As per recent research by leading industry analysts, an average 72% of CRM projects do not see the light of the day. What is notable is that a vast majority of these projects are carried out by reputed system integration firms. Despite of the significant investment in time, effort and money – results are often missing. What is it that makes CRM projects go awry?
Based on our management team’s vast on the ground experience we give below practical insights into the 3 most common reasons of failure:
Lack of Vendor Due Diligence –It is commonplace for corporations to select CRM vendors based on their CRM presence, and case studies/reference checks of successful implementations/upgrades. There in lies the first fallacy of success – Big firms do multiple implementations and upgrades. It is therefore not difficult for them to highlight the successful ones from among the many they do. This however doesn’t provide prospective customers with the list of numerous failed implementations, harrowing customer experiences and multi million dollar law suits. One of the most important pre-requisites for a successful implementation is a successful team. When contracts get awarded without seeing the team that the vendor is going to put in place – it makes the first recipe for disaster.
Inefficient use of IP – When contracts are awarded based on vendor experience; very little attention is given to the IP that the vendor will bring to bear. The purpose of IP is to guide the implementation/upgrade in a systematic manner based on learnings from past projects so as to avoid pitfalls of failed initiatives and provided consistent success. It is supposed to reduce extreme dependence on individual resources and make the project method driven. Most big firms have created IP, however there are 2 things which makes the use of this IP inefficient : One – as technology evolves rapidly, the IP doesn’t - resulting in dated IP which serves purpose only during the vendor sales pitch and Two – the use of IP is not internalized by a large part of the project team as these firms have too large a resource pool to invest money and effort to insure that the entire team is trained in the use of IP. The result is that clients do not derive the intended benefit from IP and projects tend to get driven by individualistic ways making much of the success people dependent.
Lack of Client Readiness – Most clients jump from Business Case to Vendor Selection and then Straight into Implementation. In a rush to save a few weeks on readiness evaluation, clients skip this important step and land up paying in several months of delay later. An enterprise CRM initiative is complex and mission critical. There are multiple direct and indirect stake holders involved. Can 2 horses running in different directions pull a chariot?? Assessing your organization’s readiness, setting expectations and allowing potentially impacted functions time to accommodate the changes that the CRM initiative will bring about is extremely critical to success. Interestingly this important area is not even on the agenda of most big Vendors when they pursue an implementation/upgrade.
At Lima CRM, our management team has been witness to several of these failed initiatives working for Big 5 consulting firms and tier 1 offshore vendors. We know what is missing when these firms make you a pitch. While glossy sales presentations and misleading representation of project experiences tends to take in innocent clients who do not have deep internal capabilities to assess a vendor’s true worthiness, we rely on providing you a team that has proven experience in executing the kind of projects that you have planned. We do not present you with successful cases studies and then staff the project with not right fits but with those currently available. This is possible as a result of our innovative business model that breaks away from the traditional utilization based approach of consulting firms.
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