Maximize the ROI of Your CRM Solution: Learn How to Get the Most for the Least

with Joseph Juran's Pareto Principle might say, "Eighty percent of a company's profits come from 20 percent of its customers."

It's certainly true that the majority of businesses see most of their money coming from a disproportionately small segment of its customer base buying a specific segment of its offerings. When CRM is working right, it organizes efforts toward a focused goal. You define the most valuable clients and give them the right kind of attention. You define the most valuable products and facilitate their sale. It's a means of business expression.

"CRM is at a point in organizations where IT is not the owner, not even sales or marketing [are]," says Bob Sullivan, president of Infogrow, a CRM consultancy. "It needs to be a top-seeded tool; it has to be part of the fundamental strategy. Most organizations only use 40 percent of what a tool is capable of. They just set up the process and walk away, when it should be the one truth of every conversation."

Finally, companies will often find themselves bogged down in redundancies that cancel out the efficiency gains CRM can provide.

"Missing information is the usual reason a business adopts CRM," says Larry Goldman, president of consulting firm Amberleaf, "but if you find yourself having to integrate data sets within your own CRM system, it's just an added layer that's going to slow things down."

This is particularly key if you're using your CRM as a way of creating a workflow around central business objectives. The more complex the stream down to agents in the field gets, the more likely the message is to be lost.

Name your stakes—holders, that is

Whether the approach you take is top-down with a CRM czar, as Sullivan suggests, or something more oligarchical, to have good uptake, the relevant teams must be represented early.

"Have a representative from every type of user you expect to have on the system," Jennifer Pollard, director of product marketing at Microsoft Dynamics CRM, writes in an email to CRM. "Then work closely with this group to ensure the right processes are implemented and to test the system."

This has the virtue of both making teams companywide aware of and excited about CRM and also giving them a chance to define how it will be used. The worst thing for a new solution that's meant to broaden knowledge and teamwork is for it to be separated and unresponsive to the concerns of the broader ecosystem.

As Pollard writes, "The most important determinant of success is adoption."

When there is fundamental disagreement about the desired outcomes of CRM, there won't be much in the way of uptake and the project will likely fail. More than that, though, it has to be easy to use and provide actual value. The last thing anyone wants is more paperwork and processes. Make sure that everything your team is asked to do is worth their time or they will at best half-use it with scorn, at worst ignore it entirely.

Focus on small goals

The onboarding process for CRM is lengthy and paradigm-changing, and the temptation to collect missing data right away is hard to resist. However, "a lot of companies will overengineer," Plourde laments. "They'll overcomplicate what they're trying to measure. It 

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