Toys Not Included: Making CRM a Company-wide Strategy

A while back I was asked what I thought was the toughest challenge to overcome when introducing CRM to a company. I thought for a moment about things like value proposition and convincing sales people to share their contacts. After seriously thinking about it, I am compelled to answer that the toughest conversation I have with customers is around the impact of CRM across their business. While ROI and CRM tool-selection / deployment are usually the first topics to emerge, discussing the idea that CRM is for everyone in the company (not just sales, or marketing or customer service) has always been the most challenging to address. That's because, to many customers, the idea of everyone having access to CRM translates to paying for more licenses or including additional stakeholders who may not be completely on board with the concept. Both of these objections immediately reveal that many companies either see CRM as "the tool" or the "thing" sales uses to manage customers.

Engaging in the "company-wide CRM" conversation makes business sense. It forces people to think about CRM as a strategic initiative; one that carefully orchestrates plans and methods for winning and retaining customers. CRM is more than the tool we use to manage the customer lifecycle. It is "A vehicle to connect all the people in your company with the vision of improving the central relationships of your business through meaningful interactions[i]." When you define it that way, CRM must be used by everyone who contributes to the customer relationship; even if the CRM tool itself is deployed in phases.

Approaching CRM as the exclusive project of a single organization (usually sales, marketing, or support) is common. A sales or support organization for example (at law firms ...