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These technical aspects aside, hopefully it is clear that many of the factors involved with CRM adoption – possibly a surprising number of factors to you? – are in the hands of executive leadership and not your CIO, system implementer or training team. Of course, the technical complaints are FAR more acceptable as excuses than some of the human nature dynamics summarized above, so polls of sales teams often yield results which seem like everything would be perfect and that big investment the company made in the CRM would really deliver, if only a few things in the system were tweaked…. Don’t be misled that polls of this kind yield the real rationale behind your team’s reluctance.
CEOs are in a complex quandary on information security. On the one hand this is a topic requiring deep technical expertise which is (usually) outside the wheelhouse of CEOs, unless they head up a security tech company. On the other hand, it has become abundantly clear that in the court of public perception (and for that matter, the court of law), it is considered a CEO’s personal responsibility to ensure that appropriate protections are in place to protect the information of a company’s customers – particularly consumers. No CEO wants to end up on the front page of the newspaper or sued for negligence over a breach.
This is not the main driving problem though. The top CRM systems (Salesforce, Dynamics, SAP, Oracle) have been designed with sales input, design thinking and user experience experts coming out their ears. I find several of the top systems really elegant in their combination of simplicity and power. It’s hard to imagine these systems being much simpler while still achieving their intended goal. Neither is the tech IQ of sales staff the major problem. Never before have salespeople had the level of technical skill that today’s sales professionals possess.
Every business should want to have an IT consultant! IT consulting offers multiple benefits to both small and large organizations. Businesses benefit from their wealth of expertise and experience in handling technical tasks. Unfortunately, many business owners wait until they experience a crisis to hire experts. Such an approach may lead to irreversible damage, especially in the case of a security breach. The best approach is to hire consultants regularly to ensure that a business has the best systems in place. Explore more info on monetizing tech.
A trick every CEO should know about cybersecurity: Achieving information security compliance with one or more government regulatory standards for information security (i.e. ISO 27001, NIST 800-171, HIPAA, NYDFS, etc.) is good, but not sufficient to ensure real cybersecurity. Historically, cybersecurity has been an area that is housed solely in the technology department of a company, whether that consists of one or twenty employees. But more and more executives are understanding the importance of being not only knowledgeable but also involved in the conversations and decision-making process when it comes to protecting their data.