As a sales person (amongst other roles) for the past 30 years I have been involved in multiple Customer Relationship Management and Sales Force Automation rollouts and I have almost seen and used every major one that’s been in the market from the simple end of using Microsoft Outlook to mid-size solutions like ACT, Goldmine, Dynamics CRM and Sales Logix right through to using highly customised solutions like Siebel, Pivotal and Onyx at the high end.

In fact many of these systems no longer exist, having been swallowed up, re-branded or retired by various vendors as is the nature of the industry.

But without a doubt, not matter which solution has been in use there is a consistent thread running through each deployment – successful or failed – and this comes down to the discipline of utilising these solutions across the organisation.

MYOB Advanced CRM helps you build real-ationships with your customers with functionality that works

CRM Success and Failure Factors

And that usually comes down to the fact that the CRM in most small and midsize organisations tends to be mainly used as a sales force automation tool – either with the buy in of the sales team (because it is simple to use and easy for the sales person to control access to) or begrudgingly when it becomes a management tool used to try to drive sales behaviors like effective and more accurate forecasting and sales productivity.

In fact in some of the biggest organisations in the world that spend thousands of dollars on the roll-outs of these tools, the sales force still end up using spreadsheets as the tool of choice…because at every level in the sales organisation, the issue is controlling who can see what in the sales process mainly to ensure that only the information that the sales person or sales manager wants to be shared is shared.

So this usually leads to silos of data all across an organisation with no single view of the truth that can be relied on and that then robs every one of the valuable data that can be held and used to drive better results from marketing through to sales as there is no single system that manages the end to end process.

Even the solutions such as Salesforce, the current darling of the CRM world suffer from the same challenges – in fact, most organisations, when asked, report that they only use 10 to 20 of the functionality in the solution (and yet spend 10’s of 1000’s of dollars on it every year).

So, what’s the answer to this challenge, I hear you ask – I want to get better data on my customers and how we interact with them, where they come from and how we can serve them better.

Get REAL

The answer is simple (as it usually is) and thanks to a typo when I was writing this blog I even managed to come up with a name for it.

Customer REALationship Management – emphasis on the word REAL – and that word is actually an acronym for choosing the solution and for the process involved in successfully deploying a CRM solution – it has to be

• R – Real time, rapid to deploy and robust
• E- Easy to use, extensible and everyone should have access
• A- Adaptable, accessible and automated
• L- Low cost, low complexity and lovable (don’t laugh, software can be lovable when it’s fun to use and helps you)

So if that’s the criteria, then lets take a look over the next few posts at how MYOB Advanced stacks up in the REAL world.