Are people actually using their CRM, or is it becoming 'shelfware'?

I had a client indelicately once put it to me this way:

"Our CRM system eats sales time and craps reports."

Sometimes companies start on their CRM journey to solve a very specific, tactical issue. At a company I once worked for, we bought salesforce.com primarily as a way to harvest our prospect and customer contact data from the sales account managers' laptops. We had more than one person leave the company, taking an entire territory of contact history with them along with their Outlook files.

Still other companies put in CRM systems to systematize forecast reporting for senior management. Once the line sales staff sees that the process of inputting opportunity info outweighs the benefits (more time in the field selling), their use of the system may decline, dooming the initiative to dustytime on the shelf (or drifting in the cloud, as the case may be).

I've found that a solution to the the problem may be found in two areas: data and community. By providing more data on customers and prospects inside the CRM system, you may be able to reposition it as something that will help and aid a salesperson on their job. Many marketing automation systems are great at enhancing lead and contact data for the benefit of sales. The other advantage is you can create a community of what they call crowdsourcers within the CRM system to help collaborate and advance deals. Salesforce.com has launched their Chatter product and there are other solutions from companies like Jive Software that will plug into your CRM system to help create community.

Hope this helps!