"Traditional" Sales Software (i.e.: CRM or Customer Relationship Management) rarely works for midsize organizations. It generally brings little or no ROI, generates unwanted complexity and squanders large amounts of time for both managers and users. IT consultancies (Gartner™, Meta Group™, Butler Group™, Accenture™…) acknowledge that 55% to 70% of all CRM implementations fail. The CRM industry often puts the blame on resistance to change and on insufficient upper management buy-in.

Here is a 30-point anectdotal overview of what in-house implementers generally say about their CRM/SFA experience. The problems with CRM are not merely pitfalls or side effects. They stem from the business model of traditional software vendors and the unique nature of the sales function.


Often unfit for the sales processes of midsize companies.

Most sales people find the prospect of entering and updating information in a database burdensome and needlessly time-consuming. They usually enjoy a great deal of freedom, and it is not in their interest to load a database with the very information that makes them valuable and hard to replace. They resist "commoditization."

Sales and customer service teams in midsize companies tend to be small and spread across locations, countries, or product lines. They have their own sub-management and unique objectives. CRM processes often clash with existing procedures, practices and local agendas. CEO's want to avoid anything that might stifle local entrepreneurship and destroy local value. Corporate Sales Managers may not have the authority required to impose a shared application to local leaders. Local managers lack the awareness, perspective and motivation required to spot and pursue cross-unit opportunities.

Midsize companies' sales and customer-service personnel have pre-existing ways to manage their customer relationships and do their jobs. Established patterns can make them reluctant to relinquish their personal tools (email application, PDA's, etc...) and adopt a management-controlled, enterprise-wide alternative. ERP's, accounting systems and dedicated enterprise applications already give them a wide array of tools and real-time information (e.g.: quotes, orders, email, shared calendar, campaigns, bug tracking, project management, document Management, etc.). The CRM functionalities that are redundant appear optional or unnecessary to many. Since the benefits of automation are more obvious than the benefits of integration, they do not understand why they should switch tool. Their argument against CRM is strong: "why fix it if it isn’t broken". Some legacy tools are never retired. They overlap and conflict with the CRM system. Integration and customer-centricity cannot be achieved.

Sales software implementations are hard to manage and easy to derail. The benefits brought by CRM are benefits to the organization as a whole and not necessarily to the individual department or user. A system that integrates all the front office needs of an organization into a single tool will never be as powerful in each one of its functionalities as a series of dedicated applications. Striking a balance between the common good and the legitimate needs of the users can be complex and risky. Ignorance (in the face of software complexity), power struggle, personnality, and fear can get in the way. They can derail the process at an early stage or subtly strip the system of its benefits (through "opt-out" exceptions).

Processes embedded in CRM systems cannot be enforced; only written procedures can. When CRM users do not conform to the many non-written procedures imposed by a CRM system, they usually blame the software, and in doing so, blame the sponsors of the system. Implementers generally fail to understand that everything that the system asks of users should be written and approved by both higher and lower hierarchy in all the departments involved. This is essential to ensure that management requests and CRM processes are reasonable and do not conflict with each other. Every procedural decision has to be made with the CRM system in mind. This requires a high level of CRM knowledge and commitment from all the managers involved.

Likewise, Sales or General Managers seldom foresee that employees will not adjust to the new system if their roles and job descriptions are at odds with the CRM processes. Managers tend to underestimate the importance of the change involved, how alien the software is to employees, and that their own methods must change. Roles and job descriptions are not revised. Goals are not defined. Fairness and effectiveness are not verified. Change is not introduced. Employees are not properly trained, and rewarding schemes are not adjusted.

The need to consolidate and share information (account profile, contact data, opportunities, calls, correspondence, quotes, orders, shipments, payment history, profitability, customer support issues...) is proportionate to the size of the company. Midsize corporations have less need to simulate a one-to-one relationship with their customers in order to sell and create loyalty. Instead, they rely on empowered sales people to listen to their customers, understand or uncover what they need, obtain it from their factories and guarantee that their promises are kept.

