018. Why CRM Implementations Fail?

Foreign from boundify and welcome to another episode of boundify Live, your Demand Generation Stream Live event and podcast for B2B marketers. I'm really happy for having the opportunity to talk to you today. And as always, if this is the first time that you're listening to any of these episodes and you want to learn more about them, subscribe or depending on the social media platform that you are, you will get notifications about future events. And with that being said, let us start right away on this very interesting topic. Today we are going to talk about CRM implementations and in particular we are going to talk about why they fail. It's very interesting topic, something that I find from time to time with clients and today we are going to explore I want to start and before I actually start just want to say if you are listening right now, say hi, say where are you watching from? And I will be happy to know who is there. And so let's just start right away. I want to start with a interesting stat and is that according to gartner, up to 50% of CRM implementations for whatever reason fail in terms of time or money or goals or a combination of the three of them. And beyond those statistics I can say from myself that I have seen situations with companies where that happened where there is this initial implementation and after a few months or or sometimes a year the system is not being used anymore or nobody understand why it's there, how it works and in that sense becomes a failure. So it's something that is very common and today while usually for those kinds of scenarios there are multiple reasons, I want to Explore at least 10 elements or things that might derail your CRM implementation project. I hope you find them useful. Let us start right away with the first one. This one is one of my favorites. Not having clear objectives or goals. Usually what happens is that either the CEO or someone on sales or someone else in the company that have access to technology gets excited about this new platform that can accomplish these many things and the implementation start right away. And and while there are clear benefits to a CRM system, to a customer relationship management system, still it's important to understand what will be the impact for the business in particular, even when it's a known best practice for most industries generally. And some of the questions that you need to be doing are what are the business problems that you think the CRM is going to solve? Is there any way that you can measure them and have a clear target once implementation is finished? And especially what will be success for you for the stakeholders for the company once the project finish. And all those questions are important because there's going to be an incredible amount of time and from the team involved, from stakeholders and money invested on training and all those things. And definitely you need something more than just everybody else has a CRM or this CRM is cool. The technology school as a reason to or to justify the implementation. You definitely need some business goal behind because if you don't have them at the end you you will question why you implemented all that effort and will be hard to prove that there was an impact on the business. So having a clear goal or objective will be one of the first things that will prevent you from having a failed implementation very related to that one. The second one is not getting management on board. Frequent reason to implementations that fail too. As I was saying, it's not always the CEO or the general manager of the company, the ones that drive the initial excitement about the implementation. Sometimes it's someone in the sales department or even marketing in some cases. And while that's okay, you still need to involve management into the process getting them on board. And the reason is because CRMs usually cover more than just one area. They cover client facing processes and therefore different departments. And you will need the backup both in terms of direction and budget from management to support that decision. It's not just the CEO or the VPs. It's also important to include at least the involvement of sales, marketing and customer success, for example. And because you're going to have conversation with them. One key thing for getting them on board with we'll be talking about things that we were saying on the first topic or the first reason that are related to the business. For example, is there going to have this new implementation is going to have an impact on cost. It's going to reduce cost in some way either by improving processes or making it faster and more efficient. That will be a great reason or a great way to get management on board. Another one will be for example, increasing sales. Is this implementation going to help us close more sales or faster or in a higher rate? Any of those potential reasons will be great to get management on board. It's going to affect the way that we do marketing, be more focused also or finally is going to help us to retain and grow current clients. That will be also a great reason to implement CRM. And those are ways that you can get not just the CEO but the other areas on board and being part of the project from the beginning. The third one, again closely related to the first two, is the lack of sponsors and champions. Right. So you have this truth. These two first two requirements, being able to have clear objectives and getting management on board. But once the project starts or during the process, you need to have people that are going to be responsible for the success or for accomplishing those goals. And there are two facets to that. One is the figure of the sponsor, the person that finally that at the end of the day during the implementation will be in charge of bringing the actual resources that the project will need. They will provide authority and budget and the right time and framework and feedback to the other figure on the project that is going to be the champion, the person responsible for the project leader. And there can be not just one general project leader, it can be also leaders from different areas that will work together to make the project