What are the top barriers to CRM Success?

There have been a number of great, insightful points made.
It appears as tho' everyone is in agreement - in some shape, form, or other - that process adoption is one part of the failure and another is that some company other than yours (i.e., the software vendor or...) has by default dictated the data capture and workflow process.

These days I get the impression that some people forgo the "functional requirements" part of understanding and making a buying decision.

The objections that we all believe sales people have are the same ones we've encountered for 15 years:
There are , it seems , so many "human" elements of the "system" which can be overlooked. Whether it is following the process, entering call notes, accurately and honestly reporting information into the pipeline report log, etc: these are human actions that require an eager willingness for the best outcome.

I remember a sales VP back in 1997 giving laptops with the latest reporting and SFA tools for his sales force. His message: you have a year to learn and get fluent in this process and data capture method. If you don't do it, you won't have a job in 365 days.

Should we look to the leadership, ourselves included, for not doing the best possible job of keeping and recognizing the human? and, if we did do a better job of that, how might that translate into the everyday communications, training, and positive motivation that goes across the entire organization?

One "top barrier to CRM" success or failure: people still see it as a software play - a solution in a box (or cloud) to install. CRM and CEM are not and never were software.
But you either know this or disagree wholeheartedly, so I won't say more now, lest I get on a platform and try to preach to the crowd.

1. The software is poorly designed and as such it is not easy to use;
2. CRM software enables more managers to micro-manage thus it is resisted by the people who will be micro-managed;
3. Marketing and sales folks tend to be happy playing with ideas and interacting with people - they do not like spending time being 'slaves to the CRM system';
4. The Customer Service folks are under pressure to wrap up calls quickly and do not perceive that they have the time to enter in the right details in the CRM system;
5. You will find multiple entries for the same entity (because someone has entered it in more than once) and the data tends to be out of date;
6. The CRM system on the whole does NOT make life easier for the people who actually have to use it - in fact it adds another layer of work;
7. Data is simply data (and that is what CRM systems hold) and it in itself does not help sales, marketing and customer service folks to win at their jobs.

Coincidentally, in a conversation yesterday, a client who is VP of Marketing said, “Customers had no input or involvement in anything we originally did with CRM. They were bystanders … targets, actually … of our CRM-driven initiatives. We are making a big effort right now to change that.”

The last response reminded me of what a St Louis client said to me when asked why they were building a database (this was 1995): Cuz everyone else is doing it.
CRM initiatives fail because they are not the company's driving force, its strategy.
I could expound, but that would require willing listeners - because I think this has always been the root cause of the failures.

Hi Brian,

Speaking only of the Sales Force Automation (SFA) part of CRM, the most commonly perceived "greatest barrier to success" is user adoption by the sales team members.

How do you best achieve user adoption?

Let's assume that the top three things salespeople really want are:
- More Recognition
- More Reward (monetary)
- Less Work to get more recognition and reward.

Unfortunately, the common perception around SFA is that it requires more work...not less. But it doesn't have to be that way.

With well designed and implemented SFA, ultimately sales people will land the same or higher levels of business with less work. This concept needs to be actively sold to your sales team once your implementation is designed to deliver it.

Need an example or two?
1. Design, into your implementation, the ability for salespeople to enter information into your SFA verbally and immediately after sales calls or events. This will eliminate massive amounts of key strokes and, at the same time, will result in more accurate, more timely and more thorough reporting.

2. Design, into your implementation, lots of automation that moves the sales process along for the sales rep without ANY active involvement of the sales rep.

3. Sell and resell your sales team on the work that SFA is doing FOR THEM to make them more successful with less effort.

4. Consider providing monetary rewards initially for high system adoption by members of the sales team.

You could contact me if you need help figuring any of these out in more detail.

Finally, make sure management is implementing SFA for the right primary reason. Enhancing individual sales effectiveness should be seen as the primary goal of SFA. Performance reports should be seen as a by-product or part of the tool set.

After all, if members of the sales team are more effective, everybody wins including management, regardless of the management reports the system spits out.

The top barrier to CRM success is without doubt

USER ADOPTION

If the Sales and Customer Service teams dont' adopt it, and that means not just a once a week updte for pipeline purposes then CRM add little value.

CRM needs to be adopted widely, by all the mahor customer facing employees as well as deeply and that means using it all day every day just look we all use Microsoft Outlook.

Key issues around user adoption are -

How seemless is it with my current applications?
Is the User interface simple and clear?
Is it responsive - does it react quickly enough to my input or does it slow me down?
Does it add value for me - what intelligence and information can it provide to help me with my day job?

