empirically, but anecdotally, I've seen a lot of non-use or under-use of MCIFs on the credit union side of the financial service industry.

On the credit union side, marketers are the primary users responsible for the MCIF/CRM. Many of them come out of the English, Journalism, or Communication disciplines, while most marketing databases (MCIFs/CRMs) are analytic engines. So the left brain/right brain thing can come into play (if you buy into that concept) and some marketers just kinda check out when it comes to using the MCIF/CRM beyond anything really basic.

Again, nothing empirical to back this up. Just my observations over the years.

I think that many companies buy CRM software with the intent of expanding their use of the tool as their buisness grows. Ironically, when the economy took a downturn, growth potential went by the wayside and many companies went into survival mode.

I also think that technology companies do such a good job of selling that companies often buy more tool than what they need. The biggest and the best tool is not always what is needed...understand what your needs are and find the tool that will help you meet those needs most efficiently.

The CRM Solutions that have this problem are not user friendly enough and not tailormade for each usergroup! + the most important reason of them all is that the user is not guided by the systm throu each task they where the right functions will be shown and used when you need it in the real life at work. This way of handle and solv tasks should also been used at other areas f.ex. why learn everything at photoshop instead of just knowing and using the what you need and you may mange to do this if the right application shows up when you need it in the process that the system guids you throu. Hope I made my self understandable..If not give me a sign and I will try harder and with more examples of how we have solved this with 100% success and where f.example 100 new users are able to be up and running the very first day the start to use the solution.. Here is an example at youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/NextComEvolution

There are three necessary strategies, and they are all somewhat related. The first is training. I continue to be surprised by how many organizations roll-out major SFA and CRM initiatives without properly (or effectively) training the sales force and management. My firm's last two projects were to develop training for CRM's that had rolled out over a year ago, and either the company never trained the staff or the training was so poor that they needed to do it again. And one tip: rarely, can you simply rely on the vendor's training.

The second is communication, which others expressed in similar posts. Again, I am surprised by how many organizations make these tremendous commitments that will change the way everyone does business without telling everyone what they are doing and why they are doing it! Tip: communicate, communicate, over-communicate.

Finally, no one likes change. Everyone loves the legacy system, right. You know, the one they were complaining about last month! Well, change becomes easier when you feel like you are not the first one. Communicate (there's that word again) successes of colleagues using the new system. If so-and-so is using it, it can't be all that bad.

So its train, communicate and promote success.

Seems to me that the biggest issue is education - educating the users as to how it will help THEM increase revenues, not just for the business but for their own selves! For salespeople, for example, a CRM with sales tools can be a huge benefit in shortening the sales cycle, great for follow up with customers and the list goes on to the bottom line of increasing sales. They need to be sold on and clearly shown the benefits of the system they're using.

There are several reasons for this.

1) The mentality at the start is to begin in one small area first and grow the functionallity later. Never happens.

2) Resistance to change. We have all seen this.

3) Poor training and poor implementation planning.

4) Protected territories. CRM cuts accross many managerial responsiblities. It only takes one manager too say, my operation is so special that we can not use it. CRM requires TOP management to be involved with the decision manking process, make sure all users of the system, both operationa users and report users are signed on. Then enforce it. It is a corporate decsioin, management must dictate: use the product the company carefully selected, paid for dearly and you had input on. Top management rarely view CRM with this level of importance, yet they pay for 50% utilization. Why? Would this happen with a capital purchase of production equipment. I think not.

I second the comments by Will Noble and Mike Watson above. The problem with most CRM systems is that they were designed for sales management and hence primarily focus on sales reporting. The salesperson gets little benefit from using the system but now has data entry added to the task of clsoing deals. A system that seems to understand and adress this disconnect is Landside www.landslide.com which offers every subscriber free personal assistants to do their data entry for them. .

I agree with Will's comments and Fred's reference to Excel.

When businesses are looking at CRM systems, they generally don't appreciate the true breadth of potential CRM functionality (i.e. every touch point that a business has with it's prospects (potential customers) and it's actual customers) covering marketing, sales, service etc. You can find that CRM gets confused with contact management.

The other point to note is that businesses can start their CRM project with a look at systems, rather than reviewing / re-engineering the related business processes before deciding on the appropriate system.

I think the key issue here is that most contributors to this discussion (and most people in business) see "CRM" as a software only. This is a language issue that has raged for 10+ years. Why don;t we give up the fight and concede that CRM is actually a very useful piece of technology. Let's find new and more appropriate language for the cross functional customer related work that is so necessary in the developing world where the customer is becoming more of a "participant" in our businesses. I see customer dialogue a bit like tight rope walking in a circus, everyone knows what it is but few people have the skills or competency to do it properly. The chalenge now is to identify and properly name the activites related to the developing customer "stuff" then provide the training resources needed to help businesses develop the competencies that are required.

Yes ! But not only
We also have another reason, CRM tool design should be the final step of :
a) a company strategy clear vision and action steps
b) clear goals for CRM teams, according to this global strategy,
c) clear vision of tools needded to reach these goals (according to strategy, available tools and data, and people know how)

If these three steps are not the foundations of CRM tools and functionality (which is clearly the case in most of the oragnizations) we reach the pointv where:
a) CRM tools are useless to reach company goals,
b) egeneric functionalities of these tools, not designed as explained, are not fully used (if, by chance, corresponding to company needs and goals)

Solution:
Fully involve Head of CRM in company strategy
Fully involve CRM teams in its tools design, according to their daily needs, aligned with global strategy of the organization.

Whatever the percentages, a majority of CRM installations have an opportunity to get much more productivity from their existing system.

At Tech.Sell we strongly believe that it's not just about buying CRM software, it's what you do with it.

We find companies frequently focus on making a CRM software selection . That selection is where the budget dollars are focused.

They don't budget adequately for the soft costs that really deliver a payback and bond the CRM application to the company's needs. Specifically:
1.- consulting with an experienced CRM expert
2.- customizing the software to capture the key information unique to the client company
3.- capturing at least one key process, either for sales or project tracking
4. establishing at least 5 reports to pull usage and key activity tracking from the database
5. - and finally TRAINING on specific tasks until everyone gets it!

I'm convinced, after doing this for 15 years, that increasing the payback on a CRM investment is based upon the above 5 items. I've lost track of the number of folks who come to our site disgusted with GoldMine, and, after a short hands on session have an oh WOW epiphany!

After running multiple CRM initiatives, there are five reasons:

1. (Readiness) Customers are not ready for the change.
2. (Awareness) Include the customer early, often and all the way through the process.
3. (Risk Mitigation) Planning goes a long way and establishes credibility and directly impacts customer adoption rates. Do not miss the delivery dates exepcted by and communicated to the customer.
4. (Planning) Establish the rules relative to delivery, operational support, and change management.
5. (Time to Market) Design the first deployment of the solution in a modular fashion that allows for quick turns to market - most CRM deploymetns fail due to long cycles and inability to receive benefit/perceived value.

Users behave naturally; they tend to only use what they have been instructed to use, or if a certain piece of the software is a natural, intuitive extension of something they do today. Many CRM systems are deployed without that focus on user groups, and tend to throw too much at the user, too quickly, and without training. This is the field of dreams "build it and they will come" approach.

Over time, as customizations are made, and more functionality introduced, it's only going to make for more unused functionality and frustrated users.

The approach to minimize this is designing around each user-group's business process, and how they view the world. Integrate users early into the design phase, make them own it, and then only enable or show to the user what applies to the group. It's important to note the importance of functionality for the collective, and to avoid creating something that is simply customized for one super user, but deployed system-wide.

I am a firm believer that more features doesn't make a better product - that a smaller yet more relevant feature set and higher take rate of those features by customer make for the more viable product for the customer.

