Lessons Learned from the Trenches: The 4 Biggest Challenges to a Successful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software Implementation.

by Mark L. Friedman for The Velos Group

Over the past two years, The Velos Group has been involved in over 20 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementations, almost all of them using Salesforce.com software. We have worked with companies with annual revenue in excess of $100 Million and as a little as under $1 Million; companies just getting started. This has translated into as many as 50+ Sales people to as few as 2.

We have found and successfully addressed four consistent obstacles to a successful CRM implementation:

• Getting the Management team to enthusiastically sponsor and stay involved in the implementation.
• The company's Sales Lead Management and other processes are neither efficient nor documented and in many cases, exist only in someone's head.
• There are many, mostly subjective, ways within a company to describe the status of a lead in the Sales process.
• Dirty Data. In one company, we identified a total of 18 different spreadsheets and databases where prospect and customer interactions and data were recorded and tracked. After the first phases of the CRM implementation, we were able to eliminate all but 5. Future phases have been identified to eliminate them

For the full 6 page report (PDF) click here.