But "all of CRM" is not the goal for many companies. International Speedway, the Daytona Beach, Fla., company that sponsors Nascar and other motor races at 12 venues around the country, took a targeted, slower track to CRM. When Craig Neeb joined the company as its first CIO two years ago, he immediately focused on areas that were key to boosting revenue: installing ticketing systems, and promoting sales and merchandise over the Internet. Neeb looked at a wide array of CRM vendors and chose Vertical Alliance to rebuild the company’s website and set up a fan loyalty program. The budget for software, re-architecture and implementation, which took about two months, came to $1.5 million for International Speedway, which has annual revenues of roughly $500 million. "You have to find the best fit for your immediate objectives," Neeb says. "We have a fairly simple operation. Why add complexity? Our plan is to move slowly and add to the system over time."

Adam Honig, president of Akibia Consulting, a Westborough, Mass.-based consultancy that specializes in CRM, says companies should focus on quick wins: Analyze their situation for two weeks and then implement a small piece of a package. Then, they need to establish ROI before they can move on. "We’ve always looked at CRM as small, tactical and progressive," says Honig. "The 18- to 24-month implementations are a myth created by the large consulting firms."

Patching Things Together

COMPANIES ARE OFTEN FINDING that no one CRM vendor can address all their customer-related needs. They’re willing to take on the headaches of patching systems together to get exactly what they want.

When FedEx bought the transportation company RPS in January 1998 and set out to merge the sales and IT departments, Scot Struminger, a vice president of IT for corporate headquarter systems at FedEx Services in Memphis, Tenn., started looking for a sales-force automation system that he could install quickly for the company’s 2,000 salespeople. He selected CRM vendor Youcentric (recently bought by J.D. Edwards) primarily because he wanted to save time and money. While packaged CRM applications often require companies to load and maintain customer data within the application, Struminger notes, Youcentric and some other, more flexible vendors let customers plug in to preexisting back-end databases. The result, he says, is that companies can save money because they don’t have to build a brand-new data mart, as they do with some of the larger CRM vendors.

FedEx Services is in the process of integrating its sales-force automation application with its PeopleSoft ERP system, a sales compensation application from Trilogy and call center software from Clarify, all using Tibco software to pass information among the different packages. "We decided to go with multiple vendors in order to find the best in each area," Struminger says. "Piece by piece, we have implemented them all gradually."