Kissing your sister and joining the 70% club

CRMAcceleration event
I had the privilege of speaking at a CRMAcceleration event hosted by The Sugar Refinery in London last Thursday (13th May). It was a great event and very well organized. I was impressed with how accessible and engaged the SugarCRM execs are with their customers and market.

Apart from taking the opportunity to poke fun at the enigmatic world of British politics, the topic of my talk was "Accelerating Sales Velocity with an Integrated CRM-DMS Solution". I looked at how integrating SugarCRM and KnowledgeTree through a module called iNetDocs (written by a KnowledgeTree partner in Paris – iNet Process) can empower sales agents by ensuring they have the right information when they needed it in the sales cycle. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today - if you want to hear a webcast of a similar talk you can download it here: SugarCRM-KnowledgeTree WebCast,  and you can get the community edition of the integration module here: iNetDocs 

The 70% club
What I want to talk about today is the 70% club. Several speakers from SugarCRM and other independent CRM practitioners mentioned this infamous club that you really, really don't want to join. Apparently 70% of CRM implementations across all vendors fail. There are many reasons for this, and one of the leading reasons highlighted was “lack of clear business goals”. In essence you really need to know what you want to achieve before you have a fighting chance of having a successful CRM implementation. One of the speakers showed a slide of actual customer quotes along the lines of: “We need a CRM system by next week. Can you help?”. Of course just installing some software because you have it probably won’t achieve anything more than taking up some disk space and providing a few hours of amusement.

But these free CALS are so shiny...
Hey, I thought this was KnowledgeTree’s document management blog, what’s with all the CRM talk? Well, the commonalities between a successful CRM and document management or just about any other software implementation are obvious.

Following my talk, one of the delegates asked me a great question, it’s one I get asked a lot: “Why would I buy KnowledgeTree when I can get SharePoint free by using all those CALS I have?”

There is always a slight murmur from the audience and some uncomfortable shifting in seats when this question is asked. After all, putting a speaker on the spot like that and the potential for any sort of embarrassment just isn’t British! Still I had been deriding the prowess of England’s sports teams, so I guess I had it coming. On the face of it I understand why one might think this is a tough question – there seems to be a sentiment that you just can’t compete with free stuff, particularly when it has the critical mass of an organization like Microsoft behind it.

My response to this question is always the same. I could talk about KnowledgeTree’s incredibly frugal hardware requirements. I could talk about how easy it is to install – taking only a matter of minutes rather than weeks to configure and setup without any help from consultants. I could mention the fact that because KnowledgeTree is a point solution, users find it very easy to understand rather than getting lost in a powerful but daunting and monolithic application like SharePoint. I could, but I don’t.

Kissing your sister
Instead, I simply say, “Choosing SharePoint over KnowledgeTree just because you have the CALS is like kissing your sister or asking her to the prom just because she happens to live in the same house as you”. Although some laughter generally follows my response, the point is made. We had just been hearing all morning how your CRM implementation would fail unless you had clear business objectives from the start – just getting “a CRM system” or “a document management system” for that matter is not a recipe for success. When that system is a powerful yet daunting and somewhat monolithic application like SharePoint, just installing it because you have the CALS is almost certain to lead to a failed implementation.

So when your Operations Manager finds a spare server, decides to play at applications developer (or at least configurer) for a day and proudly tells you they they have installed SharePoint because you have “all those free CALS”, tell him you are not about to join the 70% club and you don’t kiss your sister. At least not like that.