Times are hard. Your sales group is having a little trouble making their numbers. What you need right now is a quick hit of CRM to get everyone more productive. There’s only one hitch: the CFO. It’s the CFO who gets to say whether you’ll get the money to upgrade your system, money that the CFO would rather not spend. “CFOs want to see a real return on investment,” says Rob Desisto, a research director at Gartner, a Connecticut-based market research firm that studies CRM usage and buying patterns. “If you can’t show hard savings, the CFOs aren’t going to sign on the dotted line.”

It’s sad but true. CFOs are increasingly reluctant to dole out dollars for sales-focused CRM. And why not? For years, CFOs have been promised that new technology – email, ERP, B2B, etc. – is going to make everyone more productive, but more often than not the promised productivity fails to materialize. Go to the typical CFO with a CRM request, and you’re likely to hear skeptical noises. “There has been some overselling on the expectation side, especially in sales force automation,” says Gartner Group vice president Tom Topolinski. “Sales of such systems have gone from explosive growth to projected flat or low growth, for the next two years at least.”

This is not to say that CRM isn’t popular. On the contrary, a recent Gartner Group study indicated that roughly two-thirds of U.S. companies intend to have CRM initiatives deployed by the end of 2002. However, many of these initiatives are such nonsales CRM applications as call center processing and marketing support. If your sales group is going to get its fair share of the IT dollars, you’re going to have to convince your CFO that the investment makes sense. To help you accomplish this, Selling Power asked a number of CRM experts how to build a strong case for CRM. They gave us the following eight keys to making sales automation into an offer a CFO can’t refuse.

Key #1: Take charge of your CRM destiny.Some sales managers wrongly believe their corporate IT group should drive CRM initiatives. That’s a big mistake, especially when you want to get the CFO onto the bandwagon. IT propeller-heads (uh, I mean professionals) know less than nothing about sales. Their idea of a great CRM system is likely to be the one that has as many bells and whistles as a pinball parlor. If you’re going to make your case to the CFO, you’ll need a clear vision of what you want to accomplish with your CRM system and how you plan to use its capabilities to close more sales.

You don’t want your CRM system to be held hostage to a set of extraneous issues, according to Keith Raffel, chairman of the Mountain View, CA-based CRM vendor UpShot. “CRM has lost its way to a certain extent,” he explains. “Everyone is trying to boil the ocean rather than focus on increasing sales revenues.” The worst-case scenario is when sales-oriented CRM is treated as an extension to the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. ERP systems are nightmarishly complicated and can take years to change and modify. Raffel puts it this way: “There’s just too much ‘bloatware’ out there that salespeople don’t like using and don’t find useful.”

Key #2: Keep It Simple for StupidSelling your CRM concept to the CFO is like selling any other product to any customer. If you get involved in a complex discussion of detailed functions and capabilities, you might as well just jump into the swamp and start grabbing for alligators. Instead, you should seize on a particular aspect of the sales process that CRM can make more productive, and then build the budget case for the system around that concept. “The name of the game is to increase sales,” says Raffel. “Some CRM vendors seem to forget that.”

Keeping it simple is not just a good sales tactic; it’s also likely to result in a CRM system that your sales folk will find useful and even indispensable. Indeed, the most effective CRM implementations are often those that are limited in scope, according to Adam Honig, president of Akibia Consulting, a Massachusetts-based company that provides CRM consulting and IT support services. “What’s epidemic is the overuse of mandatory fields in CRM forms,” he says, “Salespeople want to enter as little as possible and then only information that is pertinent to making a sale and keeping the customer happy.”

Key #3: Make the CFO’s Job EasierCFOs, like all bean counters, are fascinated by numbers. When you’re talking to the CFO, be sure to emphasize the important data that you’ll be able to supply to the corporation. Point out how the proposed CRM system or upgrade will make it easier for the CFO to build slides that are chock full of quantitative information. However, don’t go overboard and promise the CFO too much, or you might end up burdening the sales force with hours of virtually meaningless data entry.

