What You Should Really Seek from Phase 1 of Your CRM Project

You may think that your goal in the initial phase of a CRM project is to finally, at long last, gain access to useful management reports, or perhaps, should you be so bold, to increase sales or improve customer service.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but neither of these goals, admirable as they may be, deserves to be your most important objective.Your most critical job in Phase 1 is to sell your troops on the importance of using the new system, and thereby achieve your most important goal: high adoption levels.

How do you gain high adoption levels? The same way you succeed in selling most products and services-via high perceived value, low cost (with cost in this situation typically measured in terms of learning time and usability), and serious motivation and management.

Here is what these attributes mean in the real world of your company:

First and foremost, provide your sales and marketing people with clean data. If you tell me that now that you are giving me a shiny new system, ,I have to stop selling and become a data entry clerk for a few weeks, well, that is not quite the turn-on you might have expected.

One way around this problem is to salt the system with sales leads. If you don't already have data, buy some lists and hire some temps to make qualifying calls. Salting a system with leads is a sure way to give not only your troops, but yourself, a head start. If you already have data, then merge the duplicates, update the addresses, and in general clean it up. By the way, cleaning and importing the data can sometimes be the single largest expense in Phase 1.