Others who have run into problems with CRM projects stress the importance of focusing on the users throughout the process, letting them test different programs and creating an incentive plan to encourage use of a new CRM system. "Salespeople are nomads scouring the landscape. If they aren’t taken care of, you’re in trouble," says Rodolphe Kirk, director of IT at CopperCom, a DSL provider in Santa Clara, Calif. CopperCom abandoned a $500,000 CRM project last year after an ASP failed to provide adequate support for the complex new system. Now implementing a new, smaller scale application, CopperCom has created an incentive plan and is "nurturing" the sales force with a newly formed support center. "It will take another three to six months of hand holding," Kirk says.

So Many Vendors, So Little Time

When the word got out that Blockbuster was looking for campaign management software, a parade of vendors began to approach the Dallas-based company. As the stream of CRM vendors made their appearances and their pitches, those working on Blockbuster’s project began to scratch their heads. "The vendors started to create a lot of confusion in the organization," says Augie MacCurrach, principal and CTO at DiaLogos, a Boston-based consultancy working with Blockbuster. "They’re good at getting the CIO cornered and making them believe that if they don’t choose them, they’ll fail," he says.

Barclays Global Investors, the San Francisco-based asset management arm of Barclays, examined the top 15 vendors two years ago when looking to augment contact management capabilities for its sales force. "Every vendor told us they could do everything," says Bill Drobny, manager of strategic projects and Web. "They all wanted to walk us into multimillion-dollar software exercises."

CRM consultants stress the importance of educating yourself before meeting with CRM vendors. "The vendors are trying to make a sale, and they’ll do whatever it takes," says Renee Sommer, managing partner at Semeron, a Seattle consultancy. Blockbuster, which built an Oracle data warehouse four years ago, is still in the process of fact finding technologies that will help it deepen its knowledge of its customers. And Barclays Global Investors, after testing different packages with its sales force, decided to go with an application called Worldtrak, from the Minneapolis-based software company of the same name, which sits on top of the Microsoft Outlook platform, already familiar to salespeople at the fund company.

Sommer notes that many of her clients want to go with the big name vendors because they perceive it as less risky. In fact, she says, companies are better off analyzing their business needs and then looking at whether several vendors may be better than one.