I recently read a blog entitled “Why we cannot get CRM (and SCRM) right” that triggered several thoughts; not as much on CRM but with regards to a challenge I used to face when ‘us’ marketeers wanted to try something drastically new. The more I thought I realized the problem (that I’ll try to illustrate below) is often the result of a company attempting to adopt a technology without having clearly understood the challenges that their users might face when using this technology, its limitations, and/or the process/guidelines that already existing in their environment.

In the following, I’ll share a bit about my experiences trying new things, having access to technology that can (and in some cases cannot) help me, but most importantly finding out (often in midstream) that there are junctures in making the idea become reality that conflict directly with existing business operation procedures.

Before striking out on my own, and during two years of emerging ’social’ trends, great ideas would emerge on how to use social channels to reach our clients, partners and prospects. We’d engage in lively discussions with our ad co.s, PR teams (internal and external) and others across the organization. We’d mock up how we could be truly creative and daring and use both our co.s technology and emerging ’social’ web-tools (Facebook, Twitter, Live.com, etc.) to raise awareness, start discussions and (hopefully) engage the community and have some fun while doing so.

Then when we went to turn ideas to actions we found ourselves caught in a quagmire of many of the business operations procedures. Part of the business like legal, privacy, finance, etc that had to be consulted would have lists of objection that would be counter to our business plans. Here is a hypothetical project example.

One of the first we’d run into was our legal dept., and they’d raise concerns about who’d have access to the data, what contributors across the business, partner community and customer (and prospects) might share with regards to personal, business or product information. Whether this was good, bad, risky, etc. Who owned this (the concept of community ownership doesn’t sit well with LCA folks). And of course could we (the co.) be sued b/c of any, some or all of these. Did any notice, competition, brand usage comply with the companies rules and regulations… the list went on and the quagmire of being daring became a real tough uphill battle.

Heck here is what a tweet (with feedback from LCA) would have looked like:

#nopurchaseneccessary #viewsarenotthatofXXXXXXXXX #plsreadprivacystmt http://ow.ly/1vabA – that is 88 of 140 characters used for compliance & regs — we have not even begun to tweet a simple message and action…

Further there are privacy and financial regulations about who we could use for these types of campaigns – even if we could get through LCA the more creative upstarts (for social media marketing) where typically not on the “approved vendor list”. Not that a large multinational 1980s advertising company couldn’t come up with something new and innovative, after all they did get billg to ‘wiggle his butt’, but the time and costs involved often created their own challenges.

Then there is the technology component. A well executed marketing campaign must have measurable results. Thus even if you got all the ducks in a row you still had to often figure out how to get the information, contacts, leads that you gathered and nurtured into the companies systems. Data pull, old CRM systems and processes, individual spreadsheets all would do their best to thwart these efforts. Then how do you disseminate the data to your partners and sales teams…

In the end, too many ideas were lost to the roadblocks I’ve mentioned above.

This brings me back to the post I mentioned at the title of the article and to quote the blog I mentioned, “The bottom line is that CRM is about companies engaging in relationships with customers.” However, I would like to add that relationships are very complicated these days with many moving parts. Whereas, start-ups and small companies, like mine, can be more flexible here – larger companies can but have many hurdles they must overcome in order to do so. There are good reasons for this, but complying with these may result in large companies continuing to seem more and more stodgy, slow and boring. None of these terms is often used in corp branding – wonder why?

I’d therefore like to offer my experiences (hopefully this post wasn’t too much of a rant) so that midsize and large companies who are looking to update their CRM solutions will think abut involving more of their business in the selection of CRM tools, but most importantly in the pre-implementation discussion about what they are trying to do when it comes to customer engagement for the long term. How do trends and new technology impact this and how does the business work together to overcome from the beginning rather then midstream.

Further, consider how you’d like to deliver your message given the changing marketing and sales channels. e.g. what conversation(s) do you want to start and by whom. Use input from legal, privacy, and the data analysis teams on how they can support the marketing, sales and customer service efforts and then develop  plans of what CRM means to the business rather than investing in a good tool, but limited in the ways you may be able to use it.