CRM is more than a system project

A company can have a good CRM system and still have a poor customer picture. Dashboards can be in place. The fields can be defined. Leadership can have clear expectations for registration.

Nevertheless, important customer information may still sit in email, personal notes, Excel files, or in employees' heads. Sales registers something. Customer service something else. Some employees document well, while others use the system sporadically.

Then the company has a CRM system. But it does not necessarily have a shared CRM practice. That is an essential difference.

For me, CRM is therefore more than a technology project. It is a leadership, workflow, and collaboration task.

When CRM becomes reporting for leadership

Many salespeople know the question:

"Have you updated CRM?"

It can of course be a legitimate question. Information must be registered if the system is to have value.

The problem arises when this becomes the employee's primary experience of CRM.

If the system is primarily perceived as a place where information is registered so that leadership can follow activity, forecast, and pipeline, CRM easily becomes something done for the system rather than something that helps the employee in their work.

Then it is not surprising if usage becomes uneven.

Research on CRM acceptance among salespeople has shown that perceived usefulness is a very important factor for whether the system gets used. Clear expectations, ease of use, and support from the immediate manager also matter.

This aligns well with what I have seen myself.

When CRM usage is weak, the temptation is to respond with more mandatory fields, stricter registration requirements, and tighter control.

Sometimes clearer discipline is needed. But leaders should also ask another question:

What does the employee actually get back for using the system well?

Value must also start with the employee

This is especially important in sales. Salespeople are out with customers, moving between meetings, and need to keep track of relationships, opportunities, agreements, history, and next steps. A good CRM setup should make this easier. The salesperson should quickly be able to understand what has happened with the customer, what has been agreed, who else has been involved, what opportunities exist, and what should happen next.

Then the question also shifts from: "What do I have to register?" to: "What do I and others need to know so that we can follow up the customer better?"

That is, in my view, a far better starting point for CRM adoption.

A recent study of 126 larger companies using CRM also underscores the importance of user involvement. The researchers found that involving users was a central mechanism for handling both system complexity and uncertainty around user needs in CRM implementation.

But employee value is only half the picture.

The customer meets the company, not the departments

The customer rarely relates to the company's org chart. For the customer, the distinction between sales, customer service, marketing, order processing, operations, or other functions is not necessarily very interesting. The customer meets the company. Nevertheless, knowledge about the customer may be organized along internal boundaries.

The salesperson knows one part of the story. Customer service knows another. A third employee has received an important email. A fourth has had a conversation that was never documented.

One customer should not exist as five different versions in the company.

Here, in my view, lies one of the biggest gains from good CRM practice.

CRM can become the company's shared information foundation around the customer, not just a sales tool.

This requires that central functions with customer contact contribute to and use the information.

Payne and Frow's classic CRM framework describes CRM precisely as a strategic, cross-functional, and process-oriented discipline. They point, among other things, to information management and integration across different customer channels as central CRM processes.

The perspective is still highly relevant.

When central functions are excluded, the company loses coherence

Weak CRM use is often described as a data quality problem.

The consequences can be much greater.

If central functions or employees with important customer contact do not use CRM in a reasonably consistent way, the result can be a fragmented customer picture, weaker data quality, duplicated work, and inconsistent customer follow-up.

Over time, a trust problem also tends to arise. When employees do not trust that the information in CRM is complete, they start looking elsewhere. Some create their own overviews. Others ask colleagues or keep information locally. CRM thus becomes even less complete. Trust falls further, and leadership simultaneously gets a weaker basis for decisions. It becomes a negative spiral.

When CRM is used differently or not used by central functions, the company loses not only data. It loses coherence.

Shared practice does not mean everyone should work the same way

It does not mean that sales and customer service should work in the same way. A key account manager has different needs than an employee handling customer inquiries. Marketing, operations, and order processing may again have other workflows.

The goal should therefore not be identical use. The goal should be sufficient shared practice so that relevant customer information can be understood, shared, and used across functions.

Too much standardization can also be a problem. If employees have to fill in a series of fields that no one later uses, administration increases without customer work necessarily getting better.

Good CRM practice is therefore not about registering as much as possible. It is about registering what the company needs in order to work better.

What leadership must clarify

Before the discussion is about functionality, dashboards, or automation, I believe leadership should have clear answers to some fundamental questions:

• What information about the customer must be available across the company?
• Who owns the next activity, and how should that be visible to others?
• What do the different stages in the customer and sales processes mean, and when is a case moved forward or closed?
• What information do other customer-facing functions need in order to do their part of the job well?
• How should the information actually be used in prioritization, customer follow-up, coaching, and leadership decisions?

These are not primarily system choices. They are leadership choices.

And without such clarifications, it becomes difficult to expect consistent use from the organization.

Customer information must survive the person

Strong personal customer relationships are valuable, especially in B2B. We should preserve them. But the company should be careful not to make customer information as personal as the relationship.