The trick here is to strike a balance and make the systems responsive to both the sales force and the managers. “It’s a myth that companies need 360-degree customer view, warns Erin Kinikin, a vice president at the Massachusetts-based research firm Giga Information Group. “Information is only valuable if you gather it for a purpose, and companies that try to force their salespeople to enter all kinds of detailed customer data almost never get around to using it.” What’s better is to have the salespeople focus on entering information that’s useful for closing sales, and then generate slides from whatever data is gathered for that purpose.

Key #4: Plan to Measure What’s ImportantAlways try to bring the CFO around to the idea of measuring the CRM system in a way that makes sense from a sales perspective. “We recommend that companies focus on problems where they can experience some quick successes that provide a measurable return on investment,” says Paul Rodwick, vice president at San Mateo, CA-based CRM vendor Epiphany Inc. “At a high level you should be looking at customer retention rates, the total amount of sales coming from the average customer, and the wallet share of your customers’ businesses that you’re getting.”

Planning to measure the right things is also a recipe for success when it comes to implementing and installing the system. Measuring the right behavior is a particularly critical issue when the success of the sales team is dependent upon other organizations in the enterprise, according to Giga’s Kinikin. “A classic recipe for unhappy customers is when the sales force is rewarded for making a quick sale and then moving on, and then customer service is rewarded for getting the customer off the phone as quickly as possible,” she explains. “If you do it wrong, CRM can be about spending people’s time to enter data without getting any financial return.”

Key #5: Don’t Ask for Too MuchWith CRM, less can be more. Focusing on what’s really important often means purchasing less technology but using it more effectively, says Kinikin. “We did a best-practice audit on CRM in retail banking and discovered that the two most effective banks had the smallest amount of technology,” she explains, adding that both banks were successful because their organizations got together and agreed on how they were going to handle customers across different departments. In other words, knowing what you’re trying to accomplish and working with other groups to accomplish it is more likely to pay off with productivity gains than if you simply pour extra technology into the sales process.

This is one area where you’ll need to work closely with your IT professionals to make certain that you’re asking for just the right amount of hardware and software. A good way to make certain that you’re on target is to first propose a pilot project. “If you have the resources, it’s a good idea to set up a staging environment that allows you to test the system under real-life conditions,” says Steven Sherkanowski, director of product management for New Hampshire-based CRM vendor Pragmatech Software Inc. A big advantage of this approach: you can tell the CFO that you won’t need all the money until the pilot has proven successful.

Key #6: Don’t Underestimate How Long It Will TakeIT projects are notorious for running over budget, according to Gartner research director Beth Eisenfeld, who judges that a majority of businesses underestimate the costs of CRM projects by as much as 40 to 75 percent. “Many businesses blindly pursue costly CRM initiatives without understanding the challenges and costs involved,” she warns.

The key to avoiding cost overruns is to continuously monitor and manage the implementation and product phases of the CRM system. Eisenfeld recommends calculating the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the system by estimating the benefits of the system and the expected return on investment while considering the costs of the work plans for the various implementations that will be required to install or extend the system. “Using these tools to manage CRM projects, in addition to using them for program justification, ties it all together,” she explains.

Key #7: Be Sure to Include Enough Spare DevicesSay you have 100 sales representatives. When you size your CRM expenses, you’d better ask for 100 laptop computers, right? Wrong! Unlike desktop computers, laptops are fragile and tend to break all too easily. “When you hand normal, plastic portable PCs to a sales force, you have to count on a 30 percent failure rate every year,” explains Rance Poehler, president of New Jersey-based Panasonic Personal Solutions Corp., a manufacturer of rugged PCs for field sales organizations. “That can end up costing a great deal of money, both in device support and in lost sales opportunities.”

This means that when you tell the CFO how many devices you’ll need your sales force, you’ll need to include enough extra units to replace the units that go out of commission. Another option is to ask for laptop computers that have been “ruggedized” so that they can survive more easily in the rough-and-tumble world of the sales road warrior.

Key #8: Wait until Next YearStill can’t get the CFO to open up the purse strings? Don’t worry. Your CFO will eventually come around to your way of seeing things, especially once the economy improves. “Generally speaking, the CRM category is hot,” says Clarence So, director of products at San Francisco-based CRM vendor Salesforce.com, “And the benefits of CRM definitely include revenue enhancement and cost containment.” While it may take some time, the CRM message will eventually get through the green eye shades of even the most tight-fisted CFO.