Hot Seat: Take My Advice, Please

At the recent Frost & Sullivan "Realizing the Potential of CRM to Drive Revenue and Growth" Executive Summit, CRM magazine had the opportunity to meet with several industry executives. During their conversations, Editor Ginger Conlon asked: If you could give one piece of advice to CRM project leaders, what would it be? The responses: "Make sure that what you're doing adds value to the actual [users], not just the managers." --Ed Daihl, president, Baan CRM, PLM, and SCM, Baan "Talk to customer references and make sure you know what you're buying. Make sure you're getting the value and the adoption rates. Get what you're paying for and use what you get." --Jim Steele, president, worldwide operations, Salesforce.com Inc. "The number one thing is to scope and plan for the entire engagement and establish discipline milestones along the way. But then expect that things will change along the journey. Anticipate, plan, and budget for those things." --Roger Siboni, president and CEO, E.piphany Inc. "Look for CRM applications that deliver business capability, business flows, and information flows--not features and functionality. Features and functionality are relevant, but not as much as information, process improvements, and the business flows that the application delivers." --Lisa Arthur, vice president, services and CRM product marketing, Oracle Corp. "In any CRM initiative, that there is a leader is important in itself. It's also important to deliver tangible results in the earliest time frame possible, and those results have to resolve a very specific pain in the organization. Implement CRM gradually, but rapidly get to the first phase. Aim to get quick, measurable results and delight users over time." --Tim Fargo, general manager, SalesLogix "CRM is really knowing what your performance indicators are in the organization. Everybody has their own goals, and you have to know what are the targets to improve those individual goals. Then it comes to operational excellence, to performance improvement, to revenue enhancement at that level, and that's how you can really target bottom-line efficiency and the success of CRM." --Dr. Patric Timmermans, director of marketing and product management, Baan CRM