If an employee changes role, leaves, becomes ill, or is simply unavailable, essential knowledge about the customer should not disappear at the same time.

If valuable customer information exists only in the head, inbox, or notes of the individual employee, the company has information – but not necessarily an information base.

CRM should not replace the personal relationship. It should make the organization better able to support it.

That is why I like to think about CRM this way:

CRM should both make the employee better informed and make the company less dependent on individuals.

That is an important dual value.

From registration to workflow

I have myself experienced situations where CRM data has been incomplete and usage has varied.

The intuitive solution may be to increase registration requirements.

But often it is more interesting to take a step back and examine the workflow.

• How does a new customer or opportunity come in?
• What does the employee need to know?
• What should happen after the customer meeting?
• Who is responsible for follow-up?
• What do other parts of the company need to be able to see?
• When should an opportunity move forward, and when should it be closed?

When these questions become clear, it also becomes easier to decide which information actually has value.

Then CRM can move from being a database that must be kept updated to becoming part of the company's way of working.

Data has little value until it affects action

It is entirely possible to collect large amounts of customer data without becoming much more customer-oriented. The information first gains greater value when it affects what the company does.

A good CRM environment should make it easier to understand which customers need follow-up, where opportunities stall, where friction arises, what information is missing, and what the next action should be.

The same applies to the leader's use of the system. If CRM is primarily used for reporting upward, employees will quickly understand that this is what the system is for. If the information is instead used to prioritize customers, coordinate resources, improve customer follow-up, and develop employees, registration takes on a different meaning.

What is entered comes back as value. And then it also becomes easier to build trust in the system.

From employee value to customer value

I believe the most important connection can be described like this:

EMPLOYEE VALUE → SHARED PRACTICE → INFORMATION FLOW → COLLABORATION → DECISIONS → CUSTOMER VALUE

The employee must experience usefulness if usage is to become good. The company needs sufficient shared practice if the information is to be understood across functions. Good information flow makes collaboration easier.

Better collaboration provides a better basis for prioritization and decisions. In the end, this should be felt by the customer.

If CRM work does not over time contribute to better continuity, more relevant dialogue, or better follow-up, we should question what value we are actually creating.

Therefore CRM is a leadership task

IT of course has an important role. The system must work. Integrations must be good. Security, access, data models, and technical architecture must be handled professionally.

But the technology department cannot alone decide how the company should work with customers. It also cannot alone determine what information employees need, who owns the next step, how customer-facing functions should interact, or how data should be used in leadership dialogue.

These are leadership choices.

Leaders set the expectations. Leaders prioritize the way of working. Leaders decide whether the information is actually used in practice. And leaders send a clear signal through their own behavior.

It is difficult to demand good CRM discipline if employees experience that the information they enter is never used.

That is why I also do not believe CRM adoption is primarily created through ever more registration requirements.

It is created when employees see that CRM helps them do a better job, while the company uses the information in work and decisions.

And then comes technology

Developments in automation and AI are making CRM increasingly interesting. The systems can reduce manual work, summarize customer history, find patterns, prioritize opportunities, and suggest next actions. That can create significant value.

But technology does not change the fundamental premise. If the workflow is unclear, central functions do not use the system, and the information cannot be trusted, more technology will not necessarily solve the problem. It may just as easily reinforce the weaknesses.

That is why I would start with a different question than:

"What can our CRM system do?"

I would start with:

"How do we want people, information, and customer follow-up to connect?"

When the company has a good answer to that, technology becomes far more interesting.

For me, that is the core of CRM as a leadership task. Not a system the company must get employees to use. But a shared work and information structure that makes the employee better equipped, the company better coordinated, and the customer better followed up.

It is only when these parts connect that CRM moves from being a system the company has to becoming a way of working that creates value.

Sources

Payne, Adrian & Pennie Frow (2005). A Strategic Framework for Customer Relationship Management. Journal of Marketing, 69(4), 167–176. DOI: 10.1509/jmkg.2005.69.4.167

https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.2005.69.4.167. The study develops a strategic CRM framework with five cross-functional processes and emphasizes CRM as a strategic and process-oriented discipline.

Avlonitis, George J. & Nikolaos G. Panagopoulos (2005). Antecedents and consequences of CRM technology acceptance in the sales force. Industrial Marketing Management, 34(4), 355–368. DOI: 10.1016/j.indmarman.2004.09.021

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2004.09.021. The study is based on 240 CRM-using salespeople and finds that perceived usefulness was the strongest driver of CRM acceptance in the sample.

Suoniemi, Samppa, Alex Zablah, Harri Terho, Rami Olkkonen, Detmar Straub & Hannu Makkonen (2022). CRM system implementation and firm performance: the role of consultant facilitation and user involvement. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 37(13), 19–32. DOI: 10.1108/JBIM-08-2021-0380

https://doi.org/10.1108/JBIM-08-2021-0380. The study of 126 companies shows, among other things, the central role user involvement plays in handling the technological and organizational complexity of CRM implementation.