In this episode of Salesforce Simplified, we’re talking with Michael Hudlow, a leader in business transformation and corporate innovation – and an expert on the topic of CRMs – about common, but not always obvious, reasons people don’t use and adopt CRMs, including Salesforce CRM. Michael is also the author of the books, “How Not To F*ck Up A CRM System: Learning From Others Mistakes” and “How Not To F*ck Up Artificial Intelligence & CRM Systems: Maximizing ROI With AI.”
Mike Boyle: Hi, everyone… Today’s topic on the Ad Victoriam “Salesforce Simplified” podcast is CRM Adoption… I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. And our guest today is Michael Hudlow. Michael is a leader in business transformation and corporate innovation and he’s an expert who knows about the common but not always the obvious reasons people don’t use and adopt CRMs, including Salesforce CRM. Michael is also the author of the book, “How Not To F**k Up a CRM System – Learning From Others Mistakes.”
Hi, welcome to the “Salesforce Simplified” podcast. Great to have you with us… Now, do I understand that in addition, Michael, to “How Not To F**k Up a CRM System – Learning From Others Mistakes” there happens to be another book in the works from you?
Michael Hudlow: Yeah. So, the second book is really not a follow-up but along the same lines as the first book and it actually is becoming, making it into a series very similar to I guess what you’d say is the, you know, the dummy series from years ago. But this one is more focused on how not to mess up AI going into CRM. Because it’s just, you know, it’s, it’s the buzzword that everyone is sick of hearing about but it’s there, you know. Yeah. And, so I had to address the fact of where the AI world is going with regards to CRM.
Mike Boyle: And, just so everyone knows, obviously, in the show’s episode notes, I will put links to those, to the books and other things related to Michael.
Michael, tell me a little bit more about your background. What makes you the CRM expert that you are?
Michael Hudlow: I think it really comes down to experiencing and, and having all of the experiences in life in the professional world of dealing with CRM since 2008, 2009. And then before that, I’m really the product of being, I guess you’d say a senior manager, a global leader with a couple of the big four firms before that doing it, systems work both internally and externally the operationally and, and consulting. But since 2008, I have really been focused on CRMs and, you know, they’re linked to knowledge management and data management with a consulting firm and with some consultative work as well in that realm and then deploying those things globally.
So, yeah, I have to say, I kind of quote Jimi Hendrix with the song “Crosstown Traffic” and, I would say I have, you know, cars on my back or, you know, the tire tracks on my back to, to, kind of go through the whole how to learn from others mistakes. You know I’m, I’m a participant but I’m also, you know, a person who has experienced most of these things or talk to people that have done, you know, had issues.
Mike Boyle: Well, we’re gonna focus specifically, Michael, on CRM adoption… So beyond the usual complaints about complexity and cost, what are some less obvious reasons that people resist using or adopting a CRM system like Salesforce?
Michael Hudlow: In no particular order, I would say there is a huge level of paranoia by users. So, you know, regardless of the firm or the company that you’re working for, puts it in or not, there are lots of people say, wow with, you know, all these metrics out there, you know, am I being watched of how much, you know, the easy stuff is, you know, how much time I’m in a system if, if you’re a more, you know, the transaction-related person at a company, but at the higher level, it is, you know, how much information am I putting into the system or getting out of the system? And people, you know, you have to think of and, and people don’t think of CRM as a large sharing system. And ultimately, it’s a, you know, very complex, a very smart sharing tool and requires data, and or you can’t just get that out of something you have to put it back in. So there are lots of people that say, you know, have the mentality of, you know, my secret way of doing process or of getting clients or, or, you know, managing professional service opportunities, you know, that’s part of who I am and I, they identify with it. So they’re very paranoid about who is gonna look at my information and why. So the thing is, what makes it hard is a Salesforce administrator. And I use that word very broadly, you know, anybody involved in the Salesforce operations had to add a firm. You know, what makes it difficult is those individuals that are reluctant to adopt, most likely they’ve been told either with a stick or a carrot, they’ve been told to use the system. So, it is very common for people to mask usage, meaning they kind of sort of use it, they dabble a little into it. So people see they are using the system, but in reality, they’re not giving all the information that they really should. And that is a huge problem with regards to, you know, through adoption where administrators rely on the quality of the information coming in as being whole, instead of what I would call a, you know, secretive usage where the administrators see from a technical angle that that person is using the system. But, in their own heart, they’re really not. So there is a level of paranoia, there’s also a huge level of, and this is, I’m gonna blame leadership. And so don’t, you know, don’t bring too many pitchforks out.
