Most CRM systems provide no productivity guarantees. According to a recent study by the market research firm CSO Insights, only one out of four companies implementing CRM realizes significant performance improvements. What makes some CRM implementations successful and others a wasted effort? The best way to answer this is to examine how a leading outsourcing firm ensured its CRM implementation would deliver as promised.

Roseland, New Jersey-based Automatic Data Processing Inc. (ADP) is one of the world’s largest payroll and tax filing processors and offers a wide range of services, including human resources, retirement, expense management and benefit administration. Each day, ADP’s services are delivered to one out of every six private sector workers in the United States. ADP’s outsourcing model has allowed it to maintain strong financial performance during the recent recession – one of the few companies to do so.

As a pioneer in the field of outsourcing, ADP has consistently leveraged technology to expand its service portfolio. As a result, ADP’s executives were looking for a CRM solution with the capabilities to address a number of its sales force’s specific needs. Among these was the ability to increase the sharing of contact information, access customer histories, identify opportunities and measure the pipeline. Boiled down, ADP needed a system that not only could handle its requirements for sharing information but also provide accurate pipeline and forecasting metrics. It also needed to support ADP’s vast and distributed organization without placing additional burden on either the administrators of the system or its users.

The sales organization for ADP’s Employer Services (ES) division – the largest of ADP’s four divisions – consists of 2,600 sales associates, 400 sales managers and 250 technical support people, totaling at least 3,250 users located in various regions of the United States. This organization is designed to serve the market by dividing it into three distinct market segments, based on customer needs. ADP ES is equipped to service companies ranging in size from the Fortune 100 to Mom-and-Pop start-ups. ADP National Account Services targets firms with 1,000 or more employees; ADP Major Accounts Services focuses on firms with 50–999 employees; and ADP Small Business Services provides solutions for companies with fewer than 50 employees.

This structure allows ADP ES to employ a large, highly trained sales staff to offer its broad portfolio of services to a diverse customer base. ADP was looking for a CRM system that could support the evolving needs of its sales force and allow it to maintain its competitive edge.

“We wanted to find a way to help sales associates work through the entire account-management process,” says John LaMancuso, senior vice president of sales, ADP Major Accounts Services. “It also had to be flexible enough to manage multiple sales associates accessing information on different areas of a single account,” says Kris Borkovich, senior vice president, ADP National Account Services. “And we needed to be able to react quickly to referrals,” adds David Forbes, senior vice president of sales, ADP Small Business Services.

In other words, they needed a system that could handle the intricacies of an enterprise selling complex product lines into multiple customer segments, with very different sales processes. With these goals in mind, ADP began to search for a CRM system. Based on previous experience, ADP executives knew that in order to be successful the CRM system would need to overcome the following three key hurdles.

1) Data conversion and Data Quality. The information from the contact manager would have to be loaded into the CRM database. Losing data would mean that sales associates would have to spend time doing extra clerical busywork.

2) Rapid Employee Training. Sales associates would need to be trained to use the new system, without taking quota-busting chunks of time from their schedules.

3) Unanimous Employee Acceptance. Sales associates should want to use the system, without management looking constantly over the associates’ shoulders to ensure its use.

After a review of desired features and potential challenges, ADP selected salesforce.com. “Of all the systems we evaluated, salesforce.com seemed to be the most intuitive,” says LaMancuso. ADP executives were also influenced by the fact that several companies with similarly large sales forces have recently embraced salesforce.com, including Staples, SunGuard, Nextel and Cisco.

To ensure its goals were met, ADP took a gradual implementation approach. Aided by salesforce.com and a systems integrator, ADP gathered inputs from line managers and sales staff to ensure that the system reflected the company’s best sales practices. “We were trying to create an ideal marriage between the people, the process and the technology,” says LaMancuso.

To help preserve data integrity, ADP created a Web-based tool that made the process simple for sales personnel to convert their data while providing safeguards to check and validate data accuracy prior to it being submitted to the CRM system. The active role the sales force played in the implementation process helped ease adoption, and further streamlined its central database.

Train Fast. Train Well
ADP rolled out training in two segments. The first segment consisted of a two-hour, Web-based pretraining, which allowed sales associates to get familiar with the basics of the system. This online training was quickly followed by a full day, hands-on program, presented 60 times across the country during a four-month period. To further increase adoption, ADP used the actual data that the associates had previously converted. “Seeing the real data made it easier for the associates to see how the system could actually help them sell,” says Borkovich.

To complement this, ADP executives emphasized features of the system that made the sales job easier for sales associates, such as the ability to retrieve competitor information. “When an associate knows what our competitors are doing, he or she can more accurately address how to attack or counterattack in the account,” says Borkovich. Associates also learned that their managers could use the CRM system to provide guidance and assist them in securing business. “Sales leaders could plan and review opportunities on a biweekly basis to help the sales associates strategize and assemble a value proposition for each customer,” says LaMancuso.

While ADP focused on the process for rolling out the CRM system, they also found salesforce.com’s ease of use to be a key selling point for getting employee commitment. As sales associates watched their sales figures grow, they became increasingly enthusiastic. “Early feedback is that our associates like the dashboard approach to managing their opportunities,” says Forbes. The salesforce.com system has proven particularly valuable for sales associates who call upon large corporations with multiple divisions. Because associates can find out about relationships that ADP already has with the customer organization, they can more easily find points of access and influence. In contrast to the widely publicized CRM software failures, ADP experienced near-unanimous adoption. “I only received one negative comment out of our initial group of 1,500,” noted LaMancuso.

ADP’s sales managers like that the system presents them with an online dashboard overview of their entire sales group. In addition, sales managers can automatically perform many tasks that in the past were time-consuming, such as the mailing of marketing materials to regional customers. Finally, ADP has recognized the value the system can add in helping to increase accuracy in forecasting future sales.

The lessons are clear. Companies that want a successful CRM implementation must define their best practices and select a CRM vendor that can then reflect those practices in the CRM software, get sales employees involved early, provide top-notch training, and emphasize system features that lead toward higher sales figures. “I believe that the ROI for this system will turn out to be very powerful,” says Borkovich. “We now have the information that we need to be more successful.”

While ADP has found success with salesforce.com, CSO Insights also reports that salesforce.com experiences much higher than average satisfaction and return on investment – testimony to the outsourcing model that benefited ADP and salesforce.com. •