On CRM: How To Save A Failed Salesforce Implementation

Salesforce crm implementation- 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 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.

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