If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’ve already been successfully evangelized. Converted into the hosanna-singing faithful flock of the evangelical ministry of CRM. And why wouldn’t you be?

In just under a decade, adoption of customer relationship management solutions has nearly doubled. A recent study by CSO Insights found that CRM use has increased to 82.9 percent from just shy of 50 percent 10 years before. Companies are looking for CRM to do everything from streamlining their workflows to expanding and deepening their customer base. And as CRM becomes a more pervasive part of the sales interaction, CRM-enabled interactions are becoming less an invisible tool and more a necessity for meeting customer expectations in even the most minor of transactions. Customers who wouldn’t know to call it CRM are aware—from the ads that are targeted to them to the conversations they have on the phone—that their behaviors and transactions are being tracked and optimized. As such, their expectations are increasing.

No one needs a soapbox for CRM anymore; the business case is clear—if also expensive. The question then for many is not should they implement CRM, but how to get the most out of it once they have it. There are a number of issues and best practices that anyone using CRM needs to consider, but before we dive into that, let’s lay the groundwork.

Defining the Terms

There are two major questions that CRM systems answer to help deliver a return on investment in a good implementation: who are a company’s customers and how are its resources being spent to attract and service them. Both of these sound almost poisonously straightforward, but often the answers aren’t obvious. A company’s way of understanding its customers might actually be losing it potential business.

Mark Wollen, senior vice president for cloud marketing and sales cloud at Salesforce.com, points to the financial services sector as a prime example.

“Traditionally, the customer and the financial account were synonymous,” he says. “But am I my account? I may have multiple accounts and policies, but I may also have a spouse. A family. They may have their own banking and insurance needs.”

Understanding what those needs are and anticipating them, making the right offer at the right time to make the rest of that family customers, and then identifying needs before they fully express them, upselling them products they may not have been aware of, and deepening their value is what ROI in CRM is all about on the customer side. In short: preserving or padding revenue.

On the structural side, CRM is about cost savings. A good solution will help a company identify where value comes from within its portfolio and reduce costs where it does not.

“Say a company wants to increase new leads by X percent,” offers Vishrut Parikh, director of product marketing for NetSuite. “If the marketing organization’s system is tied into the CRM [solution], you can see the cost per lead and you can see where they’re coming from. Is it the Web? Is it emails? You can focus on the source of the leads. And you can also measure the value of the leads you get from those sources so you can focus the marketing.”

CRM also helps identify star performers. If you have a sales team that is outpacing others or a particular agent with stellar numbers, you can identify them and build best practices around their work. More than that, though, CRM provides a context. For instance, on face value, you might have a sales team that looks outstanding. It may outperform other teams by many multiples, but maybe it just operates in a rich territory. Maybe it’s underperforming, but looks great when stacked against teams working with less rewarding spaces. You wouldn’t want to build best practices from a team like that. CRM provides the tools to make these sort of evaluations.

However, CRM is not magic.

If There’s Something You Can Do Wrong, You’re Probably Already Doing It

When CRM asked consultants what the most common mistakes they routinely saw among client companies were, nearly all of them pointed to the onboarding phase. Enterprises often have unreasonable expectations. Perhaps fueled by the siren call of vendors who tout sales cycles that have dropped from 80 days to 60 days and increased customer support capacity to the tune of 60 percent, they go into a roll-out thinking that a CRM solution is going to take care of itself. That it will just automatically whisper the right words to salespeople to close sales and divine the best outreach campaigns for marketing teams.

Ryan Plourde, CEO of AbleBridge, a Microsoft Dynamics partner, cautions against that kind of easy money thinking. 

“Where companies don’t get an ROI,” he argues, “they don’t have internal stakeholders that are responsible for the CRM system. Someone should have direct oversight of the terminology and the system at large. Otherwise, you get six months in and things start to get too loose. A company will rely solely on [its] partner. It’s very costly to spend constant money on an external stakeholder.”

And would you really want an external stakeholder defining best practices for your agents? That’s more or less outsourcing central corporate strategy. One of the strengths of a good CRM system is that it gives cohesion to a business mission. As any hack who is familiar with Joseph Juran’s Pareto Principle might say, “Eighty percent of a company’s profits come from 20 percent of its customers.”

It’s certainly true that the majority of businesses see most of their money coming from a disproportionately small segment of its customer base buying a specific segment of its offerings. When CRM is working right, it organizes efforts toward a focused goal. You define the most valuable clients and give them the right kind of attention. You define the most valuable products and facilitate their sale. It’s a means of business expression.

“CRM is at a point in organizations where IT is not the owner, not even sales or marketing [are],” says Bob Sullivan, president of Infogrow, a CRM consultancy. “It needs to be a top-seeded tool; it has to be part of the fundamental strategy. Most organizations only use 40 percent of what a tool is capable of. They just set up the process and walk away, when it should be the one truth of every conversation.”

Finally, companies will often find themselves bogged down in redundancies that cancel out the efficiency gains CRM can provide. 

“Missing information is the usual reason a business adopts CRM,” says Larry Goldman, president of consulting firm Amberleaf, “but if you find yourself having to integrate data sets within your own CRM system, it’s just an added layer that’s going to slow things down.”

This is particularly key if you’re using your CRM as a way of creating a workflow around central business objectives. The more complex the stream down to agents in the field gets, the more likely the message is to be lost.

