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.