Eight questions to ask to get, or keep, your CRM project on track

Up to 84% of digital transformation projects fail to deliver their expected benefits. This equates to colossal missing ROI, as well as the collateral damage to business strategy, shareholder value and team morale – according to a report from Forbes in 2019.

These numbers are not new.

In 2017, a report in CIO magazine averaged a dozen analyst reports. The numbers ranged from 18% to 69%. Those failures can mean a lot of things — over-budget, major operational issues at go-live, data integrity issues, technology limitations, and so forth. But in my work with clients, when I ask executives if the CRM system is helping their business to grow, the failure rate is closer to 90%.

These reports transcend the introduction of Agile, as a way of delivering projects, and Microsoft Power Platform. It is likely that neither of these evolutions have changed the numbers significantly.

A survey done by C5 Insight in 2015 pulled together a number of other surveys looking at failure rates between 2001 and 2013. The reasons given in these surveys were:

• Too time consuming
• Difficult to learn
• Poor performance
• Inflexible
• Did not integrate well
• Over budget
• Poor support
• Lacking in functionality
• Visually unappealing

The eight questions in this video, if answered honestly, will help you to avoid these issues and so keep you out of these reports and instead on track to success.