Farewell SDM! You will be missed!

Friday night was the SDM wake (December 1 spells the end of the SDM brand). It was great to catch up with all the ex SDM’ers, some of whom I haven’t seen for a long time and some I just saw that day! It was also a sad day though as I was saying goodbye to a company that was one of my favourite to work for. I loved my time at SDM and I met some fantastic people there who I know I will keep in touch with for a long time to come. It got me thinking, what made SDM such a great company? How would you go about emulating SDM’s success – and I know many of us will try? For me it comes down to one thing and one thing alone; SDM had extraordinary people. From senior management, to its account management team, project team, to the delivery teams, SDM had fantastic people! There was a passion at SDM that you could actually feel as you walked through the door. Everyone loved what they were doing and did it with contagious enthusiasm. A big difference for me personally was the attitude of the experienced staff at SDM. There was a real belief in mentoring and helping and for many of us that meant learning and growing. I know that I have learnt many valuable lessons that I will use throughout my career thanks to the time that individuals took to help and teach me along the way. And for that I will always be grateful.

So what has this got to do with CRM? Well probably not a lot and admittedly this is a bit of write and release but there is similarity between successfully managing customers and employees. The broad definition of CRM is “A strategy to assist an organisation in managing relationships with customers to maximise profit”. The same can go for employees. In order to maximise company profit you need to find superior talent, build solid relationships with the acquired talent and help that talent grow. The hard part in all of that, in my experience, is finding and keeping the right talent. The right talent doesn’t always mean the best money can get, but rather its more about getting the mix right. It’s about finding passionate people who complement each other and can cover for the areas that they are weaker. I believe this is where SDM really got it right. They had a good mix of techies, business and sales all of whom complimented each other.

Farewell SDM, you will be missed! I hope to work for you again someday!

Bloggers Block and training experiences

I have resisted creating a blog for many years mostly because there are so many great CRM blogs out there and I didn’t want to simply repeat what was already being written. However having worked with CRM and ERP software for a while now (13 years next Feb!) I have been privileged to see many creative uses of CRM as well as some fantastic solutions. I felt it was time to share my experiences.

Another reason I’ve resisted creating a blog is the fear that I’ll fall into the trap of blogging like crazy for the first week or two and then never updating it again. I’ve found that the most useful bloggers are the ones who regularly update their blogs no matter how busy they get. I’ve always believed that in creating a blog you’re making a pact with your readers that firstly you’ll write something worth reading and secondly you will post that useful information on a regular basis. So take the fact that I’m now finally capitulating and entering the bloggerspeare that I will endeavour to do both.

So what do you write about in your first entry that is both useful and worthy of your very first blog post? That’s probably another reason I haven’t started a blog, the pressure of that first article seems to lead to bloggers block! To get past my bloggers block (BB for short?) I thought rather than write an epic Pulitzer winning novel, I would keep my first post simple and talk about what I believe is the most important aspect of a CRM solution.
So what makes a CRM project successful? There are many things that lead to a successful CRM project such as strong executive sponsorship, ensuring the technology doesn’t distract from your CRM strategy, ensuring you have a well planned and thought out change management strategy. I’m not saying any of those or other items are not really important but I have found that almost without exception the one absolutely vital element of any CRM project is this: Training!

Far too often training is something that happens at the end of a project. The solution has been designed, built, tested; change management has been put in place. Right we’re ready let’s go train! Far from being something that should only occur at the end of the project, training should form part of initiation of the project as well. How often I have heard during a training session someone in the initial project team pipe up, “Wow if only I knew the application could do that! That would have solved this problem”. By starting your project with even simple application training you’re ensuring the project team has a better understanding of what the CRM application can and can’t do and how it can achieve their objectives. By training at the start of the project you’re empowering your project team with knowledge.

Another successful training strategy I have used in the past is to break your training sessions into a number of short focused courses rather than a few long sessions. I never like to have a course go for more than an hour and half or cover more than two major topics. Keeping it short and focussed helps ensure the content is relevant to your students. For example you can narrow the course content down to purely the marketing functionality for the marketing team or managing the sales process for the sales team. By keeping my sessions short and focussed I have found that my students are far more receptive and end up using a lot of what they have learnt out in the Real World of CRM.

In the end all of this means you need a sound training strategy in place right at the start of your CRM project. The more thought and focus you put into your training strategy the more successful your CRM project will be.

As an aside, as I struggled with my bloggers block, I turned to my good friend Google to see what he had to say on the matter and found this article “10 tips for beating bloggers block”. I loved tip #1!