But, you know, a lot of times actually more frequently than not individual leadership, you know, let’s just say, you know, at the divisional level are not, you know, they still wanna see their magic report that they’ve been using for the last 15 years that they’ve made in Excel or, you know, for, for an example. And so they’re not, they’re willing to play the game of using a large CRM system such as Salesforce, but they’re not willing to let go of the past. And so what you have is a lot of systems that are competing with other older, more established systems that were never sunset. And as a result, you have dueling systems, and then the grind of, you know, duplicate, triplicate manual activities having to take place really beats up on users. And, you know, sometimes, you know, Salesforce systems and like that can really wither on the vine. Those are two big ones that are kind of not necessarily so obvious that you know, aren’t part of a certification process… that happened a lot.
Mike Boyle: Well, it kind of leads me into my next question, Michael, how can a company’s existing culture and communication styles inadvertently create roadblocks to CRM adoption?
Micheal Hudlow: It’s a huge problem, actually. You know, it’s funny, it’s not the stuff kind of topic that gets a lot of press. And I guess ultimately that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book that I wrote because I wrote it out of frustration quite frankly because I kept seeing the same problems happen again and again. But I was never seeing, you know, the snippets, the articles, the, you know, shows like this even though we’re really talking about those issues. So, you know, it is much easier for an executive. And when I say that, you know, and whether it’s a CEO or board of directors, I’m just talking about the leaders for a company, it is much easier for them, even though it’s a big pill sometimes to swallow to pay for a system than it is, it’s much harder to get those people to actually say, you know, what our old processes are, you know, stink or somewhere, somewhere less than stink. And we’re gonna commit both to paying for this system. But we’re also gonna pay to do a lot of, you know, historical soul searching and change processes that need to be changed to align with those techs, you know, with the new technology and, and by not doing so, and you know, and then more specifically what I have found is that a lot of these processes don’t get changed because it’s the very leaders that are making those decisions that have probably been part of, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago or longer in making the existing process. And it’s kind of like, you know, no one wants to be told they’re, you know, their baby is ugly, kind of, sort of. And, and it’s like, well, I don’t wanna change this process because, you know, whether they admit it or not, or even if they know it or not, they’ve probably personally identified with processes that are in place that need to be changed or even technical tools or, or quasi technical tools that need to be changed. And they’re just not, they’re not willing to accept that defeat yet. Those people usually are not vocal about those issues. And as a result, they become a huge problem for project managers and product owners at companies that are responsible for things like Salesforce because they’re not apparent, the problem isn’t apparent, and the root cause of the problem isn’t apparent.
And that’s quite frankly what I do a lot of times is come in as a, you know, unbiased third-party observer to see where these snags are coming up in systems and then determine, well, how do I fix this? And ultimately, I think that’s where a lot of these ongoing processes or the existing for as you put it cause a problem and you think about it, why that is, is because there’s never been something like a Salesforce. There’s never been something like that before. You know, people sometimes say, well, you know, you could equate it to another big legacy system, but you can’t because, you know, these cr MS which used to be much more fine to fine-tuned to, to solving or a specific problem have now are touching every facet of a company, you know, the marketing, the intellectual property accounting, you know, you name it.
Obviously, everybody knows there are all the different clouds that exist and how can any previous system ever be compared to these things? And they’re changing every day. And then with the advent of AI, you know, it seems like it’s, you know, the morning is different in the afternoon. Nowadays, I’m sure another thing that you deal with is making folks understand the value.
