CRM Failures: Businesses Failing to Use CRM Software to Full Potential

I think there is an error in my headline today. It should read: Businesses are still failing to use their SOFTWARE to its full potential. How many IT projects fail after 1 year? How many White Elephants or “Islands of Databases” do you have in your organization? This picture best describes why most projects fail, [...]

CRM: Solutions to its Classic Flaws -I

There’s a reason CRM is the fastest-growing category of enterprise applications, with worldwide revenues projected to grow more than 50% annually to reach £77 billion in 2007 (META Group). By automating and integrating a host of customer-related processes, vendors of high-end CRM suites promise enterprises the ability to increase revenues, streamline processes, and reduce costs. But while CRM vendors wax on about the virtues of their solutions, they neglect to discuss seven less appealing characteristics of these packages: 1. Excessive license and implementation costs, 2. Endless implementation timelines,
3. Technologically complex deployment, 4. Organizational upheaval, 5. Poor adoption rates, 6. Weak links in the solution set, 7. Elusive ROI.
Any one of these factors would be enough to trigger second thoughts about investing in an expensive CRM suite. Taken together, they cry out for an alternative. Online sales management is a particularly strong alternative, offering many of the benefits of CRM in a small fraction of the time and expense-and none of the chaos.