Sales people cannot be coerced into using a CRM system. Prudent sales managers will not enforce policies that could backfire if critics find sympathetic ears higher in the hierarchy (i.e. their CEO). Vigorous enforcement may be an option in giant organizations; it is not in midsize companies where sales people play a crucial role (all the more so in "labor-protective" Europe and in "consensus-driven" Asia).

The success of CRM software is contingent on user adoption and education. In most sales environments, sales people can barely afford the time it takes to learn new products. They do not have time or mindshare for software training. They do not have time to study a complex enterprise software application - let alone "Windows" if they are PC-challenged. Unlike most other employees, they are goal-driven; they are not bound to a tool. They can do their job and succeed without the CRM system. So all it takes to derail an implementation and corrupt the reports produced by a CRM system is a PC-challenged sales person or one who shows brilliant results but defies the CRM policies.

The benefits of CRM integration can only be fully realized if Sales, International Sales, Customer Service, Helpdesk and Marketing, all use the CRM system. Midsize organizations come in all shapes and forms. In some of them, all the department involved in front-office activities report to a single boss. In others, they do not. They may be totally independant from each other or they may report to other departments' managers. In some organizations, Customer Service and Helpdesk activities are placed under the control of an operations or production manager. In others, marketing itself (or product management) is seen as a back-office activity. When this is the case, and unless the CRM implementation is initiated by the C.E.O of the company himself, the benefits of integration are unlikely to materialize.


Traditional sales software generally produces poor data.

CRM solutions tend to offer a wide array of interlocking features that form a whole. Users have to learn and understand too many things that they don't need to get to the one they do and to properly enter information that others will use.

Sales activity is hard to quantify. Reports produced by CRM applications draw moderate credibility. This is especially true when systems are not used in a uniform and universal manner. CRM is too dependent on the diligence, goodwill and skill of the users.

CRM databases are filled with prospects and direct customers, as well as distributors, sub-distributors, retailers, representatives and their own customers and prospects. The information may have been entered by sales people, customer service agents, and marketing staff or by the contacts themselves through the Internet. The CRM data lacks homogeneity and integrity, and it is perishable. It is a poor source of information for the marketing department (let alone for "data-mining").

More information is a good thing only if it is "pre-qualified." If it is not, activity increases but productivity decreases. A large proportion of the people who contact a company will never buy from it. Some customers place orders without ever being contacted by a salesperson. Yet, both these types of contacts find their way into CRM databases and generate additional follow-up or maintenance work. While this influx of information can clearly lead to new business, it more surely drains sales resources. What makes a difference in sales is not so much how many contacts one calls as it is the number of times one calls existing contacts.

CRM applications generally involve personnel from a single organization. Yet, the people involved in the sale of a given product are often outside of the organization: distributors, agents, and independent representatives. The reseller market remains mostly opaque to its sales and marketing management.


Traditional sales software is complicated, rigid and risky.

Most users are generally not willing or able to juggle the relationships between contacts, companies, leads, opportunities or customer-service tickets in the database. They do not know how to properly handle duplicates. CRM is generally implemented by the sales team with limited involvement from the IT staff (often uneasy with CRM). For both, maintaining CRM data is a daunting task.

Client/server CRM programs are difficult to install, tweak, fix, maintain and upgrade. They are among the most complex applications running on PC networks today. Many midsize organizations find the long implementations (30, 90 or even 180 days) unacceptable. The cumulative complexity of the application, network and client OS is overwhelming for them.

The complexity of CRM systems is often overlooked by non-users in top management positions who in turn neglect or underestimate the training needs of their teams and the need to adjust processes, roles and attitudes.

Importing and exporting data in and out of a CRM system is extremely complex, time consuming and costly. The conversion of legacy system or commercial database information into usable CRM records typically requires that this information be cleaned, reformatted and imported in as many layers or steps as there are tables in the target database. The structure of the CRM database has to be well understood and long routines have to be written and tested.

Importing 1,000 or 10,000 contact records into a database costs as much as importing one or several million records. The cost involved in populating CRM systems does not significantly shrink with the size of the company. Since this cost is generally larger than that of the CRM software itself in large systems, one can imaginge how it can become prohibitive in midsize businesses.