Mike Boyle: What are some common misconceptions about the value proposition of a CRM that lead people to underestimate its potential benefits?
Michael Hudlow: I think this is gonna be, this is gonna sound like I’m beating you know, being a roundabout here with my answer. But, the reality is the initial problem there is quite frankly the question, meaning how do I prove value or, you know, and even, you know, how do I maximize ROI how do I change and say, hey, because we spent, you know, whatever a million dollars on this, we’re now making two million dollars. So, therefore, it’s, you know, fantastic the issue there is unless everyone is all in meaning all those things that I talked about earlier, unless, you know, there is some type of reward and consequence system put in place for, you know, being what I call a good corporate citizen with regards to CRM, unless all of the things are not going through one system, meaning you don’t have dueling banjos with, you know, so old, you know, spreadsheet system that people used or some other antiquated, you know, business development activity process that isn’t embedded into these new systems. Unless all those things are buttoned up and put into one system that can be tracked, then proving the value becomes, not only becomes impossible to answer, it really becomes a poor question because it can’t be the only way to, you know, really because, because ultimately, you know, unless you have all these things wrapped up and even, and maybe the way you do it is to scale it up where you, you know, you make one group in the world completely buttoned up into a process or a set of processes and then roll in war. But even then it becomes difficult because of what I was talking about before sharing.
You know, I have found that if you go down the path of ‘if you build it, they will come’ kind of mentality, then you will have teams getting into the CRM or our Salesforce space and not fully being participatory in the inclusion of information, but they are fully expecting to get the information out of the system. And that also becomes a big problem. But you know, the ROI proof that’s really the only way you can go down the path is if you know that you will just say keep it very easily in a sales model kind of conversation.
You know, if you have 10 salespeople and all of their activities are going through the system, I mean, literally all of their activities are going through the system and they’re being honest about what, you know, what they’re doing and what they’re up to and where they’re going next, then you can just, you know, easily do a, you know, compare, you know, month, over month kind of issue. But where the real pickup will be is how they are obtaining the opportunities. Is it through, you know, forecasting, is it through advanced algorithms in the CRM that are finding things that, you know, a human and you normally wouldn’t find. And then obviously we go into the A I world, if you can do all those things, then you definitely can measure it. But just going back to the problem that you’d mentioned earlier that requires full adoption and full leadership support, which is quite frankly scarce. I mean, it just doesn’t happen frequently enough at an all-inclusive level that it really needs to.
And I think it’s not necessarily the fault of the leaders. It’s that this technology is becoming so new. And now with the advent of AI as well, it’s changing so quickly that people just can’t wrap their head around.
Mike Boyle: There are a couple of other issues… I’m sure you run into with CRM adoption, trust, and security. Can a lack of trust in the data accuracy or security actually within a company lead to resistance to implementing a CRM system?
Michael Hudlow: Yeah, there’s, you know, there’s, I was gonna say there’s an analogy here. I heard – I think it was [comedian/magician] Penn Gillette – saying about magic where he said there’s this, I don’t know the name of it. I’m sure there’s some theory name to it, but it’s a concept that if you’re sitting in the audience of a magic show and you see one thing that you weren’t supposed to see, even, even if it isn’t, you know, directly related to, you know, the main focal point of the trick. Once you see something you weren’t supposed to see, you have complete doubt over everything. And I guess it’s kind of funny because, you know, obviously magic’s not real. So I don’t know if they thought the people on stage were wizards, but in reality, you know, the point’s a valid point and where I was going with that with regards to data and CRM.
