Helping Engineer the CRM Vision

I had a very interesting call with a CIO of a large customer of mine today. We implemented a CRM tool for a division of a fairly large media conglomerate of companies a few years ago. They recently built a corporate structure to manage all the lines of business and are looking to us to provide a CRM strategy and vision for their overall organization. This is refreshing as we'll get to talk about the right things. The right things center around the 'WHY' should we do an initiative. Too often as consultants, we get wrapped up in the solution or the 'HOW' and the 'WHY' goes unsolved no matter how much time and money gets thrown at it. The impact is that the desired results are not met and an expensive technology solution sits on the shelf or remains an unused icon on a desktop.

Unfortunately the CRM buzzword keeps us from getting to the real business issues at hand and we get tied up in discussions around - 'can the product do this, can the product do that'. At the end of the day technology can do pretty much anything you want it to do. The CRM products today are merely platforms for developing solutions. These platforms will often times meet 80% of the needs of a business but the additional 20% needs to be customized as every business operates a little differently. So focus on the 'WHY' or what matters most and the chance of success goes up dramatically.

My thoughts on Microsoft's CRM 3.0 so far

My organization recently brought on the Microsoft CRM 3.0 product and I am interested in what it can do for our customers. For those who have a large investment in the Microsoft technologies this solution seems to be a good fit. It's got an Outlook-like look and feel which makes it easier for end users to adopt. The majority of corporate workers including salespeople are working in Outlook all day . I think this tool could help organizations and their salespeople adopt CRM more easily. Their sales processes and best practices can be embedded in the desktop tools and experience they use today. We had an event for our clients that was well received on the new solution the other day but I am not going to hitch my wagon to just one publisher.

My biggest concerns are lack of maturity of the product and hopefully the R&D efforts will continue to improve the current system. This is what should have been the version 1.0 launch as it's still behind some of the major players like Siebel, Salesforce.com, and SalesLogix. However, Microsoft claims to have 250 developers working on the product and $80 Million going into the marketing so the best may be yet to come.

Everything you wanted to know about CRM

My name is Matt Rosen and I am a CRM sales consultant for a CRM consultancy called Ascendix. I have been in the technology consulting business for the last 7 years. During this time, I have worked with CRM software including ACT, Goldmine, Salesforce.com, Siebel, SalesLogix, SalesBoom, and Microsoft CRM. The organization I work with sells CRM software from several of these leadingpublishers, howeverI am creating this blog to be a place to share my honest opinions with individuals looking for information on CRM solutions.

Please come back and check my blog weekly as I write about the trials and tribulations of CRM deployments. These software deployments are challenging for organizations and my goal is to help people head down a successful path or delay their CRM initiative all together.

Feel free to send any questions about CRM deployments. You can find more information about me at www.mattrosen.net and Ascendix at www.ascendix.com