Getting Ready for CRM: A Pre-Implementation Checklist

The following was excerpted from The CRM Handbook: A Business Guide to Customer Relationship Management

These days it's practically routine to pick up an industry trade magazine featuring a CRM case study on page 1. Somewhere amidst the paragraph about the company's new customer loyalty program and the part about sales uplift increasing 200 percent, you'll find a sentence or two describing implementation.

No, CRM development isn't sexy, and yes, it's fraught with hazards from technology glitches to hiring freezes, but it's really the hub in the CRM wheel when it comes to ensuring business acceptance. The snazziest end-user interface and most enthusiastic marketing staff will never compensate for the CRM system that doesn't do what it's supposed to. Not to put too fine a point on it, the implementation project is a critical piece of the CRM puzzle.

I spend most of my time these days evaluating how prepared companies are to launch their CRM programs, be they departmental or enterprise-wide, single or multifunction. Sometimes this occurs at the requirements definition stage, where there is uncertainty about the perceived need and its implementation viability. Other times it involves evaluating a company's existing infrastructure just prior to implementation. What I do most is quiz key CRM stakeholders about their existing and desired environments from both business and technology perspectives.

My company calls such evaluations CRM Readiness Assessment engagements, but I like to call them premortems. After all, what's more valuable than fixing problems before they occur? The best way to do this is to envision possible outcomes based on current circumstances, using experiences gleaned from successful CRM deployments. It's good old risk management, come home to roost.

The checklist below offers a series of considerations to be aware of before moving forward with CRM development. Make sure each of these items has been at least considered at your company, and the more complex your intended CRM program the more mandatory it is that you resolve the issue prior to beginning development.

The most valuable feature of a premortem exercise is that it's a lot easier to give bad news before disaster strikes than to say "I told you so" after the fact—and after the money has been spent. A pre-implementation review can alert the business sponsor to potential roadblocks. Such findings allow CRM team members to fix problems proactively rather than pointing fingers after the CRM project has failed, as 60 percent of all CRM projects allegedly do.

Ideally, the answer to each of the questions in the above checklist will be "yes," with consensus on how each issue will be handled when it's encountered. At the very least, the CRM team should be aware of each issue and prepared to deal with it when it inevitably comes up.