And this unfortunately, or fortunately ties back into the whole adoption issue that we were talking about earlier and the sharing of information, if a person goes to a CRM system because they were told to go to the CRM system or they’re interested in it and then they come and do a search and don’t find something that they know should be there and then go to another system. You know, one that hasn’t been sunset it or one that hasn’t been, you know, let’s just say data hasn’t been consumed yet. And then they find that information. Well, you have now tainted the quality of that in that system, Salesforce in this case, them and probably everyone they speak to at the water cooler, you know, they’re gonna say it’s not reliable, it’s not there. You still have to go in three different places. You really haven’t improved anything if you just made another place where things might be.
So the whole data concept really becomes huge. And, you know, whether it’s a benefit of the, of, of CRMs or a, a AAA detriment is the fact that if you say if the she machines, you know, if the system is tied into marketing and hr and, and all the other different places that it can go into, then it better have the information that people perceive to be in those other systems. It can’t be, you know, and, especially if you publicize that, you know, and the problem where, you know, most likely happens is one of technical issue, obviously, but more commonly and than not, I find it to be people process going back to the example I said about a salesperson that doesn’t want to share everything. Well, if they want to share everything at the water cooler, talking about how great they are.
Obviously, I’m making it a caricature here. But if they want to talk about what, you know, what’s on their pipeline and what they’re doing, and then someone else goes into the system to say, hey, I wanna find out more about this. Maybe there is, you know, an add-on work or something and that information is not there, then you’ve just unfortunately proven to people that, but the system can’t be relied upon even though that might be completely false. And from an initial standpoint when you’re doing, you know, data imports and data translations, your taxonomy, all of those, you know, data-related things have to be perfect. There are AI tools now coming out that help out greatly. But if you people see duplicative records worse than that trip of records and so on, then they just get a cast of doubt, and then they really, you know, the uphill battle of learning a new system from them and not being confident. And once you learn it that the right information is gonna be. There is usually just too much to ask of a person for adoption’s sake. And then you’ve lost another user, potentially, then you lost the information those people are gonna share and you know, it just snowballs out of shape.
Mike Boyle: Well, we’ve talked about reasons for people to resist adopting CRMs. We’ve talked about, you know, what culture and communication styles and value and data, accuracy and security and, and, and, and those things. So there’s a whole host of things that we’ve covered. …Let’s get to some solutions here in the last couple of questions that I have for you.
If you’re advising a company – and I know you do this – how can companies overcome the challenge of integrating a CRM within an existing legacy system and workflows? How do they just make it work right?
Michael Hudlow: Easier said than done. But I would say this way and I’ll pretend that we are, you know, two executives sitting in a room having a student level of consultative conversation. The first thing to make it work, you’re quoting the word it is and this is gonna sound so basic, but it’s really what a lot of times is missing is having a true set of realistic goals that you’re trying to solve.
From the very beginning, you have to do something that is going to visually and financially make a difference because this is very much a public relations kind of a task internally to accomplish when you’re overhauling these systems or replay, putting a system in for the first time. I mean, that’s kind of one of the ironic things that most people say, you know, that don’t have a, you know, a Salesforce, they say, ‘Oh, we don’t have CRM yet.’ Well, you really do. I mean, you think about it, I mean, if you don’t, if CRM, if you just boil it down, it’s all about managing customers, you know, helping business development activity, you just may be doing it with a, a notepad of paper and your, you know, your exchange, your outlook email folder, but you do have a system but maybe your system is just, you know, terrible. You have to get people.
And the first thing I say to anyone, if leadership is not completely vested, meaning not that they just want to pay for the system that they are really willing to make, you know, like give me an example effective June the first, the, you know, the monthly, you know, leadership report will no longer be looked at it. Will, you know, anything you submit through the old channels will not happen? And me the CEO this is law and I am gonna hold fast to this. Leadership has to be vocal on change, vocal on support, and the absolute biggest cheerleader because no, the best project manager product manager in the world cannot overcome.
You know, if leadership says, ‘Well, you know, great, I still get CRM is really cool, but since I’m still using my old, 1-2-3 report or a now or whatever the case may be, then it, it just won’t work because people don’t know what to do.’ So the biggest thing I would say to any leader at the time of sale of the system or the time you start talking to your vendor is that, you know if you’re gonna use a deployment vendor is they have to understand that they have to change priority one. That’s the biggest thing.