That being said, i also find as mentioned above that biggest problem in this environment is eduction on the application and its features. This is not meant to say that upfront training solves the problem - but rather follow-up from the Account Managers to ensure that as the customer becomes familiar with the system they are truly taking advantage of what it has to offer. In general this requires more due diligence from sales and account management vs skipping town as soon as the ink dries on the contract!

Another approach that I have seen (primarily outside of the CRM space) is the concept of use base education within the application. The concept behind relies on triggers setup within the application that fire when a user attempts to perform an action or a series of actions that could be better suited by another feature or action. Once triggered, proper messaging can be presented to the end user to instruct them on the behavior. This is really valuable and has been show to be really effective but requires a great deal of upfront thought and development.

A less sophisticated method of doing this are the "Tips" that pop-up as you open an application to help provide information or how to's regarding more advanced functionality within the product.

In the end, nothing beats an onsite evaluation with the customer every 6 months to see how they are using the product, how their needs may have changed and then provide follow-up education based on your own observations.

I wrote a blog entry on this called "CRM: The enemy of sales and business development"

found here: http://raisinwine.blogspot.com/2009/08/crm-enemy-of-sales-and-business.html

CRM: The enemy of sales and business development

I believe poor understanding of effective business development processes and behaviors that are the cause of ineffectual CRM initiatives. I'm not a fan of stats for stats sake. However, the following stat pretty much underlines a suspicion of mine. Gartner analyst Robert DeSisto was quoted as saying that "As many as 85% of companies that buy CRM software to automate sales efforts don't pick the right tools because they fail to define business objectives or develop processes for meeting objectives."

That's probably right on the mark, the reasons are legion, and seeing as though I have a deep and unexplainable affection for lists and bullet points, I am going to list why I believe this to be true.

1. Most mainstream "out of the box" and hosted CRM applications are not CRM's at all. They are a hodge podge of reporting and data entry widgets thrown together. A true CRM defines what a good business producing relationship looks like and then provides a structured place to guide the development of that relationship with data as a partner and not a surrogate to the relationship. If the sales people see CRM as a chore that doesn't benefit them, guess what? They won't adopt it, some will be unduly disciplined for a bad investment that someone else made, and eventually CRM will fail.

Build your methodology before you build your CRM. I say again, build your methodology before you build your CRM. It should start quality before quantity. Build your client relationship philosophy before building your methodology. Write your mission statement for the sales organization before you write your client relationship philosophy. (this statement should match your value proposition for what your business does). You can't begin a good CRM without addressing it through these steps.

I am not talking about activity metrics, I am talking about a methodology that tells you the health of existing clients and the health of new business opportunities or "new relationships". Take existing healthy clients and reverse engineer how they became such loyal and healthy client relationships and the key behaviors that developed that profile and build metrics for that. This will reward properly focused client behavior and not just doing activity for activities sake which can lead to scorched earth territories and sales force churn. This is the kind of data that will help sales, marketing and sales management know exactly how mature an opportunity or existing client relationship is and to forecast accurately. It will also help to socialize the concept of CRM due to it's ability to help the sales professionals understand their business, and hence they will adopt it.

2. Homegrown CRM initiatives fail for exactly the same reason that out of the box CRM initiatives do and also for other reasons.

The main reason this happens is because they fail to listen to what sales is telling them and instead listen to what stats are telling them. This is a mistake and I am going to write a separate blog post on this. Use the input of the sales organization to tell you what's important, use stats to tell you HOW important those things are and how to prioritize them. Relying on stats for business intelligence is what organizations do when they have lost vision and do not have leaders in place that are secure enough to empower their sales organization. Don't do that. They are your business.

