The foundation for successful CRM…

Michael Bosworth/John Holland make the following observation in their book ‘Customer Centric Selling’ – ‘Because of the predominant perception that selling is more art than science, few companies have sales processes that traditional sellers can execute. We believe that this deficiency is the single most significant factor contributing to the disappointing results achieved with sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.’

Leaving aside the art v. science debate, this observation hits the nail on the head. High pay-back CRM systems are those that effectively automate good business process, whether it’s sales process, lead generation, lead tracking, or any of the myriad of key business processes that CRM technology can impact.

This isn’t how organisations generally implement CRM technology. Lured by the vendor siren call of quick results for a fiver a month, the process part somehow gets forgotten. It’s not that the resulting system necessarily fail to provide any benefit, so much as they only provide a small fraction of the achievable benefit.

Take the sales process highlighted above – CRM technology gives the sales manager new capabilities. Gone now are the hours of compiling multiple slightly differently formatted Excel spreadsheets. The forecast can be viewed in real-time, with graphical charting, and drill down capabilities, so that the sales manager can immediately validate the underlying data. Is the sales manager better off? That depends what’s being automated. If the underlying sales process is non-existent or weak, then automating it isn’t going to improve too much. It might be quicker to compile the data, but unless the process itself improves, then forecast accuracy is unlikely to increase, or the conversion rates improve.

The real benefits accrue when technology enables powerful processes. If those processes don’t exist already, or aren’t developed as part of the CRM deployment, then all CRM achieves is marginally more efficient disorder.

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