Overcome Obstacles for Widespread Adoption

CRM investment has exploded over the past decade with organizations big and small. However the value of CRM applications are limited to its weakest link. Hobbled with the absence of pervasive use. What can we do to motivate widespread adoption. Avoid mistakes. And measure its value.
CRM FAILURE -- something worth examining.

Like a traffic accident. And the curious rubber-necker stopping traffic to get a glimpse. Isn't it human to be drawn to the failures of others? We can identify with it. We can draw from lessons learned. And were more receptive to hearing the humility of personal experience versus the preaching of how-to's.

Understanding this behavior has its use for implementing change. Reverse psychology. Devil's advocate. The optimistic cynic. Whatever you call it - proactively addressing fears, uncertainties, risks, and reasons CRM fail communicates empathy and understanding at the very least with your user communities. You understand the challenges of their job. What's the old adage? Seek to understand before being understood.

In CRM, the accidents and horror stories are plentiful. And over the years, the speed at which one can make mistakes have accelerated. SaaS, Cloud Computing, and On-Demand CRM have accelerated the 'time-to-benefit' AND 'the-time-to-get-burned'.

I have witnessed three (3) sure-fire ways of failing to achieve CRM adoption. Enjoy the wreckage and hope this never happens to you.

Mistake #1: Ignore the Unique Culture of Sales
"Automating sales is like Herding Cats"

A sales operations director of an enterprise software company once told me that their sales force did not understand process. Odd I thought that a sales organization successful at selling enterprise solutions could succeed despite lacking this important skill. After further discussion, it became clear. The director misunderstood choice with lack of knowledge. After all, we reward sales with being able to expertly circumnavigate process. Assess the shortest distance to cash. And prioritize activities that lead directly to revenue. Understand this and you'll have the keys to their hearts.

And how do we measure adoption for sales? Is it time spent in CRM or the number of logins? Don't we expect our salespeople to be visiting with customers instead of tooling around software? Or is it completing customer data profiles? Kind of an expensive data collector, don't you think?

Measuring sales adoption can be tricky. Most sales executives want less time in CRM and more time selling. A more meaningful adoption metric may be: forecasting accuracy, efficient use of resources or conversion of administrative time to selling time.

Mistake #2: Create resentment early in your CRM planning
"If it came from anyone else other than me, it must be bad."

CRM often hatches in one department implemented with a self-centered design and exported the exported to others without ever obtaining their input. The gravity of a CRM strategy is centered on a 360 degree view of the customer-- bridging department silos of people and data. Failing to incorporate other stakeholders into the design is an excellent way to create resentment and perceptions that CRM was built for someone else. The trick lies in selecting delegates that will add value during the design effort, a topic for later discussion.

Mistake #3: Motivate your employees to input data outside of CRM
"Pay your employees to use another system and they surely will."

A Director of IT once complained to me that the no-one in sales was using their CRM. The VP of Sales was pressuring IT to solve the problem of grossly inaccurate forecast reports. Despite attempts to mandate compliance, they still found that the transactions were not updated even after they received purchase order commitments.

In CRM (or any system), if you can't understand the outcome from data input - is it worth doing? In the above mentioned case, opportunities were only updated by sales to manipulate a forecast reports. While another system was used to fulfill sales orders and pay commission to its salesperson. Which one do you think the salesperson used? And surprising how often this happens. If decision making, recognition, or compensation is derived from every other system but your CRM, guess what? Your CRM has become irrelevant credenza-ware.

What can be learned from the above blunders?
"Change your plan to plan for change."

Don't sweep it under the carpet. A CRM strategy usually represents significant change for an organization. With change, you can expect fear and apprehension towards the unknown. If users haven't said it. You can be sure they are thinking it. How CRM will replace them, micromanage, or add administrative burdens. Proactively addressing fears, uncertainties, risks, and reasons to not use CRM may pre-empt these objections. Make a Top 10 list. Don't take it too seriously. At the very least, you'll communicate empathy and understanding of these issues - perhaps with a little humor.

For the people and by the people. Incorporating delegates in your CRM task force and design can ensure you address critical needs from user groups intended to use CRM. Delegates have a keen perspective on the job requirements, business processes, and culture of their business units. If you play it right, your Delegates will evangelize the CRM agenda to convert non-believers in a grass roots approach. Leverage your steering committee members to help you navigate across organizational boundaries.

And Kaizen! your CRM. If you're experiencing adoption issues already - it's not too late to turn the ship. Institute a continual improvement process by which performance tweaks are implemented in bite size increments at the behest and benefit of the business and its users. Chip away at the negative perceptions. Incorporate an internal PR campaign to highlight the improvements.

