Watch out who gets their hands on your CRM system

You may have heard me talk about some of my clients and read stories about a few of their successes and failures. You might even know by now that, among other sales-related services I provide my clients, I also sell, install, customize and train on GoldMine as a CRM solution for many of my clients. When I am finished with these implementations, I usually hate walking away from them because I worry that someone is going to “fiddle around” with it and screw something up. That’s why I also offer, and many clients invest in, an on-going support agreement where I continue training, customizing, enhancing, fixing, etc, their CRM implementation. This also includes designing sales and business processes to help streamline their sales cycle and improve their customer acquisition and retention strategies.

Well, here’s an interesting story about someone who stopped using me because they hired an in-house “IT Guy.” I was never their “IT Guy.” I was their GoldMine expert who also helped with their business strategies and processes. Additionally, they used another outside consultant to do their IT work. Now they have their own in-house person and no outside consultants to work on GoldMine, business practices, or their IT stuff. The first problem with this scenario is that this new “IT Guy” does not know GoldMine, nor is it in his charter, interest, or schedule to learn it. He made that abundantly clear to me on our first encounter.

One day he called me to introduce himself and to say that he is now in charge of their CRM implementation (which he knew nothing about) and had a question about a new user they added to the system who wasn’t seeing the same options as the other users. Hmmm??!! Mind you that I am no longer under contract with them, but being the nice guy that I am I frequently will help with the quick and easy ones. I coached him through a quick and dirty, but totally viable, solution and reminded (no, strongly encouraged) him to be very careful about “playing around” with the CRM system since he has no idea which settings and configurations do what. I figured the best free advice I could give him was how not to destroy what took his bosses (and me) a long time and a lot of work and investment to create and set up, and which now successfully runs their business and improves their customer relations. He said he will try out my suggestion and call me back to let me know how it worked.

Naturally, he never called me back, except 2 weeks later with a new problem. The first thing I said was, “Say, how did that other problem I helped you with work out?” in which he replied, “Oh, fine. That solved the problem. Thanks.” None of this has much to do with this story, except to set the stage. (Yes, I’m setting you up)

The purpose of his second call was to explain a long-standing problem with launching Word from GoldMine. Like most good CRM systems, GoldMine allows you to create Word templates that embed fields from the contact’s record to personalize the document. This lingering problem consisted of a totally unacceptable delay in Word once all the fields were embedded. In other words, when they launch a Word template from GoldMine, it loads Word and embeds the appropriate fields very quickly, but then hangs for about two to three minutes seemingly doing nothing before allowing the user to do anything. All research to date pointed to this being a Word problem, but neither I, the GoldMine vendor, nor the previous IT consultant had success tracking this down.

When this new “IT Guy” called me, he said it got to the point where everyone was completely annoyed with this delay and something needed to be done. After going through several obvious but failed solutions (turn off their virus scanner, turn off their spyware/adware utilities, etc.), he immediately said he wanted to replace this flawed CRM system with an Access application he would write himself and wanted to know how to export out all the GoldMine data so he can start developing a replacement system.

Wow! Talk about jumping the gun. I agree that this can be frustrating for the users, and even though the problem seemed to be with Word, users are prone to blame the application they are using, GoldMine, and not the actual culprit, Word. But to replace an entire CRM system that is otherwise working so flawlessly and comprehensively because of one problem, and with Access, is incredulous. Since he was a new employee and may not be aware of the commitment they had with this system we designed and implemented, I reminded him that his bosses might not take a liking to the idea of replacing their worthwhile investment with a home-grown solution (or nightmare, in this case). He gave me a lukewarm yet somewhat agreeable response, but I knew that this system may some day be destined to his egocentric desire to “put his own stink on things.” It’s just a matter of time I’m afraid.

I’m not being negative or skeptical. I just have seen this happen before. You take a good system and add a bad manager, executive, “IT Guy”, or otherwise clueless employee, and poof, it’s gone in no time. They start fiddling around with things and since they don’t understand what they have inherited, they decide to replace it with something they are familiar with (like an Access application). Then they leave (or get fired) and the poor client is left with some spaghetti coded piece of garbage that no one knows how to support. Not to mention, their original investment is lost when this “expert” threw it out like yesterday’s news.

This client may have hope though. I finally asked their IT guy to check and see if Word had all the spell check options turned on. It did, so he turned most of them off and the whole process ran immediately and perfectly. Bingo! Problem solved. I’m glad I wasn’t the “IT Guy.”

The moral of the story is that CRM is a business solution. First and foremost, it is a business culture that addresses what is best for your customer. CRM technology deploys that culture by allowing users to enter, manipulate and use information about the clients in order to best satisfy the clients’ needs. CRM, the culture or the technology, is not a toy for someone to play around with and make unilateral decisions about it’s use, or future. It seems I need to spend a little quality time with this client’s senior management to delicately explain, once again, that if fallen into the wrong hands with no management supervision, their CRM strategy will be at jeopardy, which will affect their customer acquisition and retention plans. This alone has a bigger affect on their long-term revenue and success than the lost investment of implementing their CRM system to begin with.

This scenario of the “IT Guy” trying to make decisions that affect the company’s customer relationship plans is also common with companies who are planning their initial CRM strategy. If IT is in charge of the CRM implementation and strategy, then I can almost guarantee that, in many cases, it will not address the needs of the customer, the Sales department, Marketing, and many other stakeholders that should otherwise be part of the solution. I’m not down on IT. I just know that CRM strategies need to be a team effort (see my book “CRM For The Common Man”) and should not be done by one person or group, in a closet. Many companies unfortunately put this responsibility in the hands of the IT department because they think CRM is just about the technology and neglect the business strategies that need to be developed first in order to build the proper foundation for the technology.

So be careful who you let get their hands on your CRM system. They may only have their own personal agenda in mind instead of your entire corporate strategy.
Good luck and good selling!

Russ Lombardo

Watch out who gets their hands on your CRM system - To learn more about this author, visit Russ Lombardo's Website.

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