"There’s a tremendous squeeze on CIOs with CRM because there’s such a corporate need," says Berg. "The vendors are selling the CEO, saying they can just plunk it in."

In order to cut through vendor hype and ensure that those within the company will use CRM applications, CIOs need to partner with business executives to promote companywide training programs and effectively sell the new systems internally. "CIOs have got to turn this around and make it an end user project, not an IT project," says Jim Dickie, managing partner at Insight Technology Group in Boulder, Colo.

Selling to the Sales Force

Bob Ogdon is one of those who learned the hard way about the importance of selling CRM to those who are supposed to use it. At first, the promise of CRM was enticing for Ogdon. With a $300,000 investment, his sales force would be equipped with the latest technology to follow sales leads, acquire new customers and boost the bottom line.

But Ogdon, CEO of Mshow in Highlands Ranch, Colo., which produces training and marketing programs to companies via the Internet, saw his hopes quickly dashed. After a months-long implementation of Siebel Systems Mid-Market Edition software in 1999, his 50-member sales force refused to use it. "Spending the money and not getting a result was a huge disappointment," says Ogdon. "We paid for our education."

Ogdon blames the initial CRM blunder both on the company’s failure to articulate its needs and the consultancy hired to implement the system. For remote salespeople, access was slow and data was unavailable.

Companies large and small are finding that fancy new tools for those who don’t want to use them are often left untouched--even if they do work. "A typical member of a field sales force is independent," says Berkeley Enterprise Partners’ Berg. "They don’t adopt or accept easily." Indeed, many CRM projects are stumbling because the sales force needs to be sold on the idea. Even Microsoft, one of Siebel’s largest customers, has gone down a long, hard road in its bid to get its 19,000-member sales and marketing force to use the new software, according to several consultants familiar with the project. Microsoft declined to comment on its Siebel implementation. When asked about difficulties with large implementations such as those with Microsoft and IBM, Siebel’s Schmaier says: "In any IT project there’s always bumps in the road."

At Mshow, executives decided on the second go-around to go with a point solution designed by SalesLogix specifically for use in smaller companies. Ogdon stresses that the company’s failed CRM implementation made it easier to do research the second time. "The first time, we went out and bought technology and then a consultant," he says. "We should have done it the other way around." And he notes that salespeople are now required to use the system.