The argument most often put forward to justify a CRM is customer orientation. The idea is sound, and yet it leads many projects to failure: by trying to transform the company’s culture, the project is given an ambition that no software can carry on its own.

There is another way to go about it, more modest at the outset and more effective in the end. Here is why CRM is a structuring project, and how to make the most of it by starting from the field rather than from the top.

The team behind our flexible, automatable CRM tells you everything.

The top-down approach, and its limits

The classic course of a large-scale CRM project roughly follows four phases.

• Audit and consulting: consultants define the target organization and culture, together with management.
• Process redesign, on paper, based on this target.
• Rollout to the teams, with plenty of training and change management support.
• The technical component last, adapting existing tools or adopting new ones.

This approach has its logic, but it piles up risks. Field teams discover processes designed without them late in the day. The tool comes last, constrained by choices it cannot always accommodate. And the cost of change management rises as the gap widens between what was designed and what is actually practiced.

The field-driven approach

The opposite approach takes the CRM implementation as its starting point. The teams who sell, communicate and respond to customers take part in defining and configuring the tool. Change starts from the bottom, on concrete topics, and then spreads.

The initial objectives are deliberately simple and operational, for example:

• enabling sales reps to share their customer activities with colleagues and management;
• harmonizing the sales approach from one sales rep to another;
• improving the flow of information between marketing and sales;
• giving customer service a complete view of each account.

These objectives seem modest. They have two decisive advantages: you quickly know whether they have been achieved, and achieving them already changes the way people work. The project produces visible results within a few weeks, which creates the buy-in needed to go further.

Customer orientation as a consequence

In this approach, the tool becomes structuring for sales, marketing and customer service. Information is shared, practices align, customers are seen as a whole rather than in silos. Customer orientation is no longer a prerequisite for the project; it becomes its result.

It is also an approach compatible with working methods based on short iterations, whose principles we detail in our article on agile methods. The concrete start-up steps are in our article on launching a CRM.

An approach that applies from the company’s creation

Young companies have understood this well. Those that structure their sales approach from their very first customers avoid having to rebuild it later, when it has become an obstacle. The topic is covered in our article on CRM for start-ups.

A well-known English phrase sums up the approach: think big, start small, move fast. Think big for the ambition, start small for the scope, move fast for buy-in. The foundations of a successful project are detailed in our article on the three pillars of CRM success.

Your questions about CRM as a structuring project

Does the field-driven approach exclude management?

No. Management sets the direction and arbitrates; it simply does not design alone the processes of those who apply them.

Which initial scope should you choose?

The one where the pain is most visible. A problem everyone knows about, solved quickly, convinces better than any presentation.

Is a preliminary audit still needed?

A short scoping exercise, yes. An audit lasting several months delays the first results without reducing risks.

How do you keep the project from staying too modest?

By planning the next steps from the outset. Starting small does not mean staying small.

Is this approach suitable for large organizations?

Yes, by proceeding team by team or with a pilot site. A successful pilot then serves as a reference for subsequent rollouts.