Question: After over a decade of CRM best practices and lessons learned, why does the CRM implementation failure rate continue to be so high?
Guru answer: The CRM software failure rate is an unfortunate reality. Industry pundits continue to believe it will subside, but year after year it doesn't. CRM software users sometimes use these statistics to slow their adoption or believe they have bad CRM software. Unfortunately, there is no simple or single answer to this question. However, there are a number of recurring criteria which are often contributing factors. From my own 16 years of CRM software implementation experience as well as the countless articles I've read and stories I've shared with industry colleagues I would cite the following five factors as the most common and significant contributing factors to unsuccessful CRM software implementations:
- Lack of (active, visible and vocal) executive sponsorship
- Lack of CRM project vision and/or strategy
- Insufficient pressure for change within the organization
- Insufficient budget (generally coupled with unrealistic expectations)
- Failed user adoption (and failure of a change management strategy to deal with challenged user adoption)
