One of the larger causes of CRM implementation failures in small businesses is over-engineering.  Small businesses have a need to be agile and flexible, and many a CRM implementation tries to put too many restrictions and enact too rigid a process to make the tool useful for a small business.

Several years ago, I was involved with an implementation of a sales process for a small company of about 50 people.  The sales manager at the time wanted to implement a 15-step process for sales that had so many forks and loops that it took a multi-page Visio diagram to figure the whole thing out.  The process was implemented (despite my warnings of its over-complexity) and the adaption rate ended up being near zero.  Since so many dollars had been wasted on a failure, the sales manager was fired.  Since I had registered my objections at the time, I was brought back in to review the process and simplify it.  In reality, the sales team needed flexibility in their process.  They needed to have multiple actions available to them at multiple times, but there were really three major steps to their sales process – qualification, proposal, and close.  At each of these stages, there were elements that contributed to the completion of that step (demos, meetings, proposal documents, etc.) but the exact sequence of those actions needed to be fluid to deal with the different types of products and customers that the organization dealt with.  By simplifying their process while still providing the tools they needed to effectively measure the process, the sales reps were given more control of how they sold, and management was still provided with effective measurements (how long from initial qualification until a demo was performed, how many sales resulted without a face-to-face meeting, etc).

Other special considerations besides process complexity should be given for CRM implementations for SMBs.  Jim Berkowitz recently wrote an article outlining three key steps to CRM success in SMBs.  It is worth a read for anyone who is involved in such an implementation.  I would only add to his list by cautioning against over-engineering.  It is tempting to do, especially from the management perspective, but if the software becomes too complex to be usable, its adaption rate will be low, and its benefits will never be realized.

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