Select CRM Software First And Throw Good Money After Bad

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How one mistake can lead to a series of mistakes

***tier3square.shtml***So many companies select CRM software first, before they do any other planning at all. The only plan is to get CRM software in house, and to make sure it costs as little as possible, and has as many "features" as possible. No one likes to hear about their mistakes after the fact, so I decided to share some of my personal CRM experiences with companies that were sold software before they had any clue what they were going to do with it

So You'd Like To Save Some Money...

I've got a suggestion, don't spend it in the first place, because if you start buying CRM software and implementation services before you know what you want to do with your business, you're going to be taken for the value-added ride of your life!  I'm not trying to be funny. This is serious business. Especially now during these tough economic times.

Anyone who has some sense of financial responsibility would always want to spend as little money as possible. But here's the catch when it comes to CRM....it's not an expense, it's an investment. When you're investing money, you are always looking for a return on your investment. The amount you invest should be evaluated in terms of what you will receive. That makes sense doesn't it?

It just doesn't seem like this is the thought process when it comes to purchasing CRM software that's supposed to change the way you do business. Wait a minute! Don't you want to determine how you do business? Exactly!

Here are some gems from my past that I hope will enlighten you. Not to the power of developing a CRM strategy around your customers. No, I want to highlight just how much money you will flush down the toilet by letting a value-added reseller be your conduit to CRM success. So here we go!

CRM Software Is Like A Blank Check....To Your Consultant (VAR)

Just Had To Have A New Palm Pilot

I love this one because it is so simple and really demonstrates why you should never allow your emotional tie to gadgets and impulse buying control your life. This dates back to the 90's when the Palm Pilot first came onto the scene. Every one just had to have one, including me.

CRM software vendors scrambled to create conduits for Intellisync to synchronize the Palm data to their respective CRM applications. I was a business partner with one such CRM vendor called, well, let's just call it Begin. This was a distributed database with syncing capabilities. In fact, every client was a syncing client.

As a result, everyone had to "sync" in order to stay up to date, and to update everyone else. It was actually pretty painless...unless you enter something new into the mix!

Along comes the V.P. of Sales for one of my customers. This is one of those companies where the V.P. of Sales also oversees IT. Perfect match! So, he got his new Palm Pilot, loaded it up with data, set up the syncing process between the Palm and Begin and let her rip. Everything worked as advertised!

Soon, the novelty wore off and the Palm was set aside. The battery soon died and when the V.P. of Sales returned his attention to this Palm device, he noted that the batteries were dead, so.....he replaced them. Makes sense, right?

Since it had always worked as advertised, and because all of his data was now missing from the Palm device (dead batteries will do that), he decided to cradle it up and hit the sync button; thinking the data from the Begin CRM software database would repopulate his Palm Pilot. Sure it would, right after his Palm Pilot updated the Begin database!

Within 15 minutes, he was getting calls from all over the company that all of the Accounts and Contacts from the database were missing. You see, as he sunk his deletes out, these in turn sunk out to each and every syncing copy of the database.

Fortunately, there was one person on vacation who's computer was not syncing. They tracked me down and told me what had happened. So I drove 4 hours to get there and correct the problem. It took me an entire day to rebuild their system from the vacationers database. Fortunately, this user had all the data and not just a subset or it could have been really ugly.

Cost of Palm Pilot: $300 - Cost to Company: $3500 plus expenses. Cost of replacing database: Almost priceless

Territory Realignments

One of my customers, and I'm glad to say they came onboard before my tenure began, was a company many of you have heard of. So, I won't mention their names, because it's really not their fault. The fault lies with the vendor and the VAR for selling them a bag of goods.

One of the things I learned about this company was that they, for whatever reason, were constantly realigning their territories. They also had a fair amount of turnover. Well, the Begin database didn't have a CRM software solution out of the box (I eventually designed one for them), so a completely custom solution was designed ($$$$$). Unfortunately, it wasn't designed with territory realignments being considered.

As a result, I found myself spending many overnight sessions, brute-forcing these realignments which simply could not be automated with the selected technology. Do you think they were considering the cost of my consulting services when they did their initial CRM software budget? I doubt it! Life was good for me!

Scalability

One thing that really disturbed me about Begin was the way they went after large enterprises. After all, this thing started as a PIM and really hadn't changed all that much. This was CRM software that still had a proprietary database with no ODBC or OLEDB connectivity.

It's syncing engine, while extremely reliable, was not designed to run in multiple threads. This was only important because there was only one sync engine, with no ability to distribute the load across servers. So, then more users you had (and all users were syncers) the more CPU was being used as the process chugged away.

With one client, and it embarrasses me to say that it was the same as above, they had so many users that the server wasn't keeping up. There was some built in limit to how many requests could be made by a client so, updates weren't getting out fast enough.

We came to the rescue with a total hack. The request packets were fairly simply to mimic, so we made packets for each user, and used a batch file to pump these abnormal requests at the server. For the most part it worked, but how long do you think that expensive server is going to last while running 24 hours a day at 100% CPU utilization? We literally had to crash the server to do any work on it at all. Again, the client paid dearly in many ways for selecting the wrong product.

Process Automation at Major Healthcare Company

When I was first asked to do this project as a contractor for a major software / hardware company, I thought, heck this'll be a $30,000 job...in and out within a month. But, little did I know that big software companies don't do little jobs; even when they've rebranded the CRM Software Begin (actually a Personal Information Manager) with their own name.

After 3 months of onsite documentation - including an inexperienced consultant and a paid for Condo for he and his wife - we got 4 pages of chicken scratch for a design spec. So, when I got there (3 hour plane flight each way, each week) it became very clear that they wanted not only complex process automation, but integration with external calculation engines. Here I am armed with a product that, at the time, had no scripting, used Agents to automate tasks, and used DDE for all API communication - including to third party systems. By the way, DDE is now dead in case you were wondering.

I won't go through the entire process but will tell you that I billed 2000 hours in 6 months. My travel budget was $75,000. That was just my budget. There were two other consultants sitting around watching me do the work for the entire 6 months. Between software, services and recommended hardware, the project bloated to close to $1 million. And guess what....

It didn't meet their expectations. I had invented new ways of designing solutions with this product to meet the demand, but I couldn't guarantee how well it would perform. And the performance was horrible....SLOOOOOOWWWW!

It was a total and complete throw away for this company. But, I did great!

The Address Book at Major Financial Services Company

Another large company was convinced to purchase the wrong CRM software. This company new how many customer accounts it had going in. Yet, the table limit for Begin was some ridiculously low number. Since all tables were custom, meaning it didn't have out of the box Account and Contact tables, the limit was handled by creating separate tables for different ranges of the alphabet.

Yes, depending on who you were looking up, you had to figure out which address book they were in. Contacts were also handled this way, and had to have numerous connection controls on their forms to handle the fact that you couldn't know which Account table they belonged to.  I'm happy to say I didn't work on this project. Although I understand the Vendor upped the limit in a special build. It still wasn't enough, though. I can only imagine the syncing problems this company faced as it also had more users that the software allowed out of the box; and this limit too was raised in a special build. Please see the story about syncing above and try not to laugh.

Programming around these issues cost this company dearly. But the consultants were doing fine.

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