Information technology is usually the turf of the Operations, Finance/Accounting and IT departments. CRM can subtly disturb a pre-existing balance of power and trigger adverse reactions in the firm. When CRM claims to help a company become more customer-focused, it also promises more power to the sales department.

Decision makers sometimes fail to adequatly involve sales, customer service or marketing employees in the implementation and management of the CRM system. They give the upper hand to IT, accounting or operations employees whose culture is far removed from that of front office people. At best, this creates a useless CRM tool that wastes everybody's time. At worst this puts sales, marketing and customer service under the direct control of back-office managers and it destroys these departments. Either way, this goes against the objective to acieve more customer-centricity.

At best, CRM makes the front-office departments of the organization more customer-centric, not the organization as a whole. Everybody participates in the selection and implementation of an ERP system, and everybody uses it: manufacturing, purchasing, logistics, materials planning, general & cost accounting, design & manufacturing engineering, quality, human resources, IT, sales, marketing, customer service, etc.. This is not the case with CRM. CRM is a sales, customer service and marketing endeavor. Most other departments of the organization feel unconcerned by CRM and by the data it generates. As far as they are concerned, the system that matters is the ERP (or the accounting system). So while the front-office departments of the organization may become more customer-centric, the rest of the company remains largely "production-centric" or "accounting-centric"; in other words: "self-centric".

(1) If the departments that should be customer-centric by their very nature (sales, customer service and marketing) are not customer-centric enough, and (2) if they fail to help the rest of the organization be sufficiently responsive to its market, then software alone may not be the cure that the company needs.

While most people see accounting systems and ERP's as the nervous system of their organization, they tend to regard CRM as an exoskeleton that exists at the periphery of the business to structure and consolidate its relations with its environment. The scope of CRM and its ramifications within the overall IT and process infrastructure of the organization is unclear to many. Because, CRM only involves three departments, people tend to see it as an isolated or standalone application like a CAD package, a word processor or a spreadsheet. This confusion often leads to a gross under-appreciation of the cost and time it will take for the organization to build and absorb the application. As a result, decision makers often declare victory too soon after the system is installed and unknowingly pull the plug on their CRM initiative.

CEO's often see IT investments in sales as a possible distraction and as an unnecessary injection of complexity and rigidity into a field that "does not require it" and is hard to "tame". They may even question whether IT provides any ROI at all. If so, they will not put their weight behind the CRM project or embrace the process adjustment it may entail.

CRM systems are rigid. Archaic designs or software flaws are hard to fix without putting existing data at risk. The underlying organization or business processes that CRM applications frame are likely to be challenged by evolving requirements and technology. Flexibility, swiftness and focus are essential to the survival of midsize organizations. They cannot afford to manage complexity in anything but their core competency. CRM's rigidity is all the more detrimental considering the high costs involved.

CRM systems are error prone. Giving individuals the right to modify and delete shared data is bound to generate frustrating human errors and incomprehension. Synchronization between servers does not work any better (e.g. if 2 individuals update the same note entry between two synchronizations, the work of one of these users is going to be automatically erased).

Many non-core functionalities in client/server CRM applications are not finalized at the time of release. They are user-unfriendly or have bugs.

CRM is not without risks. With ERP, it is the past of the company that is recorded and accessible through databases. With CRM, it is its future, pending sales and ongoing negotiations, on an unprecedented scale, in real time and with full details. Customers, products, prices, quantities, negotiation stages and notes are no longer aggregated at lower levels in the hierarchy and kept hidden locally. Never before have people had access to so much critical information so easily, via a PC client or an Internet browser. Never before have managers had the technical capability to access information that was beyond their jurisdiction or scope of responsibility (e.g. foreign sales pipeline). With CRM and data proliferation, leaks are more destructive and less traceable.

Paradoxically, CRM vendors rarely rely on positive, articulate or quantifiable arguments to sell their product. There are very few hard benefits and a lots of intangibles in their pitch. No ROI talk or calculation. In essence, they propagate the idea that companies need front-office automation and a "360° view" of their customers to remain competitive (as if it were only a matter of common sense, and as if CRM was the only way to increase front-office productivity). They capitalize on the insatiable "thirst" that corporations and their managers have for predictability and control. The pitch is in itself revealing of the limits of CRM.