The Organo Gold Opportunity

Research shows that there are more than 500 billion cups of coffee that are consumed every year around the world. Coffee is more heavily sprayed with pesticides than almost any crop in agriculture. Some coffee farmers have even used harmful chemicals and pesticides in coffee trees and soil that have proven to be harmful to animals, plants, and humans. For the reasons stated above, it is safer for coffee drinkers to choose organically grown coffee. Through organic farming, consumers can assure themselves that the coffee was cultivated through environmentally safe processes and most importantly without the use of any harmful chemicals.
Organo Gold is a well known company that sells organic coffee. Their products and services are sold in 13 countries including Great Britain, United States, and Peru. The company is committed to improving the health of coffee drinkers through wellness and health product offerings that utilize the benefits of Ganoderma. Ganoderma is an ancient herb from China that is known to have the ability to enhance wellness. In addition to this, the company is also committed to improving the financial status of people by offering a cutting edge income and business opportunity.
The Organo Gold opportunity allows it's distributors to be treated as equal business partners with the company. The company estimates that it will have 1 million distributors by 2015 with an estimated revenue of more than 800 million dollars. An Organo Gold distributor is given the opportunity to buy coffee at wholesale price and generate profits through retail sales and referring new distributors into the Organo Gold opportunity. Becoming a distributor with this company only requires five simple steps which are selecting the chosen country, filling out a membership application form, and choosing the information that the distributor wants to put in the website provided by the company. The company pays up to 50% of commissions back to distributors through the Organo Gold compensation plan.
The Organo Gold opportunity offers one of the best compensation plans in network marketing. Each segment of it's compensation plan is designed to improve and encourage activity that will affect other segments of the plan. The company offers 7 ways to earn money. It offers benefits, and incentives that include retail profit, uni-level bonus, and global pool. The amount of money you can generate within the compensation plan is determined through individual rankings which include representatives, consultant, and black diamond.
One last thing you may want to research before you make a decision to join this company. There have been some complaints and allegations made about the Organo Gold opportunity. These complaints address trade practices, and health benefits of its coffee. Contrary to the claims of the company which state that their products are 100% made from organic ingredients. There are allegations that their products are actually made of alternative ingredients that may be harmful to consumers.
Others claim that the company is a pyramid scam that promises a quick way to be rich without having real results. A warning has also been sent by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to the company in 2004 for making unverified medical claims. A lot of other complaints against this company have been sent to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). However the FTC stressed that they have not yet verified these complaints.

Millionaire Secret

It is amazing to me how much we value our money. We argue over it, fight for it, heck, wars are even started over it. We hoard and protect the little money we have because we don't understand how to create it.
In this article I will break down the money creation process and show you how to use the process to your advantage. This is an Economics lesson you don't want to miss.
The Goldsmiths.
Early traders used gold to pay for goods and services. After years of lugging it around and weighing it before each transaction they realized this system was very inconvenient. So, they smartened up and in the 16th Century began depositing their gold with goldsmiths who stored their gold in a vault for a fee. In return, the goldsmiths would issue the trader a paper receipt showing the amount of gold on deposit. The traders used these receipts as credit when conducting transactions with other traders in the marketplace. Hence, paper currency was born.
Initially, the goldsmiths only issued paper receipts equal to the amount of gold physically deposited in the vault. One day an observant goldsmith realized that the owners rarely redeemed their receipt. In fact, the amount of gold deposited far outweighed the quantity of gold withdrawn.
Then they changed the economic system forever!
The goldsmiths got clever and started issuing paper receipts in excess of the amount of gold physically in their vaults. The goldsmiths would put these receipts (which were redeemable for gold) into circulation by making interest bearing loans to the traders. The borrowers were willing to accept the loans because the receipts were a credible form of payment in the marketplace.
The goldsmiths found a way to create money.
Now skip forward 500 years...
The only real difference between the goldsmiths of yesterday and the banks of today is the actual currency. Today, our money is not backed by gold, but rather by our faith in the monetary system we've created. Banks lend money in a fashion similar to the goldsmiths, by keeping on reserve only a percentage of the money they lend.
This sounds a little scary... but think of the opportunity?
If banks can create money, why not take advantage of it? Every day banks create money and lend it to folks with ideas. These people present their ideas to the banks along with a plan for repayment. If the bank approves, the person signs a promissory note (a glorified IOU) in return for the money (plus interest). That's it. All you need is an idea and a plan for repayment and the bank will create the money for you.
But what if your idea doesn't need a significant amount of capital? Or what if you don't like the idea of leverage? That's fine too. You can skip the bank and take your idea straight to the marketplace. My point here is that money need not be a limited resource. It's printed in machines and distributed to the people with the best ideas.
What is your idea?

Questions to Create A Successful Business

As a successful small business owner, I'm always up to date with the ins-outs of the business environment. Usually, I stroll the company floor, speak to my worker, direct the supervisors, and also surf the internet to discover "the ins and outs" on the changing customs and also evaluate new and old working policies. It takes a lot of diligence and plenty of time spent in conferences to get to the high caliber grade my business is at now. However, today's technique in company upkeep has been reinvented with the innovation services of online survey software and online survey. I fully take advantage of these new methods of target marketing because it assists on knowing what my consumers want and that's done by basic questions and answers. However asking the right question is key to increase the possibility of respondents giving vital feedback. So below are some factors to consider when developing your questions:
Avoid leading words
Just little phrases can change the question and result in a total different kind of feedback. Could, Should, Might, all sound almost the same, but have different meaning to the respondent.
Keep order in questions
Make sure you questions have a planned structure. Try to start with easy questions first to warm up the responder.
Be specific
How do you feel about cooking? The problem here is there is no detail. How about the baking, frying, boiling, etc?
Avoid confusing words
If the respondent doesn't understand the word in your then 99% of the time, they would answer incorrectly.
Be direct with your questions
Your answer will be very broad in regards to responses if you lack being direct and straightforward.
Don't force answers
Respondents don't want to be forced to answer questions. When using these online survey software and online survey, try making these sessions confidential for sincere answers.
Keep it simple
Longer questions would exhaust respondents. It is important to keep questions easy yet engaging to attract the answering capacities of individuals.
So now that you know what it takes to create effective questions for your online survey software and online survey, take the initiative in conducting it. Once you've have collected your relevant information, use them to develop a marketing strategy in customer or workplace satisfaction, which ties into a healthy business. Once you've have followed through with the solving and making the proper changes within the company, then you will definitely see the progress and prosperity in becoming a successful business, like mine.