6/15/2020 On CRM: How To Save A Failed Salesforce Implementation

5,009 views | Jun 11, 2020, 01:00pm EDT

On CRM: How To Save A Failed

Salesforce Implementation
Gene Marks Contributor
Small Business Strategy
I write about technology developments for small business owners.

Frustrated with CRM GETTY

Over the years my firm has been asked to resurrect many failed customer
relationship management applications. It doesn't matter whether it's
Salesforce or any number of their competitors. The reasons are always the
same and what I’ve learned is that finding out those reasons why a CRM
implementation failed will determine the best course of action for
rescuing it…or perhaps not all.

Even the best CRM systems are difficult to implement. They take
discipline and regular, consistent effort. They require a good
administrator and a project team made up of dedicated, positive
employees and a competent outside consultant. Most importantly, every
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6/15/2020 On CRM: How To Save A Failed Salesforce Implementation

project needs to have management fully behind it. I've found that if people
are blaming things on the CRM system it's almost always not the CRM
that’s the cause of their problems. In almost all the cases it's operator
error. It's like giving a soccer player a baseball bat and telling him to hit a
home run. Wrong person. Wrong tool. 

If this sounds familiar then that’s good news. Because now you can move
forward to reverse the mess, and a great place to start is by reading
Melanie Fellay's piece on SalesforceBen, a support and resource site for
the popular CRM platform. Her recommendations are really not
Salesforce specific. They apply to any CRM system.

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Fellay is now the CEO of Spekit, a provider of digital training tools based
in Denver. Before that she was the Head of Business Operations at
another company that was struggling with their Salesforce system. She
saved it from failure. How? By doing the kinds of things we should all be
doing before we implement a CRM system.

She spent a considerable amount of time reading about Salesforce and

general CRM implementations. She put a stop to all usage, reviewed her
company’s sales processes and then leaned on a few external tools to
analyze the data in the system as it related to those processes. She
identified a team of internal champions and gave them the authority to
help her re-boot the platform. She asked the team to break down the
project into smaller pieces and tackled each one at a time

"This new Salesforce implementation was going to be a challenge and

require buy-in from end-users across the board to truly be successful," she
wrote. "My hope was that delivering on some of these small wins early on
would demonstrate to these key end-users that my objective was truly to
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6/15/2020 On CRM: How To Save A Failed Salesforce Implementation

make their lives easier not harder…which in return would help me gain
their “champion” support – and it did.”

She also implemented a complete data cleaning overhaul and then set
about on a refreshed approach to training and documentation. Ultimately,
she conquered "The Beast" as she called it. But there are two things that
she inferred in her tale that deserve greater attention.

The first is her title. Melanie is now a CEO but even at her prior company
she was a senior executive. I don't recommend that the top person in an
organization get so deeply involved in a CRM rescue. But it remains vital
that this type of a project is run by a very senior manager in a company.
Someone who is tasked with getting the job done and has a strong enough
personality to deflect all the usual complaints and pushback and instead
stay focused on achieving an objective. That person should have the team
of champions report to him or her and give them the power to do what
they need to do in order to achieve their agreed-on deliverables. In every
CRM implementation that I’ve been involved - new or rescued - it's always
the senior management person that makes the difference between success
and failure.

The second important thing to note is commitment. Melanie said that her
team was considering replacing Salesforce with a homegrown solution.
"That solution didn’t make sense to me," she wrote. "Even though I was
new to Salesforce, I stared at the Salesforce tower under construction in
the heart of San Francisco every day from our office windows…so my gut
told me that a homegrown CRM couldn’t possibly compete."

She was right to resist that temptation. Replacing her existing system
would not have solved the problem because – I’m convinced – her users
would likely fail with any CRM system. Replacing a great system like
Salesforce with any one of its competitors would be like replacing a BMW
for a Mercedes. They're both excellent vehicles that will get you to where
you're going fast and safe. Melanie rightly determined that Salesforce
wasn't the problem. It was the way it was implemented. Given the amount
of money invested in it so far, it would've been a waste of resources to
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start fresh with something new, especially when knowing that Salesforce
can do the trick in the long run. So she stuck to her guns. Good for her.

Failed CRM systems are rarely due to the software. It’s almost always due
to the implementation. Before you throw your system out the door, take a
hard look in the mirror. With the right approach and the right people
involved, your CRM system can be resurrected from the dead and put to
good use. It may make much more sense to invest your resources in doing
that, rather than starting from scratch with something else. It certainly did
for Melanie.

In fact, she learned so much from that experience she left to launch Spekit
to address some of these problems. Good for her.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Gene Marks

I was a former senior manager at KPMG and since 1994 the owner of the Marks Group
PC, a 10-person customer relationship management consulting rm based outside…
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