Chapter 7. Get Set: Organizing for Success

We've just learned how to deal with the most common barriers to CRM success. Now we will look at the gap created by organizational silos. We need to learn to work together across functions and organizations to bridge this gap so we can deliver CRM results. We need to answer these questions:

• Organization: What parts of the organization need to be involved, and how?

• Sponsorship: How do we find a sponsor and keep him/her engaged?

• Leadership: How do we govern a program that crosses so many independent functions?

• Partnership: How do we strengthen relationships and build partnerships between functions and between the business team and IT?

Unless your CRM program includes all the organizations that face customers, their experience will not be integrated. If it's not cross-functional, it's not CRM. If you just want to implement sales rep automation, you may not need to involve other functions. But the most that you'll get is sales representatives who are a little more organized and productive. It doesn't become CRM until it starts to affect the customer experience and until the sales reps can actually do a better job because they have more knowledge and understanding of the customer's total experience than ever before.