During the Thanksgiving holiday of 1998, Monster.com took a million-dollar gamble. The Maynard, Mass.-based job listings site, which had roughly 300 employees, rolled out a high-end software package to provide its telephone sales force with instant information on prospective customers, thus boosting the company’s chances for rapid expansion around the world.

Instead of helping the sales force do a brisk business, however, the new system, Siebel Sales Enterprise, was so slow that telephone reps were unable to help customers. Salespeople working on laptops in the field were locked out of the company’s customer database--and remained so for a full year. "The entire sales force--and everyone here--was very upset," says Ned Liddell, Monster.com’s vice president for business applications development. "Our business was hurt. At the time, no one understood how complex these systems can be."

Liddell, who places much of the blame on the consultancy that installed the initial package, is far from alone. In Monster.com’s case, the local consultancy was inexperienced, and eventually, developers from San Mateo, Calif.-based Siebel Systems returned to help Monster.com rebuild the application.

In the end, the initial failure resulted in millions of dollars in added expenses and months of effort to get the application to work. "CRM is not for the weak spirited," says Liddell. "It requires a lot of management and money."

As vendors and consultants selling CRM software rake in growing profits, companies are struggling to implement the complex systems they peddle. Like Monster.com and other small and midsize startups, most Fortune 500 companies are involved in some sort of CRM project, experts say, and many multimillion dollar initiatives have quietly stalled or failed as executives search for business benefits and salespeople shy away from technology they say won’t help them. In one example, a large telecommunications company rolled out a major CRM application to more than 1,000 sales reps in late 1999, at a cost of $10,000 per user, only to find a year later that fewer than 100 were using the system, according to one CRM consultant. Software vendors aren’t always at fault; in fact, analysts say the software packages are adding more useful features while slowly becoming easier to use. And it’s often true that companies jump into CRM projects without clear strategies or support from top management. But those embarking on CRM projects need to be wary of slick marketing messages because, so far, there is no one end-to-end package that can provide an easy CRM fix.