a success. So just as important, having goals and having the onboarding or the okay from management, you need to translate that into actual leaders and sponsors that can drive the implementation through the months that the team will be focusing on this effort. Really important keys, once you move past those, another big area of opportunity is not having defined process. And again, this is very important related to how CRMs are seen. Usually I like to use the phrase that when you are implementing this kind of efforts, it's important to remember that in a company, what matter first is our processes and people. And then technology is just mapping out the existing processes and especially the way that people usually do things. You should model that, not the other way around. So when you have an implementation and you just focus on what the technology can do, and you forget your current process and the people that will implement them, you are poised to fail on the long run. So the right way to approach this is that you start auditing your existing process. Even if you have not put it on writing yet, you still have one. It's just that it's not documented. And usually that goes in the way of having conversations with the sales team mostly, but also will involve all the other areas like marketing, customer success that form part of that effort. And once you have that process identified, you can write it down and then you can start the process of. Because you're going to implement this on a new piece of technology, taking the time to evaluate if something can be eliminated or at least simplified. Right now, for example, with all the workflow moving into online remote teams is, for example, a great opportunity to evaluate if some of the steps that you have right now make sense on a digital world. Do I need to send proposals by mail or a piece of paper anymore? Can I get E signatures and things like that? It's really important that while you are auditing the process, you don't just map it out into the technology just as it is. Take the opportunity, now that you are interfacing with all those areas, to consider if something can be eliminated. Ideally, or at least it can be simplified, considering that you can use technology and digitalization to improve them. Also mapping the process is a great opportunity to improve or find things that can be added, right? So it's not just eliminating but also adding things and improving processes that you have right now. And finally, part of that auditing process should include what kind of reports do you want to have down the road. The CRM, the it will not only map the process itself, but it will also tell you or should be able to tell you if you are having success, if you are being efficient, if you are being effective. And that usually comes in the way of reports, leading and lagging. Indicators and conversations should be had while you are doing that audit to understand what management needs to look forward after the implementation. So really, key point there, too closely related to defining a process is ignoring data mapping. And what I mean by that is that there is this expression that the value of a CRM relies upon the quality of the data. If you don't have a good quality or you don't have quality data, then you run the risk of having a system or a database that is not worth that much. You need to make sure that on your implementation you are starting with the right set of data. In this case you can have two potential scenarios. One is you coming from legacy CRM, a system you already have and you are migrating into a new one. And in those cases, obviously it's important to map out those databases and making sure that you are just bringing the fields that you need and that those fields exist on the new CRM that you are implementing. That's something really important to consider and having conversations about it and is relevant because usually you don't want to start out of nothing or from scratch. However, even in scenarios where the company doesn't have a formal CRM that is migrating from, usually just like with the processes, you still have data compiled in different places. Sometimes it's just this Excel spreadsheet that the whole theme or some team members are using and that information, valuable information from the company should be centralized in this CRM. Sometimes there are formal databases that are being kept, productivity tools like contacts or similar scenarios like inboxes or emails. Sometimes it can be just non digital sources, right? Business Cards and something similar that will be spread out across the team. So it's important to take the opportunity to identify those sources and compiling and putting them together and say these are the fields that we're going to need to import into the new CRM some part of that data mapping. It's also relevant to identify if there's any objects that you will need on top of the ones that usually comes with CRMs. Typically in the case, for example, the ones that we have or I have the most experience with, which is HubSpot. Typical objects that are shared across many other systems are contacts, companies, deals, and so those are standard objects that form part of most CRMs. But you might have additional objects, entities that you want to identify that might not be present on your current CRM and you will need to identify them and map them out. So the agency or firm that is implementing the CRM for you, or if there's an in house team that is doing that, they should be able to identify that beforehand during the implementation of the course. And finally on the data mapping within those objects that either you are going to use the default ones, we're going to create new ones you want to identify if you need more properties or fields for each of the objects that need to be built and rules for them to be filled once you either migrate your existing data or train your sales team or the other teams to use them or once the implementation is done. So keep in mind all these all that part to consider. Now another area of opportunity is when the CRM becomes a sales only issue, right? It's not a sales only issue. It's true that CRMs evolve mostly from sales teams, but as time has go by, the systems