Is "outside help" necessary for success with CRM and sales force automation (SFA)?

NOTE: I'm not a consultant, rather a customer and user of CRM systems. I've implemented several systems by several vendors and my thoughts stem from my experience both with and without outside help.

I think there's great value in bringing in a partner/consultant in helping to implement a CRM solution. Sharing your plans & process with an outsider forces your company to in fact review current practices. Any implementation is a perfect time to evaluate current needs & processes and ensure everything you're implementing is, in fact, a need moving forward.

The danger in going it alone, internally with any implementation is that you won't question everything. It's harder to justify the continuation of all current methods when there is someone from the outside asking, "why?"

Paying for that "why factor" is invaluable in the long run.

My experience has been on the consulting side of the equation, and the key is to use consulting services strategically - not as a body shop, or extension of your permanent IT workforce (hire these folks - its cheaper in the long run to the organization and body shops often require more management overhead - also making it more costly - and - more error prone).

Go fixed fee, once you have clearly stated goals, requirements, and a plan. If you need help on strategy and planning, then get this first (can be either T&M or Fixed - depending on the level of complexity).... before the technology decision is made.

Usually, first release of a big business/technology CRM process or even a bigger, a multi-year business transformation program, will require a resource spike in (expensive) consulting resources, but its a tap you can turn on, turn up, tune (e.g. some resources are not working out), and then taper down and then you move into IT Ops Support (your internal IT staff).

So consider it a "On Demand" highly skilled resource that you can leverage.. but use consulting strategically as part of your long term business and IT strategic plans.

After many years helping clients implement a wide variety of SFA / CRM solutions, if there's a low hanging limb in the forest, I've found it the hard way. Despite ample free advice on "keys to success", many CRM initiatives still return disappointing results. Competent, expert assistance can make the difference between success and failure.

The first mistake is confusion about what "implementing CRM" means. If you think it's about installing new software and forcing or persuading people to use it, you've already gone wrong. Back up quick.

Better business results require more effective business behavior. CRM software, methods and skills can empower and facilitate more profitable behavior. That, not new software, is the goal.

Even with horse in front of the cart, managing a CRM project is a complex undertaking and very challenging for someone with little CRM experience and divided responsibilities. Get help, you'll be glad.

Best - Mike

The majority of companies do not have the expertise to successfully implement SFA and CRM. Therefore assistant is required to make sure the SFA and CRM programs are successfully.

90 percent of the companies that implement SFA and CRM are not satisfied with the ROI on the products. The problem is not the software but the lack of sales process and understanding of how to engage the sales force to use these tools. The business intelligence tool are missing.

The tools on their own do not proceed results. You need to set up the proper
measurements. Then you need to manage the process, the data and the people. Finally, you perform and turn leads into sales and have sales people exceeding year over year quotas.

A similar question might be, is outside help necessary to remove your appendix? The answer to both the CRM and the surgery query is clearly, "No, outside help is not strictly necessary, but most people would say it is highly desirable."

As with a complex medical procedure, because we can do something, doesn't mean we should. The end result of a CRM or SFA implementation depends to a great extent on the framework set out long before the first user ever types in the interface. Decisions abound as to field names, validation rules, hierarchies, permissions, and more need to be made. Choose wrongly at first and you may have to suffer huge pain later.

Regardless the size of the business, I strongly advocate at the very least, having a skilled consultant come in and sanity check what you have in mind. The money and time spent at the start will pay you back a thousand times over when it comes to adoption and accuracy.

Paul

Please visit my CRM and Technology blog at http://www.paulmyoung.net

Excellent responses from the previous posts, and my comments would echo much of what they've said. To add to that, I think it all depends on the situation. For a large company with dedicated resources to IT and CRM, then probably not. But for most smaller and mid-size companies, they typically do not have a full team of people available to focus solely on the implementation of a CRM system. If you want the job to get done properly, efficiently, strategically, and in a short enough time frame to be able to begin reaping the rewards of the hard work, then it's wise to hire outside help.

As a CRM consultant myself, I am hired by small companies (1-100 employees or teams within a company this size). These companies typically do not have an IT department, let alone a team of implementers. Unless you want to take the ball off of your day job and focus on the implementation until it is done, I suggest hiring someone that has the skills and experience to lead your company to the finish line properly.

Kendra,

Don't sell your services short. Even large companies need specialized consultants like yourself. It is the rare enterprise that has a large enough and diverse enough IT department to have expertise in every aspect of a complex, CRM roll out or upgrade.

Even if it is only a few days time to double check their internal team's work, I would never recommend skipping having an expert look over the project.

Paul
Please visit my CRM and Technology blog at http://www.paulmyoung.net

OK...I may be biased here. I implement ACT! and WiredContact (Web-based CRM). But, here I go with an unbiased opinion.

The CRM consultant works best when he/she focuses on the sales process you wish to improve. The CRM tools such as ACT!/salesforce/MS-CRM come 'without a sales process' built in. Their strength is they can be adopted to help you make a great interaction with customers and prospects.
The CRM consultant, when focused on optimized your sales and marketing process, delivers the best ROI.

I offer this analogy. I can go to home depot and by the best tools to hang up dry wall. However, if I am inept with them (which I am!), my results will be shoddy. If I get the worst tools, my dry wall work remains shoddy.

