But I will. Because honesty is still the best damn policy. I love CRM software. In fact, I implement CRM software, and ERP, too, for a living, so this post is a small gut check. In fact I have a whitepaper in the SightLines website that speaks directly about CRM Adoption. I use CRM software everyday and can't imagine life in sales or business today without it, but it must be said that there are a lot of issues with CRM Adoption. In fact, there are a lot of issues with the underlying culture of many companies and CRM won't fix it, can't fix it. As Brian Carrol makes pretty clear in his B2B Lead Generation Blog, if there are issues of collaboration between Marketing and Sales, the sad fact is that sales will not follow up on marketing leads and no amount of software is going to change that. If marketing doesn't give sales a voice in what a qualified lead is, for example, sales will probably not bother contacting a majority of the leads marketing generates. It's really that simple. Collaboration. We come back to this point so often in this and many other blogs. It really is, must be, the crux of the matter. It also impacts CRM Adoption. When sales people have the feeling that CRM is just an extra layer of work that they have to do for someone else's gratification they naturally chaff at the expectation that they are going to put in several extra hours a day or week working with software that provides them no benefit. However, if the CRM enables collaboration and others in the organization, from service to operations to management and products development use the tool to collaborate with sales, and sales with them, then it becomes a useful tool. But first, collaboration. |
