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From the ashes of failed enterprise-level CRM projects has come foresight for midmarket companies in their quest for customer understanding.
When Southwestern/Great American Inc. set out to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system from SAP AG, the Nashville, Tenn.-based company thought it had its ducks in a row. But when it came time to gather user input, a key business sponsor airily informed IT that having risen through the sales ranks years before, he would speak for the company's salespeople.
Project leader and senior business analyst Ryan Tabor was skeptical. "I told him, 'Even though you've done the job, we really should meet with the people who'll be using this [system] now,'" Tabor recalls. But the executive held his ground.
So when the SAP CRM went live at the $200 million-plus direct-marketing company, problems abounded. "We spent 75% longer in post-project support than we had budgeted, revising all these small processes," Tabor says. "The system had salespeople recording all kinds of activity stats that
really didn't matter but reflected what a manager wanted to see."
Midmarket enterprises getting serious about CRM can learn plenty of lessons from larger enterprises, whose expensive, often highly publicized train wrecks caused analysts to estimate a few years back that only a fifth to a third of CRM projects would succeed. Moreover, midsized businesses earned battle scars of their own during their early CRM efforts, and they're now putting those lessons to use in an emerging body of best practices.
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