Five Easy Steps to CRM Failure

by Ian Heller, Real Results Marketing

It’s so easy to fail at CRM that any distributor can do it. Unlike other unsuccessful programs that may have limited consequences, failing at CRM lets you experience the full range of disastrous results with a single effort.

Just follow these five, easy steps:

Buy a complex and fully integrated system with every feature you might want, ever. Don’t hold back – let your requirements go wild! Your IT department will love you because the integration will take twice as long and cost twice as much as you budgeted. That’s called job security!

Focus on management control instead of sales enablement. Hey, we all want to know what those sneaky reps are up to when we’re not watching, right? So, let’s put in a system that gives us tracking on everything they do. As we all know, sales reps love data entry, so this one’s a double win: we get control and account managers get to type out call reports – Every. Single. Day.

Combine your CRM implementation with an extensive and in-depth analytics initiative. Those sales reps are going to need some data, so while we’re putting in the CRM, we’ll do an analytics implementation at the same time. Heck, some CRMs have wonderfully difficult analytics integration requirements built in, which will really help us slow down the implementation. Just say no to CRMs that make it easy to get the analytics your reps need!

Avoid CRMs designed for distribution. Most distributors do a lot of buy/sell transactions, but most CRMs are designed for large orders with long selling cycles – like capital equipment, for example. Pipeline management is a major feature of the vast majority of CRMs but it is irrelevant for most distributor transactions. Good news: that unnecessary complexity and poor fit for distribution will be enormously helpful in getting your CRM to fail spectacularly.

Buy something really expensive, particularly if you haven’t used a CRM before. This is the holy grail of CRM disasters. The beauty of this tactic is that if management spends a ton of money on a CRM, they’ll spend a second fortune and potentially years of effort trying to make it work. This can drag out your CRM failure so that it does maximum damage to your sales productivity, morale in the field and the relationship between your reps and management.

If you follow this easy guide to CRM failure, you’ll guarantee these exciting, disastrous results:

Lose money: Picking the wrong CRM is easy – just accept the claims of every software provider. You’ll have no trouble making the wrong choice for your business.

Waste time: One of the most exciting disastrous results you can look forward to is the organic, silent but relentless rejection of your CRM by your sales team. Don’t be alarmed by claims of success from the project owners – rest assured that behind the scenes, nearly everyone will be undermining this new system.

Alienate your sales force without even trying. But, wait – there’s more! Not only will you lose money and waste time, you’ll be able to anger your entire sales force as an extra bonus. That will lead to bad morale, turnover problems and declining customer service.

NO CRM! And this, my friends, is the true payoff. After all that effort, wasted money, damage to your culture and squandered time you could have devoted to other projects, you still won’t have a CRM that is actually used by most of your salespeople. Mission accomplished!

If You Insist on Not Failing, Read This:

For some reason, not all distributors seem to be excited about failing at CRM. To those executives, I say:

Put your reps first. Yes, I know you want control, you’re frustrated about sales productivity and you have anecdotal data about reps who are wasting time. But the majority of your reps are in sales because they want to make more money and so the CRM should be designed to make this possible – that’s why this sort of initiative is often called, “sales enablement.”

By focusing on helping your hard-working reps (which is most of them) sell more, you wind up building a system that is designed to give them the data they need to make more, better sales calls. If you focus on controlling the underperformers, you will build a system no one uses. The high performers won’t use it because it’s a waste of time. The low performers won’t use it because they’re experts at hiding their laziness.

Buy a CRM that leads to fast results. Look, you may someday find a large, complex and full-featured CRM that meets every conceivable need while creating harmony in Washington, DC along the way. But it’s a much smarter bet to start off with something simple, easy to install and relatively low cost. Learn to hit singles before you try for homeruns. If your first CRM attempt fails, it will be many years before the company has an appetite to try again. Start small; a simple CRM with a pilot that includes a small number of account managers. Make this work and then, wash, rinse and repeat.

Talk to distributors who have succeeded at CRM. As a long-time marketer, I can say candidly that many of my colleagues are – ahem – prone to puffery. Every CRM supplier is going to have stories of breathtaking success. Ignore that. Find a partner with whom want to work who can provide references of distributors that are similar to you who are using the product. Talk to those companies and find out what it’s really like to buy, install and implement that system.

Failing at CRM is a Management Problem, Not a Sales Rep Problem

You can succeed at CRM if you’re thoughtful, careful, are committed to making your sales reps more successful and you don’t try to transform your entire company with a single software purchase.

Once your sales reps adopt the CRM – because it’s helping them sell more – they’ll naturally start interacting with the software more frequently. Humans are like that – once we understand a system, we become curious about it, we explore it and we learn to master it. That means, over time, you’ll start getting the management reporting you need to improve sales productivity.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: If your new system can’t deliver better sales results next quarter, you bought the wrong system. Buy a tool that helps your “good” reps – the vast majority – succeed by giving them better data and tools that are designed to work for distributors.

You can avoid the “five easy steps to failure.” Of course, you’ll miss out on all of the disastrous results above, but that’s the price you pay for doing it right.

About the Author

Ian Heller, Real Results Marketing Ian Heller is the Founder and Senior Partner of Real Results Marketing, a consulting firm that has provided marketing and strategic planning expertise to the distribution industry for 16 years. Ian started his career as a truck unloader at a Grainger branch and left fifteen years later as the VP Marketing. Since then, Ian has served in similar roles at GE Capital and distributors like HD Supply, Corporate Express and Newark Electronics.

Ian holds an MBA at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and is a popular writer, speaker and consultant in the distribution industry.