3. Simplicity and cleanliness is key.

More data is not necessarily better data. The issue I have with alot of CRM tools is that I don't know which information will help me sell or analyze my business mainly because I have to sift through too much interesting but non critical data and enter too much non critical information. This in turn takes me out of my role, which is selling or running a businesst. Whittle your CRM down to only the essential business and relationship impacting information and get rid of all of the rest. Most CRM tools are probably 70% to 80% overweight with reporting tools that are an impediment to production and whats worse is that many organizations make the mistake of requiring the use of unnecessary reporting tools in the CRM as a key indicator to professional performance. Too much information, too hard to pull a meaningful report and too much data and information to be useful to managers, business analysts or most importantly use in the sales process. Guess what sales people won't use it and your investment has a higher chance of failure.

A key differentiator in CRM/Cx/SCRM/VOC/Cloud Monitoring/CRM PaaS (whatever the burning issue being addressed in the Front Office) from Back Office ERP systems is getting User Adoption and Customer Experience right (the latter is also being recently branded as “Outside In” customer design). Many aspects of CRM (I will be general here for simplicity) can be optional. Sales can go back to Rolodex’s, Marketing can go back to “magical” messaging campaigns, and, most importantly the Customer now has powerful tools that hit both breadth, mass reach, and depth. This is perhaps the most disruptive shift (but will save that one for others as this one has been covered extensively elsewhere).

I ran into in interesting debate that seemed, at least to me, to confuse issues of CRM User Adoption with lack of CRM Functionality Usage.

If you can visualize a Minto Pyramid Tree to get the optics in mind that would help – but the fact that a CRM buyer uses, for example, 3 out of 7 CRM modules may not be a business problem – at all – as increasingly the enterprise CRM buyer gets, for example say, all 7 modules for the same investment, but chooses to focus energies/resources on only 3 critical functions being enabled. As long as its a conscious decision to leave the other 4 modules dormant.

So, to be clear, we can split the problem statement “How Can I Maximize CRM Investment” into 3 issue trees:

Scenario A: CRM Buyer enables 3 out of the 7 modules and gets 100% User Adoption for these modules – and deliberately does not use the other 4 as its already achieving ROI, or there is not a business need for the rest of the functionality. No real business issue to address assuming the business case was covering those 3 modules. This is still a ROI/business case success even though the majority of CRM functionality is remaining dormant.

Scenario B: The CRM Buyer enables 3 out of the 7 modules, but only sees 50% User Adoption of those 3 modules. We now have a User Adoption problem. This then spawns a series of User Adoption path issues to uncover, like does 120K spend on training make sense for a 8-10M CRM purchase?

Scenario C: The CRM Buyer enables 3 out of the 7 modules – and – gets 100% User Adoption, but especially these days, is now under pressure to get more ROI out of the initial CRM investment. In this case, we have spawned a whole set of different issues to uncover that are unrelated and mutually exclusive to User Adoption (we are assuming this area is working relatively well as we hit 100% already for the first 3 and would seek to replicate that success model). In this case, we would then seek questions to uncover needs that could be be addressed by the enabling remaining 4 dormant CRM modules, further maximizing ROI beyond the original business case. The fact that only 3 out of 7 CRM modules being used at 100% adoption would have no relation to this business issue.

One more on this thread, there is a need for clarity the metric quoted. "50% Usage of the CRM Functionality Available" is a totally different metric than "50% User Adoption of CRM Systems". The salesforce.com metric, if the quote is read literally, refers to the former, not the latter. "CRM Functionality Available" does not equal "CRM User Adoption".

I think most people can turn this into a User Adoption question as the assumption (likely due to very real frustrations in this area) but that is not the metric or the question being asked. Success rates on User/Field Adoption of CRM Systems is a completely different discussion, metric, and belongs in a different thread IMO. Hope that helps!

The #1 reason that users don't "use" the functionality is because they are not compelled to do so.

The #2 reason is that managers (who are also not compelled to use the system) continue to keep reports in Excel and other formats that they are comfortable and familiar with.

