Culture

Managing CRM according to the status quo will only yield status-quo results. I’ll be presenting three focus areas you can focus on for long-term success with CRM in my upcoming Feb. 7 webcast with MDM.com. It’s free: Register today.

The No. 1 reason I see that companies aren’t getting ROI from CRM is culture. This isn’t surprising: Many have 10, 20 or 30 years of culture under their belts, and bringing CRM in is a big change. They’ve been successful without CRM, so why should they change?

It will take time, but you can clear the culture barrier.

Training is important when you’re first embarking on a CRM journey. But if you’ve had CRM in place for several years and you’re still not seeing the results you want, it’s not too late to train.

In my speaking engagements, I frequently ask the audience whether they have implemented CRM. And then I ask who feels they are getting ROI from CRM? Very few say they are getting ROI – maybe 10 percent of the room on average.

So why aren’t companies getting what they want out of CRM? What are the common pitfalls?

It is always difficult to get everyone on-board with new technology. CRM is no exception. In fact, distributors, reps and manufacturers often face a challenge in getting “sales cowboys” to embrace CRM. Some worry that Big Brother wants to look over their shoulders. Some just resist a change to their regular routines.

One of the most common reasons that CRM fails for industrial sales organizations is because they try to do too much, too quickly.

I encourage you to start slow and grow. Don’t try to do everything at once.

There’s more to success with CRM than your initial investment in a system. In fact, the cost in time and money can be up to four to seven times that of the software itself, depending on what you want to roll out to your team.

I’m a big believer in training not only on the How but also on the Why of sales process and CRM.

On this blog, we’ve covered 10 of the most common reasons that CRM fails – or isn’t as successful as it could be. Those include a murky management vision, not getting your top guns involved, trying to do too much too soon rather than easing into the new system, and not understanding the Total Cost of Ownership, including training requirements, from the start. (Read more about common reasons CRM fails.)

But every company has its own Achilles heel.

In most industrial companies, the service group is an island. The team is in the shop or out in the field. And the interaction the service team has with the sales team is minimal.

But that’s a big missed opportunity.