Key steps have emerged over years of CRM implementations that tend to separate successes from failures.

Set the CRM Vision: Clear and Definable Goals and Expectations

An old proverb said that you can go anywhere as long as you start from where you are, not from where you think or wish you might be.

Leading a CRM effort starts with looking at your company as customers do. How is your customer relationship management operating now? Top executives should take steps such as answering an ad, calling your toll-free number for service, placing an order, and signing up to get emails.

In a successful initiative, your entire company will be deepening its ability to see better from the customer's point of view.

What are your company's value proposition and competitive advantage in their eyes? How can you improve each of these attributes?

How do your employees answer these questions?

What customer needs can you serve better?

What feedback mechanisms can you set up to measure these perceptions -- both now and after CRM implementation? You'll need these mechanisms to carefully quantify the business case for your CRM effort. The feedback you gather will document your eventual progress. It's critical that you develop objectives that are measurable, and have key performance metrics in place.

As you become customer-centric, look at your competitors the way your customers see them. What are competitors doing for your customers that the customers like?

Less-successful CRM initiatives, instead of looking from the customer's point of view at the company, look from the company's point of view at the customer, in an effort to extract more value.

Gather Requirements Carefully

Your business units and the IS department must agree on what customer-related data is needed, where it will come from, and how it will be gathered and distributed.

It's critical to prioritize the order in which business areas, such as marketing, sales and service, will be addressed.

It may be wise to have executives from the marketing, sales and service areas be on a CRM committee, as they lead the teams that will benefit most from the CRM effort.

This is the time to re-engineer your business processes with the optimal customer experience in mind. It's also an opportunity to increase procedural effectiveness and reduce costs. For instance, a well-thought-out system can eliminate and reduce the duplicate manual entry of customer data.

You're automating processes. Don't make the mistake some businesses do of automating bad ones.

Set the Implementation Strategy Carefully

Choose small, well-defined parameters for your pilot program, and spend time refining the key performance indicators. Remember the old saying that "you can't improve what you can't measure."

Make sure you have a project leader who has the experience to manage project scope carefully. It's inevitable that change requests will occur, and they'll likely put great pressure on the budget, timeline, and overall chances of success. Keep focused on your initial milestones and be sure to deliver them. Avoid the natural tendency to try to do too much too soon.

Motivate and Train Your People

It will be natural for your employees to resist change. They have procedures and processes they're already familiar with. Salespeople, especially, tend to have their own individual systems for doing their jobs, from notebooks to index cards to PDA's. You need to get buy-in. It's important to consult with your employees, get their feedback, and constantly show each of them how they will benefit from the changes. People give up familiar processes IF they see there's something better ahead.

Training must be accessible and ongoing. The most important time for training is in the months after deployment.

Set realistic expectations, provide ongoing feedback, announce milestones, and reward early gains, perhaps with incentives. The entire organization needs to collaborate as it delivers more customer value and becomes more customer-centric.

Ensure Quality Data

Part of your training needs to focus everyone on the need for accurate, complete data. Emphasize to employees that great customer data is the key to unlocking customer value. Show each person how they will benefit. Make everyone aware of how marketing campaigns can be monitored more effectively, more accurate sales forecasts can come together more quickly, and add-on sales will be easier.

Set clear standards for data quality. Communicate them widely. Make someone the champion of clean data. Devise a plan for checking and maintaining data to ensure it is accurate and clean.

Engage in Continuous Improvement

You've set up mechanisms for employee, partner and customer feedback. As you gather that feedback, take part in continuous improvement. Refine your strategies and processes, set new goals, and devise tactics to achieve them. Monitor the entire system for employee participation and make sure it's getting accurate and complete data.

You might consider setting up incentive bonuses for people based on increasing customer satisfaction.

These are some of the most common steps that have resulted in CRM success and solid ROI. Now take a look at CRM pitfalls to avoid.