In some instances, CRM can even aid with client retention by helping firms to monitor customers’ activities and respond effectively when issues arise. Yet implementing CRM programs isn’t easy.

Indeed, CRM technology must communicate with a variety of systems to capture data from numerous product areas and tie together different client communication channels, such as email, online activity, telephone calls, and in-person meetings.

To further complicate matters, CRM technology must include data from firms’ partners, such as logistics companies, fulfilment vendors, and third-party marketers. From a broader perspective, CRM can only work if sales professionals embrace it and are diligent with data entry. With that in mind, CRM programs can frequently require firms to revamp their sales culture.

Consider the following: salespeople are often highly gregarious. They prefer to mingle and entertain clients and can view time spent conducting data entry as time that could be better spent meeting face-to-face with prospects and customers. Many sales professionals also guard their client relationships with a jealous zeal.

Requiring sales reps to share client data, therefore, can often be a challenging initiative. Some sales reps may fear that other sales members will poach their clients or provide poor quality services when cross selling, thereby jeopardizing existing customer relationships.

In many cases, when CRM systems fail, firms don’t get buy-in from their sales teams. Rather, company leaders may focus on their own priorities when identifying required CRM capabilities. Corporate executives, for example, may want CRM technology that help monitor if sales reps are focusing their distribution efforts on products that have been identified as priorities or are participating in specific marketing campaigns.

In a related manner, executives may want to track the number of meetings sales reps complete and assess costs associated with traveling, attending industry conferences, entertaining clients, and holding seminars for generating leads. In the process, executives may fail to ensure that a proposed CRM system will adequately link to other technology and provide features that sales reps will need.

With that in mind, the initial planning of a CRM program should start with input from sales representatives. Sales professionals should be asked to identify CRM capabilities that will make it easier for them to do their jobs. This could include capabilities that make it easier to develop sales profiles of prospects. Such profiles can then be used by sales reps to cater their marketing efforts and product pitches to meet the specific needs of individual clients.

As part of getting buy-in from sales reps, executives should illustrate how the new technology and the time required for entering data can make distribution efforts more efficient. In doing so, firms may want to have vendors that conduct sales training provide success stories that illustrate how other companies have used CRM technology to improve their marketing efforts and win large mandates.

In a similar manner, firms should structure their compensation so that sales professionals have an incentive to update CRM databases with client information. This strategy could include assessing the quality of data that sales representatives add to CRM programs.

Sales representative should also have incentives to encourage cross selling. One obvious approach is to provide commissions when a sales representative helps another department cross sell products. Yet, firms should go a step further by allowing sales professionals to work closely with other product areas to ensure that high-quality services are being delivered. That way, sales professionals will be less likely to worry about other departments jeopardizing relationships by delivering inferior services.