How best to translate the initial business benefits of CRM and sales force automation (SFA) investments into broader adoption?

Well, who are your users? Is the CRM broadly adopted by all entities in the organization? Assuming that the answer is yes; the other question will be, what is the goal of the organization adopting a SFA/CRM. The goal of the adoption should be closely aligned with the objectives of your organization. Once you have a clearly define of your business goals for your SFA/CRM, it is important to involve people at all levels of the organization, executive sponsorship, and users. This will foster a sense of responsibility, ownership but most importantly accountability. The establishment of metrics and KPI’s will help improve the organization; you can’t improve what you can’t measure.

I agree with the statements in above posts that what gets measured gets respected and that's an important element. I would also look a step above and define what those critical elements of success are from the customer perspective. Is a CRM for measuring how well we think we're supporting our customers or should we be using our customers to tell us how they measure us and then build that into our process and systems.

The latter is a great deal more work, but much more rewarding...and meaningful to the bottom line.

When planning the CRM project, break apart the overall CRM investment in the business case into smaller components / capabilities. In the implementation plan, seek to move up the release schedule on those capabilities with the greatest ROI upfront or "quick wins" (although there may be cross-dependencies prevent this).

This will keep the momentum and allow for business benefits realization earlier in time, improving the ROI. Would advise against a "big bang", propose business feedback at the earliest possible point, and deliberately tie into an iterative approach (either via agile methods or have multi-release phase waterfall).

Note the business case need not have all "tangible" benefits, many "intangible" (e.g. Usability, Social CRM, etc.) benefits may be of critical importance. Adjust accordingly.

Lastly, look at the benefits assumptions in the business case as a "living document" that is updated through out the cycle. Many plan assumptions change during feedback and requirements definition, that may impact the business benefits. Having this model in place can demonstrate how the overall CRM release is impacted but feedback discovered later in the cycle.

What's most important is not the business case/benefits identification itself as an end state, but the rigor, process, and prioritization it forces.

Sharing the accomplishments of both the system and the users is critical at the beginning of an implementation/rollout. This can be through a company Intranet, emails, postings in the kitchen/public areas of the office, or even a contest! If you hide the fact that the system is being used and people are "getting it", then no one will want to use it more or grab hold of the concept -- but if you make it publicly known that Employee X is excelling at using the system and going home at 5:00 because of it, then others will stand up and take notice.

I like Suzette's "naughty and nice" list! That's a great way to stay focused on users that need training or encouragement.

However, I think it always starts with leadership. Management has to identify compelling business reasons for initial implementation of the CRM and also for further adoption within new groups or of additional functionality.

If an executive is able to clearly communicate the bottom line reasons for using the CRM to the users involved, then those that consciously choose not to play by the rules are not different than employees that can't seem to make it to work on time.

To Kevin's point, measuring "how good we think we are supporting our customers" is far less meaningful than how good our customers actually think we are supporting them. This is a critical success factor that no company or business can afford to overlook. Unfortunately most of these customer impressions are not captured, reviewed and measured.

Most of these impressions come in the form of customer support incidents and issues that should be and can be tracked in the Customer Support Center. Our industry has just started to focus it's attention on the CSC however, and as usual, the talk is about the "technology" rather than using the technology to get meaningful results.

In a previous discussion topic posted by Michael on the Contact Center, there were no replies - incredible! This leads me to two possible conclusions. Either we are not knowledgable enough about this key area in our business to speak intelligently to it, or we are so focused on the latest technology, media hype about the cloud, or what sf.com is doing that we are missing the boat on the real opportunity. That is to use the customer intormation that we get every day in the CSC to help our business deliver service experiences beyond the expected, products and services that parallel precisely our customer wants and needs, and to prevent incidents from turning into expensive and customer detrimental problems.