It’s not the software dummy

Here’s something that I have always thought about and it seems am on the same wavelength as Shane over at ITWorldCanada. The issue here is regarding the importance that we need to accord to CRM products and in my opinion also how new a thing is CRM. Sure, the term is not more than a couple of decades old but as a stratagem CRM has existed as long as business and trade has been there.

So, the question to ask is what is it that makes a CRM endeavor a success? How much of it is the software and whether do you really need CRM software at all? To the latter question, lets say we do need the software but how do we then account for the astonishing rate of failure with CRM deployments.

The vendors are never going to agree that its the product. If it is the methodology then perhaps it means that companies are investing too much faith in the software and not bothering to get right the human aspect that involves intuition, lateral thinking, brilliant sales, good follow-ups, obtaining information from data and using it and other such skills.

It is strange that such a crucial aspect of CRM, the human angle, fails one CRM project after another. Its ironical that companies have many aspects of CRM well covered before they go in for a CRM deployment only to see things spiral downward later.

Tags: crm, customer relationship management, open source, sales