are more and more capable and robust. And nowadays you can say that these kinds of platforms, platforms pretty much help you or help the company manage all client facing business processes and can accomplish can help you to accomplish those company goals. Typically when I say client facings, client facing, marketing and customer success functions, but in some cases I have even seen that CRM system can support part of the human resource processes. For example, when the website gets job applicants or candidates into the system too, the CRM can function as a way of managing that process too. So it's not only sales and that's important first because you can accomplish more than just that department, but also because if you ignore that fact, you might miss conversations with the head of marketing or the head of customer success and you will not accomplish having a consolidated database where you can see what's going on with Your prospects with your current clients and what clients to be and with your current clients in just one place. So really important to consider the input from the other areas to prevent you from failing now in a similar fashion, just the CRM is not just a sales thing only. It's really important to not forget about integration with other systems. Even when the CRM can become the source of truth for the context of the company. Not all the pieces or parts of your current process will leave on the CRM right away and some of them will never be for business reasons. So it's important that you consider during the implementation what kind of integrations you will need to have between those order system and your CRM so you can be aware or the system can be aware of the changes and people don't get frustrated. Some examples of things that you might want to evaluate for integration are, for example system that allows you to make proposals during deals so you might integrate with that piece of software so the CRM is keeping up with those changes. Other example can be all the phenomenon around meetings, online meetings. Those cases there are systems that allow you to follow up that and they'll become part of the sales process, so you want to interwe with those. Also internal communications, for example, if you're using tools like Slack or similar tools and your team is having conversations outside of the CRM about the contacts and the deals, you might want to understand at least if there's a possibility to integrate them. Obviously, for example, if you're doing social selling through social media platforms like LinkedIn, you want to know if those conversations that your sales rep are having can be integrated with your CRM so you can have a full picture of their following up with contacts and prospects. And finally you might have some reports that you want to do in a dedicated system and you want to take information from what's going on on the CRM so your reports can be updated on real time. Those are just some ideas, but in general the criteria is that you need to evaluate if your CRM needs to talk other systems to keep it updated and in sync very well. And the now in the area of training, talking about like people in this case, I think training is a vital part of the implementation process. And I will say that it's not realistic to expect that people will learn probably new processes while you are updating the process that you had in the past. And definitely new technology because you are implementing new technology and expect for them to be productive right away with our proper training. So sometimes what I have seen is that the Process is mapped, data is migrated, there's some initial explanation about how the system work, but there is not a process to allow people to continue be trained and to train new people that eventually will come into the system. It's really important that you define within the implementation a training program that will allow you to train the people that is going to use the CRM right away, but also have a path for training future users. So in three, six or one year you are not suffering from the problem that people is not using the CRM anymore just because new users have no idea how to take advantage of it. So considering a training program is really important so you don't have that phenomenon happening after a few months. Finally, closely related is the fact that you need to consider support. Another reason that the CRM implementation might fail is because you have not considered support in this case, support around the system itself. Users can be trained, but eventually they will have technical difficulties. It's just a matter of fact that it will happen. So you want to know from your CRM provider what are the ways that users can get support about the platform to solve them? Things that you want to know, for example is are they available 24, 7 or is just on the week, during the week, on business hours, what will happen when you have an urgent problem? What channels or mediums are are available for you and the users in case of problems. They're offering support only by chat or email or this also available phone or online meetings to solve some more critical process. You will also want to understand and document how hard is to get assistant right? And if it has a cost. There are some systems that offer support as part of the software package or service or license and there are some others that will charge you extra for that support. So you want to understand those scenarios very clearly and communicate them with the team so they know where they can go, where they can go if they want help. Obviously also you want to know if the CRM offers some documentation so users can have support on demand, on their own, do their own research, and only for more complicated things. They can end up having to reach out to the software provider for solutions. And so that is the last of the tips for preventing you from failing on a CRM implementation. I hope you have find them all useful and valuable. And as always, if you think that this topic will be of relevance to a friend or a colleague, please share this video or audio with the relevant person. I will appreciate it and thank you for listening. And until the next episode, have a great day. Bye bye.