But wait!

But wait. Here comes the bad news, also everywhere in industry media today. No less a source than Microsoft Corp has declared that CRM is failing businesses. However, those presenting the findings chose to site salespeople as the reason for today’s problems. One hundred mid-sized UK companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees were polled for the survey.

Sixty percent of sales directors surveyed see CRM as fundamental to the sales process, but only twenty-four percent of businesses say staff is using the CRM systems effectively. Furthermore, the bulk of sales directors tolerate their staff not making full use of the CRM system, with only twenty-two percent operating a zero-tolerance policy. In contrast, many are reporting holes in the data collection of the survey: Organizations cannot know how much revenue is lost through ineffective use of CRM or the lack of a CRM system, for example. In addition, the survey looked at the sales automation aspects of CRM systems and not service and marketing.

Barriers to the effective use of CRM listed in the survey include resistant sales staff, specifically things like the perception that CRM systems create extra work for little return, resistance to technology, dislike of being monitored, desire to keep hold of contacts, ongoing training, bad experiences with CRM in the past, CRM not being viewed as strategic, and generally difficulty and unreliability. Low user adoption is more likely to be the result of failures elsewhere rather than the root cause, though.

Poor implementation, process analysis, and training could be at the heart, aided and abetted by technology-based issues such as CRM systems being difficult to use. According to the results, fifty-six percent of the organizations surveyed did not use their CRM system for sales forecasting.