So, the CRM consultant can bring their tools or find one specializing in brand you have chosen.

Our target market is companies with 3-20 sales people. They need to share information, but will not have the IT infrastructure, nor the time, to implement the system well.

For the SOHO market (long ranger), a CRM consultant can build a slick database and processes for $500-$1200.

My humble thoughts, and I look forward to hearing others' comments.

Mark R. Mondo
http://www.mondocrm.com

Two answers -

If you're a small company 1-5 users the go it alone initially. However, they need to be clear on the objectives, take a good look at the culture and force it's adoption with a carrott and stick approach to really make it work.

Companies of this size have the visibility and drive most of the time to succeed. But not always! We're currently in the process of helping a company of this size re-implement and get value from CRM.

In short they took an off the shelf SFA package for 5 users with the best intentions and one year one it's still not used in anger and has delivered little value. They need help.

On the other hand mid to large sized organisations need outside help to guide them through the adoption process and speed the configuration of the solution to their given needs.

Politics and internal departmental differences also make a CRM consultants role more essential, especially where you have a tradional Sales Team and IT Team involved.

Large or small, everyone needs help (unless your company happens to be a CRM implementation consulting company.) Enabling these powerful tools is not likely your organizations core competency. The amount of help you need is not dependent on number of users, but rather on the scope of the implementation; the more complex the process, the more need for automation or workflow, and the more integration; then more help is needed. If you are small and have basic CRM needs, you probably just need a little help. Even if you are large and have a big IT organization, their job is typically to manage and maintain the technology that is in place, so using them "exclusively" to implement a CRM solution will not be the most efficient or effective. After all, it's not what they do every day of their life. Larger organizations tend to have more complex processes, more change management issues, and more integration needs; therefore, they usually need more implementation help.

One final comment - SasS solutions are the fastest growing in the market - often because of the perceived ease of implementation (read: lack of help needed). SaaS solutions also have a very high rate of failure because of this misconception. Even SaaS CRM implementations need help - it's a process of mapping a specific technology tool to business processes, and utilizing expert help on these implementations could vastly improve the success rate of these SaaS implementations, large or small.

Great discussion! I like Paul's analogy to surgery. You can't keep running your business and install mission critical new processes and systems all at the same time without some help.

At SalesNexus, we've found a niche for ourselves by putting this issue on the table with customers up front. We provide a lot of help to new customers to "get it right" and we partner with VARs and consultants. In the end though, the customer often focuses on initial costs and ramp up time and essentially decides to do surgery on himself.

It's the responsibility of everyone in our industry - CRM vendors, consultants, VARs, etc. - to let the customer know the risk they are taking with attempting to remove their own appendix.

I recently posted this on our blog and thought the group might find it interesting - http://bit.ly/6WRuw0

Mike,

The simple answer is hiring smart, insightful, and experienced CRM expertise is always the right idea and rarely (meaning almost never) should a CRM project be initiated without some objective expertise.

I have been in the SFA/CRM industry for 25 years and even now, after all these years firms still make the same mistakes in their CRM adoption/roll-out projects. Some of these mistakes can be very costly so it pays (literally and figuratively) to utilize seasoned expertise. You can gate the degree of involvement of a so-called consultant, but I highly advise against the penny-wise/pound foolish decisions some firms make in ragrd to their CRM projects.

Just one man's opinion...

As a SFDC consultant, I would say that having "outside" help like me is helpful in a number of ways. Here are five that come to mind:

1. Consultants tend to be more educated on the latest releases and trends
2. Our services may extend beyond the typical reach of a well-trained incumbent, including user training, user adoption, and global user integration
3. We can be brought in to assist incumbent staff with custom projects and provide objective third-party advisement to help the client avoid costly errors
4. Consultants tend to have a higher degree of passion for the work that we do along with an elevated level of commitment to client satisfaction
5. Over the long run, consultants tend to cost the client less money because we only get paid for the work we do, in the time frame it needs to be done.

I’ve been at three companies that implemented hosted, CRM/SFA systems. At each one, we chose to work with the reseller’s IT consultants to get it right the first time. All three had IT staff, but they are focused on internal, company projects and don’t know the programs. All three had 300+ reps in the field.

Of the three, only one got it right. I was head of sales there .I didn’t want to make any vendor decisions without first completely identifying every step in our sales process. This required mapping our sales process. I included marketing, finance, customer service, and IT. We were a service company and didn’t manufacture and ship goods, or I would have included supply chain and manufacturing. Our vendor later told us that very few companies come to the evaluation process with process mapping completed.

It made the difference for us. We knew exactly what we needed and what we wanted (wish list). We discovered that some of the vendors could not accommodate us; some could, but at great expense (time and money); and one that didn’t really understand its product’s capabilities and limitations. Those three were dropped from bidding.

By the way, I would never run a sales organization without CRM today. These clients and prospects are company property, not the reps’. I recently came across a sales force of 300+ that has its sales reps keeping all client/prospect data in Excel. So, what happens when the reps leave? The spreadsheet leaves, too, even if they leave a copy on their PC. But that’s not as bad as another company (in the same industry) that would not provide a laptop to its reps, either.