It is a wishful fallacy to think a CRM program will bring order to a disordered mind. A good CRM application provides the means to organization, not the motivation, and business owners should consider this when selecting their CRM solution.
If you or your team does not see the value in easy data retrieval, insightful reporting, workflow automation, target marketing, and ultimately the time savings to be had with proper data management, then it doesn't matter which CRM program you use. Whatever money you spend on a CRM under these circumstances will be wasted.
You must crave order, or be willing to change. It is not dissilimar to what I tell people when they believe leaving Act! for a more expensive solution will deliver a different outcome. It won't. It just relocates the problem and escalates costs.
A well executed CRM implementation manifests the business objectives. For instance, if your company wants to track transactional data, contracts, sold goods, projected income and the like, your CRM will be built to reflect that. If not, it will come to look like Outlook - where all good data goes to die.
The following quote was not written by a CRM consultant, but it could have been.
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change.
~ Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve
~ Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve
