Making the Most of Best Practices in CRM

"...best practices quickly become common practices.  Best practices also become a trap; you keep waiting for other practices to emulate rather than creating your own.  Ignore best practices.  Then create them."  So wrote Harry Beckwith in the book "The Invisible Touch: The Four Keys to Modern Marketing."  While Mr. Beckwith was making the application to marketing, could the same concept apply to other areas?

If you consider the market for CRM software, it can be broadly divided as follows: large, integrated software suites such as SAP or Siebel (as part of the Oracle family of products), best-of-breed products such as Epiphany, and platform products such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  None of these categories start with a blank slate, but rather incorporate best practices in sales, service, and marketing.  However, each of these categories takes a different approach to achieving "best practices."

Without getting into a category discussion, take a moment to consider what constitutes a "best practice"?  Think of any set of products in the marketplace.  Do any of them indicate that they have second-best practices?  Of course not.  Rather, each discusses their best practices approach to the customer interaction problems at hand.  While their processes share some similarities, they each have a unique take on "best practices."

Given this marketplace reality, evaluating best practices becomes a comparative exercise of whether the new practices are better than existing practices.  They become one part of the evaluation criteria for making a switch.  Creating a solid business case for change will require showing how the change will bring specific business improvements.  The business case should also indicate how the change will bring the firm comparative advantage in their markets.

One other facet to consider is the accessibility of those best practices.  Let's suppose you have a territory manager function that really does a great job, but it will be deployed into a specific user community where realignment will only be done every 6 months.  It is likely that users will not be able to retain expertise in the application between uses.  If the user interface is not extremely intuitive, users will tend to revert to previous practices.  Each target suser community will need to be considered in turn. 

Practices themselves and accessibility of those practices are really two parts of the same discussion.  While some would argue that best practices themselves are standalone, it is clear that a best practice that cannot be used will not achieve the desired business outcome.  By any measure, could that practice be considered "best"?

In considering this topic, I purposely stayed away from saying which is the right way.  What is your experience in the adoption of best practices?  How do you know what a best practice looks like? Please leave a comment and share your experience