The #3 reason is that for those who use the system, it is a slow process of adapting to the new technology & functionality. Most companies put your thorugh 1 week of "complete" training but it is months before Reps start to use the system and want to squeeze information out of it. By then, they have forgotten half of what they learned in class.

For new CRM systems,it is important to take the Initial week of class and divide it into 4 parts and re-inforce a different part each quarter over the period of a year.

Part 1:

This is a great thread. However, with so many different opinions, what should the reader conclude? The following summary is based on the first ~75 responses. The possible explanations appear to fall into roughly 30 distinct themes. It appears that some of these themes could be further consolidated. Others appear to be strongly related to each other and as such, might not be an independent factor. Most responses contain multiple suggestions to explain the stated phenomena, providing a total of ~220 data points. The top 5 reasons, explanations based on this non-scientific review are as follows:

1. The premise is invalid. No one organization could benfit from it all
2. Inadequate initial or follow-up training
3. The product is too generic out of the box
4. Interface not user friendly or not tailored by role/context
5. Inadequate sponsorship/resources/budget/time

Check back soon for Part 2.

Generally the focus in CRM implementations is on technology rather then bringing a change in the business. Often user training is limited to the application functionality rather then how the application is going to fit with users day to day jobs. Result is that you get based on the input i.e. in most cases a nice new application deployed without the users knowing what bells and whistles it has to offer.
It will be interesting to know if the usage patterns increase overtime once the users have explored new functionality themselves or learned the trics by hit and trial.

Keep in mind that it is highly likely that it's a different 50% of features between various users (some people use some features while other users use other features). In other words, marketing uses features A, B, C and Y while sales uses C, X, Y and Z.

With that said, the most common reasons people don't use more than half the features (my experience actually has it at less than 30%) are that there are more features than they need and, most importantly, sales reps will only use what will help them sell. They don't want to "waste time" learning and using all the features just to help management keep track of their activities, forecasts, etc. even though it's useful, if not critical, to do so. They will use as little as possible so they can spend more time selling. However, truth is that a well implemented CRM solution can actually be a valuable tool to help sales do a better and faster job of selling (see CyberSelling ISBN: 0972826327). But like any piece of software, if there are too many features, they just won't be used. This doesn't mean that vendors are going the wrong route. They add features often times to address their various markets and user bases. Hence, there are features included in most products that weren't intended for other or all users, so they don't get used. A more relevant study, if even possible, would be to find out how many "sales" specific features, for instance, are used by sales people, as opposed to marketing specific features, or management specific features, etc.

There are so many reasons why those numbers may be correct - for Salesforce.com or for any other CRM system in the market. The first, most positive explanation could be: Maybe the 50% functionality covers 100% of the needs of 73% of the users? With all the implementations I have worked on, the majority of users really have very specific CRM touchpoints to cover their job role. Then a few roles require a wider range of features, and a few specialists only use a few specialist features. So the numbers could actually cover for perfectly sound, successfull implementation.
Of course, another equally valid explanation is, that requirement specification is often driven by the features offered by the different vendors, rather than by actual insight in business needs. Unprofessional as it sounds, I think that this really happens a lot. There is a tendency that in order to justify the investment in CRM, companies go for the solutions that offer more "advanced" features, sometimes forgetting to analyze how those features will solve the actual business needs.

We would need to ensure that all of the CRM functionality is implemented and fully executable within the module, and that the end users are trained properly on the now active functionality. Navigation documents provided to end users are always helpful for rememberance.

our Siebel CRM MONITORING Toolset (Germain V1.8.4) has showed our Siebel CRM customers that quite often, functionalities are either difficult, for end users, to adopt (i.e. too complex, non-intuitive,..) or not available when/where they should be on the CRM user interface.....there just happens to be a clear gap between theory and actualy business needs. there are a few conclusions drawn out of using Germain V1.8.4 Monitoring Tool on a Siebel crm production system...

