Why you shouldn't buy CRM from an ERP Vendor

A good friend of mine rang me this morning from a sales trip to Arkansas. My friend is in the back up power business and works for an old school battery company. His organization did a search for a new CRM tool about 2 years ago and spoke with the likes of Salesforce.com and SalesLogix at the time. At that time, every salesperson was using their own methods for tracking their prospects, leads, customers, and opportunities. My friend was using an older version of Maximizer and when he asked his boss to pay for the upgrade an entire initiative was fueled. My friend was and still is the most sophisticated sales rep because he had his own CRM and he also tracked all his opportunities from his dealers which they are working on in Excel spreadsheets. His products are complex and require some level of configuration and so his organization looked at configuration software as well that could exist within the CRM and be exposed to the dealer community which ultimately owns the end user of their products.

Unfortunately CRM did not get funded by the business and ended up an IT driven initiative. IT already had an existing instance of a AS400 based the back-office and this vendor was able to sell them on their ‘CRM” suite. As it turns out the ‘CRM’ suite is merely a simple web application which pushes data into the back office. As my friend learned this morning – back office application designers do not always take sales people and their unique needs into account during their design. My friend was staying in an area that still only has dial up and as he went to fill out his quote log last night, he had the system time out on him several instances. The system was being updated probably due to some batch routine that an IT admin set to run after hours not thinking that a traveling salesman does his work after hours sometimes long after the IT staff has gone home for the day. Even when my friend is able to access the system – there are tons of required fields for each quote and if not filled out correctly – sometimes the entire quote log has to be entered again.

I have to say I felt pretty bad to hear that from my friend as my company actually tried to provide them a solution which would have had both online and offline capabilities. It would have allowed him to work offline in the field when connectivity was limited and online when he got home or to a internet connection with lots of bandwidth. Unfortunately the marketing group driving the project could not convince the CEO of the importance of CRM and it became an IT driven initiative to streamline efficiency by having sales people in the field enter their own quotes. The old Excel quote template may not have been the best solution but it was one that worked whether the reps have internet connectivity or not. The new solution while slick and fancy in a boardroom is somewhat impractical in the field and the end users end up feeling the pain. The challenge with a sales end user is if you are a $25 million producer like my friend, the company would like to tell him he’ll be fired for not using the CRM system but in reality this would never happen. Unfortunately there is not much the organization can do – and the end result – CRM fails. Don’t be shortsighted when looking at solutions especially when it involves sales people. They are some of the easiest people to sell on an idea but hardest to keep happy. Make sure that key end users are engaged throughout the project. Fully understand their needs and run pilot groups before dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars into a system which isn’t used by the people it was designed for at the end of the day. In my next blog entry I’ll discuss some strategies for internally marketing new solutions to key end users to get their buy-in. This human element is the most important for the success of any sales technology initiative.