Is your business ready for a CRM?

CRM systems and the named platforms people ask for appear in 824 of the 27,169 briefs we hold. A large proportion of those are second attempts — a CRM was bought, used for a few weeks, and quietly abandoned. The instinct afterwards is to blame the software and choose a different one, which reliably produces the same outcome.

A CRM does not create a sales process. It records one. If there is no process, the CRM has nothing to record, and what it actually becomes is a second address book that somebody has to keep updated for no visible return. That is the failure mode, and it is a readiness problem rather than a product problem.

The readiness test

Four questions. If you can answer all four without hesitating, a CRM will help. If you cannot answer two of them, buying one now will make things worse rather than better.

1. What are your stages? Not a theory — the actual steps an enquiry passes through, named the way your team already says them out loud.
2. Who owns a lead? One named person at any moment. If the answer is the team, nothing gets followed up, because a shared responsibility is nobody's.
3. What makes a lead move from one stage to the next? A specific event, not a feeling. Quote sent. Call happened. Deposit received.
4. What happens when nothing happens? Every process needs a rule for the lead that goes quiet, or your pipeline fills with things that are neither won nor lost.

The migration nobody budgets

Every CRM project has an existing pile of contacts somewhere: a spreadsheet, an inbox, three people's phones, an old system. Moving that in is consistently the most underestimated part of the project and the most common point at which the whole effort stalls.

The work is not the import itself, which is usually a file upload. It is everything before: deciding what is worth keeping, deduplicating the same person entered four ways, standardising fields that were never standard, and deciding what to do with the two thousand contacts nobody can identify.

The temptation is to import everything and clean it later. Later does not come, and the CRM opens on day one full of duplicates and dead records, which is exactly the impression that stops people trusting it. Importing less is almost always the better decision.

What actually makes people use it

Adoption is the whole game, and it does not come from training. It comes from the CRM being the easiest place to do something the person already needed to do.

• If enquiries arrive into it automatically, people go there because that is where the work is.
• If it drafts the follow-up they were going to write anyway, using it is faster than not.
• If it tells them what to do today, it replaces a decision rather than adding one.
• If updating it is a separate chore performed for management's benefit, it will not be updated, however good the training was.

That last point is the one that decides most implementations. A CRM that only serves reporting is a tax on the people entering data and a benefit to people who are not. It gets filled in badly, then not at all, and the reports it produces are wrong in ways nobody notices until a decision is made on them.

Start smaller than you think

The most successful implementations we see start with one pipeline, five stages and four fields, and stay there for a month before anything is added. The least successful start with every field somebody might one day want, which produces a form so long that people stop filling it in during the first week.

You can always add a field. Removing one after six months of partial data is considerably harder, and the partial data is worse than none, because it looks like information.