Here are several excerpts from a post by Ann All in her ITBusinessedge blog, Salespeople Want Commissions, not ‘Community’:
CRM seems like a enterprise application practically crying out for elements of Web 2.0. After all, sales and marketing are among the most “social†functions at any company.
Yet at least one publication, Network World, noted that competitive salespeople — are there any other kind? — could erode the potential of social networks if they resist sharing data with colleagues. And it’s not just salespeople. If they’re honest, most folks will admit they like communities where they get more than they give.
Robert Bois, an AMR Research analyst, made a similar point in discussing AMR’s findings that an average of 25 percent of CRM licenses go unused. He said..
Much of the software on the market today helps automate process, but doesn’t necessarily provide incremental value back to the user. Sales people often complain that CRM or SFA is just an administrative burden, and does little more than prove to their boss that they are doing their job. So adoption wanes, and users go back to using familiar tools like spreadsheets, databases or even just Rolodexes. This is not as much of an issue with back-office applications, where there are no alternatives. For example, an order entry operator must enter orders in the system they are given whether they like it or not.
Says Al Falcion, senior director of product marketing for Salesforce:
CRM is no longer about sharing information internally, it’s about extending data with partners and customers. That’s what content and ideas apps do.
Ranking vendors on the basis of Web 2.0 adoption across the enterprise, integration in the product suite, and metrics including unofficial employee engagement, Maggie Fox, a principal with Social Media Group (in a CRM Buyer article) placed most in the lower 50 percentile.
The lack of such benchmarks remains one of the single biggest sticking points with Web 2.0. IT Business Edge’s Carl Weinschenk wrote about the lack of concrete payoffs with Web 2.0 technologies last June. His smart message still stands. He wrote:
Web 2.0 apps often don’t replace anything, and their benefits are more speculative. It probably isn’t easy to make a presentation to ROI-obsessed senior management based on the potential promise of applications that, to date, are largely the province of kids. The lesson isn’t, however, that people championing these new approaches must dream up ways to prove their ROI in order to satisfy some antiquated requirements. Rather, smart upper managers must take a chance and implement innovative elements that may prove themselves — but only in the long term and only in subtle ways.
