I have worked for three companies who have failed at implementing CRM or customer relationship management systems. What went wrong? Why didn’t these projects succeed? Could marketing have played a role in making these project work and avoided having CRM plans derailed?
One common theme among all three project failures was the lack of marketing involvement. The marketing team didn’t even have a seat at the table or a voice in the process. It was as if CRM was a sales process only and nothing can be further from the truth.
Without marketing at the table, the CRM project was bound to jump the tracks.
Here are five critical lessons I learned about making CRM fit with your culture, company, and commerce.
- Without a good sales and marketing process, CRM has little chance to succeed. Imagine putting a train on the tracks but not having a plan where the train will stop? In all three failed CRM installations, the companies didn’t have solid commercial processes in place. They were all ad hoc, off-the-cuff approaches to selling. The random sales process can be a signal that an IT technology isn’t the solution. Before you begin to search for the right CRM, plot the customer’s journey and understand how the process works in your organization. By including marketing, you can more accurately understand engagement, connection and relationship building. You may find that your sales process is manageable chaos. You need some discipline and structure before automation. Don’t buy a train before you know where you want it to go and make sure marketing has a seat for that ride.
- Once you have a clear sales and marketing process outlined, what role will CRM play? What are the specific expectations you need it to achieve to make it successful? Simply put, how will you measure success? If you want it to be a record of the relationship, there are many ways to do that including paper and pencil. How will you move customers through a sales funnel? Who is responsible for each action? Start with as simple an approach as possible and see where there is resistance. Often, salespeople will tell you that they don’t have time to keep records, they need to be selling. Without a disciplined selling process that is crystal clear, your CRM effort is destined for derailment. Marketing is good at being brand sheriffs; maybe there is a monitoring role for the marketing team that can help in the early stages of relationship management.
- How are you defining leads and are they properly segmented? If you are tracking every company interested in your product, you may be overwhelming your sales team. By properly segmenting what a target looks like (company size, location, financial health, etc.), you’ll save yourself and your team a lot of trouble. Marketing tends to be very good at segmentation and can help sales refine gen definitions. I have observed many sales people tracking everyone and everything– instead of doing the proper prequalifying that would help you determine who fits the customer profile. Make sure you don’t allow everyone to ride on your CRM Express. Ensure that you have a robust segmentation strategy in place first.
- Define what role does marketing will have in the process. If you bolt on marketing at the end, you are missing a chance for alignment. Marketing needs a seat at the table long before you hire a CRM consulting firm to help support you. The marketing professional may raise flags that tell you that they don’t have the properly trained or experienced marketing staff to do outbound marketing through the CRM. Better to know this upfront so you can hire for the skillset you need. Typically, you don’t want sales doing the marketing teams role. Get marketing on board with sales so you have a clear alignment that fits with product and business strategy. Define roles and responsibilities up front and make sure you have the skills in-house to follow your schedule.
- Your outbound marketing message will vary based on where the customers are in the funnel and the opportunities they represent. Someone who shows limited interest and time on your website may need a very different message from someone who has read ten articles and come back more than twenty times. Make sure that the sales team works with marketing to identify the various segments and the stages they need to go to succeed through the funnel toward a purchase. Since marketing is responsible for attracting leads, understand what a good customer looks like is critical. Marketing and sales need to visit, in person with several key customers to know what they look like, how they behave and what problems they are looking to solve. The more you can work together with marketing on field visits, the crisper your targeting will be.
All aboard the CRM train schedule.
Would you like an outsider’s view on how to involve marketing in the process? Text or call me at 919 720 0995. All aboard.
Photo Credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Off_the_Rails.jpg