Get the above right and companies are assured CRM succcess.

I see eight common barriers:

1. Letting the CRM system define your sales process
Most systems come pre-set with default lead and opportunity stages, default fields for accounts and contacts, even default reports and dashboards. This is not your sales process. The sales process that works best for your customers should be determined in advance, and your CRM should be modified to accommodate it.

2. No consistent definitions
What's a qualified lead? What criteria are required to move a lead to an opportunity? And does everyone across the organization (including and beyond the sales team) understand that? Your data will only be as good as it is consistent, so ensure everyone knows how you expect to define and move accounts, prospects and customers through the pipeline.

3. Not enforcing consistent & accurate usage
It's one thing to have definitions, it's another to ensure they're being used actively. If a call is made, if a campaign is executed, and it's not reflected in your data, how can you use the system to tell what's working? How can you manage next steps and behavior? I've worked in sales organizations that have a simple rule for this: If it isn't in the CRM system, it didn't happen.

4. Not enforcing consistent & accurate reporting
I see it all the time, different sales groups or departments pulling the same data via multiple different reports. And because they all have different filters, different formats, and different ideas of what they're looking at, each report has a slightly different story. Inconsistent reporting (even if it's an innocent but small difference in a filter) will call into question the integrity of your entire process and pipeline. Create one, consistent set of reporting so everyone is on the same page.

5. Letting your data get and stay dirty
It's bad enough when you have bad data. Companies entered five different times. Leads that don't get de-dupped. But if you don't get on top of that problem right away, it's only going to get worse and more expensive to fix down the road. Put systems in place (including software add-ons and manual processes) to regularly clean your data - both on the way in as well as periodically for what's already there.

6. Reporting on too much at the wrong levels of the business
We often overthink our reporting. We include too much, show too much data to help justify the work we're doing. Lots of data may be appropriate at the front lines, to measure and optimize tactical campaigns. But your executive team doesn't need to see open rates for your email campaigns. Keep them focused on the "money" metrics, those that best reflect the output of your work. If that output isn't going as planned, you can then pull a second report (which you watch daily already) to identify what's wrong.

7. Failing to identify causality
Clean data, consistent reports and custom lead/opportunity stages aren't going to help you if you can't take action on what you're seeing. If something's wrong with your output, with your pipeline, your CRM system should be able to help you identify what's wrong. If the data isn't there, or you aren't using the data to get to the root of the problem, take time to identify explicitly what's missing and create a process (both right now and moving forward) that will give you that insight.

8. Sales & marketing don't use it consistently
By consistently, I mean both on a regular basis and in the same way. Too may B2B marketing teams have never been in their company's CRM system. They don't see the sales reports, don't know what's working once the lead gets passed to sales. Marketing leadership should be using CRM (at minimum using the reporting) on a daily basis. And both teams need to have the same rules, definitions and reports to ensure they're on the same page.

Hi Brian,

Great question! Have you ever wondered why the CRM failure rates are so high? Many of the reasons have already been stated in response to your question.

I focus on revenue performance on the higher end of complex sales approaches so I come at CRM from a different slant. CRM software is supposed to be a great tool for managing sales activity. Unfortunately the ‘opportunity managers’ built into these software applications and used for forecasting near term revenue can only be described as ‘better than nothing’. It is important to recognize that forecasts created in these CRM Opportunity Managers are based on a ‘percent of confidence’ factor that is applied to every opportunity in the sales pipeline as to the odds it will turn into revenue. So, a $50,000 opportunity with an applied 50% confidence factor is ‘forecasted’ to produce $25,000 in near term revenue! Let’s get real – revenue generation in a complex sales environment simply can’t be founded on this ambiguous method. All identified sales opportunities in a sales pipeline are either won, lost, parked or relegated to no decision. Nowhere in this process is the potential revenue value less than one hundred percent. You will WIN $50,000 or you will not WIN (aka; LOSE) $50,000!

Many of the previous answers infer this, but I will spell it out: lack of training.

While there are numerous reasons for low adoptions rates or low usage rates among the internal users of a CRM implementation, many, many of them are addressed through a properly planned training program that is part of the initial roll out of the system.

That should be followed by ONGOING training - likely quarterly for the first year and then every six months forever.

If the company does not appear committed to the system, why should users?

Lazy salespeople who do not want to document their work. There is a pervasive sense among salespeople that they should be exempt from recording their interactions and planning the future.