Heard the word on the street? 75% of CRM projects fail within their first year, resulting in lost productivity and wasted corporate investments in software, services, and time. The greatest irony of this statistic is that most projects fail because the cornerstone of CRM - relationships - is overlooked. Today's economic climate only intensifies the need for proven solutions that actually improve the relationship between employees and customers.

What follows are the seven 'golden rules' that CRM projects should follow to guarantee successful delivery. These rules have been developed through conversations with companies who have successfully developed, deployed, and maintained CRM solutions for four or more years.

1. CRM = Relationships - CRM is ultimately about relationships and not technology solutions. Improving data integrity, management level reporting, and even employee productivity, while important, are secondary benefits of a well thought out CRM process. Focusing on improving relationships enables organizations to develop more prospects into repeat customers, thereby increasing revenues, return on investment, and productivity.

2. Proactive Executive Empowerment - Management involvement is critical for two key reasons. As company leaders, management sets the overall strategic direction for CRM - including budget and delivery parameters - and ensures that the culture of customer service is incorporated in the organization from the top down. Equally critical is managements' empowerment of employees to both develop positive customer relationships and the corresponding systems that support and enhance those relationships.

3. Know Your Business - No one builds without a blueprint, but many organizations deploy CRM without understanding the business processes in place in their organization. Discovering critical customer interactions late in the project results in expensive redesigns, time delays, and at worst could invalidate the selected CRM solution. Defining business processes, understanding departmental interactions, and identifying ˜bottlenecks' will help employees better manage customer relationships and organizations select the CRM vendor whose product best meets employees and customers needs.

4. Know Your Users - Many companies select a CRM product based upon features rather than benefits to their users. As important as defining business processes is knowing what features are truly required by your CRM users - employees, partners, and customers (via a web portal). For example, implementing chat functionality will only reduce the cost of support inquiries if customers use the functionality. Just as important is knowing what functionality is critical to your internal employees - from integration with email and calendaring applications, like Microsoft Outlook, to offline capabilities and reporting.

5. Product You Can Support - There is no sense in purchasing a CRM solution if the internal staff can't support it. Select a product that leverages the organization's existing technology platform. This will reduce overall maintenance, software, and hardware costs. Next, ensure that the internal IT staff can support the product's technology. Reducing the learning curve and acceptance barriers from the IT staff will strengthen the overall success of project.

6. Small Successes -There are many benefits to deploying a series of small projects rather than fewer larger ones. In most business environments, change is difficult. It takes time for employees to adjust to new business processes and a new set of applications. Smaller deployments enable employees and customers to adjust to new business processes and tools. Smaller deployments can also reduce overall project risk and complexity, and result in an ongoing pattern of success that motivates employees to make the most of the tools. Finally, smaller deployments can help prevent the 'recreate the old system' syndrome. As users become more familiar with the CRM toolset, they are more apt to let go of required functionality from older systems. Over time they will begin focusing on the how the new CRM tools can be used to improved their customer relationships and overall productivity.

7. On-going Evaluation - As with most things in life, a CRM solution will only be successful if the organization is committed to long term evaluation and maintenance. Develop a CRM steering committee incorporating key users from across the organization. The committee should be responsible for evaluating ongoing business requirements, customer requirements, and productivity enhancements that will enable the system to support the ongoing needs of the business, and improve customer relations. The ongoing evaluation ensures that the 'relationship development' becomes a core value of the organization, and empowers users to adjust the business and their tools to the changing needs of customers.

Companies who have successfully implemented CRM solutions know that CRM is at its core about relationships - between employees, partners, and customers. Organizations that are committed to ensuring successful relationships will find that the right CRM tools can increase customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and overall revenues over time.