The importance of successful user and business adoption

Since a Gartner study in 2001 showed that 50% of CRM implementations failed, much has subsequently been written for the last two decades about the high rate of failure of CRM adoption. While no definitive overall figures are available, most estimates put this figure somewhere in the 40-70% range in 2021.

So, for all your efforts in selecting, designing, and building the CRM solution for your business, you statistically have around a 50% chance of it being successful. How do you beat this trend? What steps can you take to avoid being yet another failure statistic?

The most common reason cited for such failures is that the CRM is not successfully adopted by the user(s) and/or the management. Therefore, the most important thing you can do to improve the success of your CRM is to ensure that your users and management adopt the solution well.

While there is no single solution or magic wand that will achieve this, there are...