Those who have botched ambitious CRM initiatives shouldn’t throw in the towel, however. The fight for customer loyalty is on, and a well thought out CRM strategy can boost a company’s stature and revenues. At Monster.com, the 1998 failure pushed the company to assemble a team of experts who work continuously on updating the company’s CRM strategy. Liddell warns that companies need to do their own careful due diligence when choosing both a CRM package and the people who will install it. Monster.com fired its initial developer and went on to successfully install Siebel for a second time in 1999, spending another $1.5 million with a new team of internal and external experts. While Liddell calls the CRM initiative worthwhile, he warns that others in his place should do careful research and build a strong internal team before going with a CRM package. Without good information shared between sales forces, Monster.com couldn’t have grown, says Liddell, whose team has since worked with Siebel developers as well as with Akibia, a Boston-based consultancy focused on CRM.

And having learned from experience, Liddell and his colleagues will be listening more to each other and their carefully chosen consultants, rather than just to vendors trying to make a sale. "The more complex these solutions are, the greater the risk," Liddell says. "The main thing we have learned is ’buyer beware.’ Don’t just accept sales and marketing pitches. It means hard work. It may mean putting pieces together rather than buying one complete solution."