I have been using Contact Management for 3 years and what I have found is if the upper managment is not on board and doesn't force the use it will not get used.
Then again it is used at our orginization as a dumping station. We put client in and don't utilize the marketing aspect of the CRM system at all. I have tried to push this issue and prospect utilization as well. "But we don't sell cars this way." is all I get.
Anyone have any ideas how to get passed this menality?

I think it all boils down to an age old answer. CRM 90% BS 10% FACTS.
Just think on it for a good moment.Concentrate on the 10 percent and you have data thats worth using and not just building your data entry skills

Here's a link to an overwhelming response to your question. :-)

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=43621&discus...

I believe that if you are to focus on using all the functionality, your business must be quite confusing.

I favour Claus Poulsen comments greatly.

The main reason for this is that the user is busy with getting the basics right and that he does not find easily his way to answers and solutions for his needs and questions on other application capabilities.
In many case the supplier is happy with a good implementation and having collected project budget, license and support fees. After that the bigger earnings are at new customer implemantation rather then bringing existing customers on a higher level of return on application investments.

That's because sales and marketing teams who use CRM need a software for only one reason: help them close sales and not spend so much time in entering data which has no value. Customers are outside the organization and information about them comes over a period of time. Most CRM tools dont understand this fact!!

Systems designed for broad use inevitably contain features that are not relevant to every company. Also many firms and individuals have adopted SFDC simply to track leads and make sales forecasts.

To encourage broader and deeper use of the system a firm needs a committed CRM strategy underpinned by explicit requirements, what the CRM 'tool' is designed to deliver. Users then need to be trained accordingly and operational disciplines put in place that can take advantage of some of the otherwise seemingly arcane features.

Move from casual ad hoc use to professional and purposeful usage.

Don't use it because they don't NEED to. If targets can be reached and career progression advanced without using tools like CRM completely then - guess what - it won't be used.
Only when top down intiatives drive usage will you stop salespeople keeping crtical company data in their briefcases.

In my experience, it's all about stripping out the unnecessary in your CRM system down to the absolute essentials. Get the business to decide what the essentials are. CRM systems generally come loaded with features which will fit their wide range of customers, and any CRM retailer wouldn't expect a single customer to use 100% of the features anyway

Decide what your business NEEDS, strip out the unnecessary features so they don't even appear onscreen, and then build business processes around it. Prove the value in buying into the CRM concept, and then you'll be laughing.

It's not rocket science.

Spencer,
we have spent huge amount of time and money with Sales Force and can tell you that Alison could not be more correct.

The biggest reason is that a lot of times it creates duplicate work. People use applications like Outlook and Word yet the CRM systems that the company use is not integrated with those legacy systems. Those that use integrated systems are much more successful in having their sales force populate the CRM with up to date and accurate information. Those that do not are often left with incomplete and inaccurate information.

I use a fully integrated system that is not only optimized but available in real-time on a number of platforms including on-line, the desktop and mobile devices. Sales enters the information one time and everyone's databases are updated instantaniously.

Most CRM's are seen as pure data entry by the people who enter most of the information - sales people. If your CRM is not giving something back to the sales people that will help them to close sales then you will always struggle with compliance. Put yourself in your sales rep's shoes and ask - how does entering all of this data into my CRM help me close this deal?

Excellent thread. I am not going to repeat the comments made, but wholeheartedly support the direction taken by Will Noble and others.

However, I have just spent nearly 2 1/2 hours watching the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 launch (not sure if it is still continuing - after hearing the same, handful of very thin marketing messages for the third time, I gave up on getting any value from the event). It struck me that Microsoft continues to throw money at rolling out even more features in a hope of attracting market share. As has been pointed out above, getting sales people to use a CRM system at all can be a significant challenge. What makes Microsoft and other vendors believe that by, for example, allowing sales people to "conditionally format" their opportunities, that user adoption will suddenly spike?

What does a compelling CRM system look like?