When Failure Is an Option in CRM Projects

Why is the failure rate for CRM projects so high?

Depending on whose statistics you read, CRM projects fail at a rate of 50% to 80%. That means that I have spent the last twenty years of my life in an industry where the industry standard is failure. How can this be?

Of course, you have to first define what you mean by failure.

• Does it mean that the system was never launched or that it was launched and then turned off?

• Does it mean that the system is still running but is only used by 80% of the users? By 50%? 20%?

• Does it mean that the system is underused (people use it but do not record all of their interactions and do not use it as intended)?

• Does it mean that it is not meeting its original objectives, or that it is only partially meeting those objectives?

Obviously, the statistics are meaningless unless we understand the definition of failure, how measurements are being made, and how the survey was conducted. Still, a 50% to 80% failure rate is frightening and worthy of discussion.

So what makes CRM systems fail?

Twenty years ago, the hardware and software were both unreliable. That alone was enough to make systems fail.

Later, hardware got much better but software was still problematic.

Still later, the best software titles were very good. Software could not really be blamed for project failures any longer (unless, of course, you made an especially bad software selection)

Here is the real reason that CRM systems fail more often than ERP systems: Salespeople did not ...