And in another key move, Bender says her staff didn’t force the new applications on her users. In the planning stages of the project, call center and sales reps were interviewed about how they did their jobs, what processes they used and what customer data they needed. Bender’s group found a need for precise sales data, including dollars spent, number of units bought, parts purchased, and current and prior year sales.

Then after the small but critical step of carefully checking consultants’ backgrounds and references, Bender brought in a pair of consultants to implement the system. "I didn’t just bring in consultants and turn them loose?our [IT] teams worked closely with them for knowledge transfer, and I asked for semiweekly updates to avoid surprises," she says. Her diligence paid off. At one point Bender discovered that a consultant had spent most of a day configuring the system to have the Tipper Tie logo appear on each of its screens. "She was about halfway through when I found out what she was doing," Bender recalls. "For $200 an hour I thought we could use her talents more sensibly."

Once the system was developed, Bender picked a small group of dynamic sales reps to be the test guinea pigs. "We chose people who had positive, upbeat personalities for our pilot project because we knew they would help us convince others once they saw how this would help them," she says. The team members actively used the software for one month and then made a presentation about their experience at Tipper Tie’s annual sales meeting last December. "Their presentation was so positive it galvanized everyone else?there wasn’t any way [sales]people could drag their feet after that," says Bender.

Bill Burkhardt, a Tipper Tie sales representative in the Northeast based in Pittsburgh, was one of those enthusiastic early testers. "I just told people how easy it was to use and how useful it was to have all of that information going into a sales call," he says. "When I first started as a sales guy, I was just given a printed out account list of clients and phone numbers and told, ’Go get ’em.’ The system now allows us to be much more responsive to customers by providing better communication between the customer and the company."

Cross-functional and pilot teams are keys to success, says Elizabeth Herrell, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group. By employing these teams early in the planning stages of CRM projects, "it saves a tremendous amount of time and effort later on by including their insight expertise and gaining their support," she says.