“I thought our CRM project was a big success,” the COO of a regional bank told me, “but it turns out that our team was just being good boy scouts.  They had adopted CRM because we told them that’s what they should do.  But it was a colossal additional burden on them, without providing any return or improving productivity.”

The fact is that judging the failure or success of CRM projects such as Salesforce, Dynamics CRM and other CRM solutions, can be more difficult than it seems.

Don’t Tell My Boss: But I Hate CRM

Research suggests that leadership’s opinion of CRM success is often different from the teams using CRM on the front lines.  And IT, Sales, Customer Service and Marketing can all have radically different opinions of an organization’s CRM solution.

Does a difference of opinion that always mean CRM is failing?  Absolutely not.  Sometimes an organization is going through a period of change and not everyone will agree that the change is resulting in the desired outcomes.  Just like a highway being built that causes some slow downs and detours for a while.  But if that period of change extends for months, and then years, and CRM is still experiencing problems … that’s a problem.

Expectations for CRM are high, but understanding success can be mystifying.  That’s why many sales, service and marketing executives are asking …

How Can I Tell if Our CRM is Succeeding or Failing?

What are the benchmarks?  Who will we compare ourselves to?  What expectations did our leaders and users have?  Has anyone bothered to see if it is making your business better for customers (that is the “C” in “CRM” after all)?  Where were we planning to go with this project anyway?  It seemed exciting in the beginning, but we feel lost right now and don’t know if we’ve made progress or not.

What businesses need is a …

Downloadable CRM Project Success Assessment

Well, C5 Insight has taken a first shot at building a Downloadable CRM Success/Failure Self-Assessment.  And while this is a first attempt at something that will likely see some fine-tuning, it is based on years of experience and research into the definition of CRM success, and the causes of CRM failure.  We’ve put a number of organizations that we work with through the assessment to establish some early benchmarks so you can rate how far along the journey you are compared with your peers.

Click here to download the CRM Success Self-Evaluation.

If you’re a manager or leader looking for insight into how you’re doing, this is a great start.

If you have a manager who should be evaluating the project, download the tool and quietly drop it on the boss’s desk!

And check back in with us after you’ve put the CRM Self-Assessment through the paces.  We want to make it better and better.