Name Your Stakes—Holders, That Is

Whether the approach you take is top-down with a CRM czar, as Sullivan suggests, or something more oligarchical, to have good uptake, the relevant teams must be represented early.

“Have a representative from every type of user you expect to have on the system,” Jennifer Pollard, director of product marketing at Microsoft Dynamics CRM, writes in an email to CRM. “Then work closely with this group to ensure the right processes are implemented and to test the system.” 

This has the virtue of both making teams companywide aware of and excited about CRM and also giving them a chance to define how it will be used. The worst thing for a new solution that’s meant to broaden knowledge and teamwork is for it to be separated and unresponsive to the concerns of the broader ecosystem. 

As Pollard writes, “The most important determinant of success is adoption.”

When there is fundamental disagreement about the desired outcomes of CRM, there won’t be much in the way of uptake and the project will likely fail. More than that, though, it has to be easy to use and provide actual value. The last thing anyone wants is more paperwork and processes. Make sure that everything your team is asked to do is worth their time or they will at best half-use it with scorn, at worst ignore it entirely.

Focus on Small Goals

The onboarding process for CRM is lengthy and paradigm-changing, and the temptation to collect missing data right away is hard to resist. However, “a lot of companies will overengineer,” Plourde laments. “They’ll overcomplicate what they’re trying to measure. It complicates what their employees have to input and manage.” 

Take a moment to consider the long-term goal of complete integration of your CRM solution, and realize that getting your employees to consistently adopt best practices is more easily accomplished if you ease them into it. 

“Companies are most successful when they recognize that CRM is not so much a destination as a journey,” Sullivan offers. “With CRM, companies should focus on small successes.”

Wollen agrees. From Red Hat to Prudential, all of the deployments that he has been a part of at Salesforce.com followed a similar process of increasing refinement. The first goals, even among such large firms, are often shockingly modest.

“They just roll out straightforward CRM capabilities—just to better connect salespeople and understand who the customers are,” he says.

In the early stages of a CRM implementation, the work is around defining sales opportunities, figuring out where leads and sales meet. It’s not until that baseline is firmly established that best practices are defined, much less rolled out. From there, the sales team is connected to other teams within the business, and the system is allowed to grow in complexity. Connections are found between different teams selling different products, between legal departments and communications, between product lines and their reps. Profiles of customers who may have engagements with a dozen different parts of the business begin to take shape. New efficiencies emerge and business strategies begin to be defined by data.

None of that, however, is done early. It emerges only with time.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

CRM has the potential to funnel tons of data into your organization, but not all of it is good. CRM asked Vishrut Parikh if he often sees much junk data when a client switches to NetSuite from an older system or even other providers.

“You see tons of useless data,” he confesses. “All the time. First and foremost is to just not bring garbage into your CRM. When we begin the implementation, the first thing we ask is ‘Yeah, you have data from ten years, but do you need it?’” 

Data input should be targeted to goals, Parikh says. Big or small doesn’t matter when it comes to data caches. It’s about being smart. Some businesses, such as retail, have to collect tons of data because a company might work with hundreds of vendors in hundreds of markets and have to coordinate very complex business decisions. But as much as it is, all of that data has to be focused. Extraneous data slows analysis and even hides important findings. 

It Can’t Just Be About Streamlining Your Workflow

“Over time, efficiency savings will cop out,” AmberLeaf’s Goldman says. “When it does, companies should be planning for the business impact of their CRM to grow. There should be growth into more real-time customer dialogues, where the conversations and the reactions by your business are closer to one another. Ideally, you’re mastering the technology fairly quickly, to the point where workflow savings are no longer the primary benefit.”

“Automation in CRM should drive next actions,” Sullivan adds. “There should be automated reminders and warnings. If a customer that has traditionally accounted for significant returns reduces [his or her] transactions with you by 10, 20 percent, that should set off bells and whistles so that you can address the issue. You need to supplement aggregate data with technology that aids in customer service as well.”

“We’ve seen great success in the twofold approach to performance indicators,” Parikh says. “Monitoring order processing efficiency has generally yielded an improvement from 45 to 75 percent. At the same time, customer support capacity is key. Are you able to provide the experience that customers are expecting?” Customer support is not just measured by the number of designated customer support reps, he adds. “It’s anyone who’s talking to the customer. Concentrating on holistic customer support has increased returns for our customers from 25 to 60 percent.” 

Analysis Happens Outside of CRM

Above all, one fact bears repeating: Analysis happens outside of the CRM system.

“Often organizations are hoping these [magic] bullets will just tell them what their marketing strategy should be, but that still takes human thought,” Goldman says. “You need to bake the data analysis into your project plan. You can’t forget to interpret everything you’re collecting and organizing with your CRM.”

Getting ROI from your CRM requires substantial and steady investment of time and money. That investment means having skill sets on staff. Your CRM manager probably won’t be a statistician or a predictive modeler, but you may want to make hires like that to complement the manager if you’re planning on using your CRM to make important, big picture decisions. And the bigger those choices, the more capable that analysis is going to have to be.

CRM is not a robot CEO. It’s a tool to define and express business strategy—and an expensive one at that. The ROI that you get is as determined by your commitment to it as it is by the strength of the technology. So if you’re planning on investing in CRM and seeing that money again, prepare to double down and make big changes.  

Eric Felipe-Barkin (www.ericfelipebarkin.com) is a writer and filmmaker. He contributes to CRM and Speech Technology magazines and is currently at work on a Web series, “Quick Brick Tips.”