As far as everything below that goes, you have to get ahead of the curve with telling people why you’re doing it in this case, you know, let’s just say to reduce the business development timeline and why you’re not doing it, you’re not doing it to spy on anyone or, or, you know, steal information from that. People consider it to be their own personal thing. You’re not doing that. A lot of times people think that because there’s now this big system in the sky that’s keeping all of our contacts that well, that means they’ve lost their private matters with regards, you know, or their, their tricks. Well, you have to inform people what the system does and what it doesn’t do and you know, by you having yes, by people having access to your contacts. Well, they would be foolish if they went out and, you know, say, hey, I, I see you’re a friend of Joe. Let’s see, when I do a business deal together, they would never, that, that’s not gonna happen. What’s gonna happen is you’re gonna go to Joe and your colleague and say, hey, I see, you know, this person, let’s go talk to them together. So it opens up more doors than it doesn’t.
And that’s interesting that you asked the question that you did because my book, while it’s on the technical topic of CRM, it’s not a technical book. It’s much more about things you have to change and, and it’s a case study driven book where there are, you know, 20 different cases where they seemed innocent enough when people encountered them. But here’s the devastation, maybe that’s a little harsh of a word, but here’s the problems that it caused and what could have been done to get out of it.
Mike Boyle: Michael, my last question for you has to do, with AI, we kind of brushed on it a little bit earlier. I was having a conversation with someone yesterday who said to me, ‘Oh, I’m so tired of the topic of AI,’ and my answer was ‘Well, OK, but guess what? It’s not going away. So just, you know, deal with it.’ But from your perspective and from the perspective of CRM adoption, what role is AI currently playing in user adoption for CRMs, and what do you see in the future?
Michael Hudlow: Yeah, you’re right. It’s not going away, that was the cut to the chase of that. But I mean, you know, here’s the reality with regards to CRMs and that, let’s just say the CRM ecosystems, you’re seeing A I heavily used in marketing areas, you know, obviously with tying into the Pardots from Salesforce, the Marketos, or the Hubspots for content creation, for analysis on business development activity for the resourcing or the reusing of intellectual property within a firm for marketing purposes, you know, what we’ve done and here’s what we’ve done and, and AI is fantastic at looking at all the nooks and crannies to figure out what’s what and why you’re also seeing it heavily used in data cleanup that I’ve mentioned earlier to, especially if you have, you know, I was, I kept saying about, you know, a singular process that kind of spans, you know, a large group of people at a firm.
The reality is, you know, there’s usually more than one set of processes to do the same thing, even with pipe and CRM systems, the AI tools are great at leveling data. So it fits nicely into all systems to keep that information tidy.
The other area that you’re seeing is either the assistance or replacement of humans or a lot of human needs in the research, analysis, and summarization. You know, let’s just call it the reporting world in the CRM system, in the CRM world. And one thing it is doing – to answer your last question – where I think it’s going or where I hope it’s going is allowing for a company or an instance of Salesforce to be, let’s just say, more rigid, more regulated on the back end. You know, let’s just say like through workflows that span much larger space at a firm. But with AI facilitating the customization for different teams to use it, still allowing for their own, you know, personal or keen there to be used and then have the AI kind of bidirectionally interpret the information back into the, you know, the mothership so it could remove a lot of the burdens that people may perceive that I, hey, I have to learn a new way to do X and Y and Z. Maybe you can make X, Y, and Z more like their old way with AI, but still having the system be buttoned down in the back end. So, I think, you know, there, there’s the immediate areas and to be honest, I think the biggest problem that people have right now and I myself included is there’s so much A I out there, it kind of feels like the boom of the nineties, you know, in Silicon Valley and you had all the IPOs going and you just, you know, you, you couldn’t turn a corner without getting thrown a new technical wizard thing happening and there are just so many, there’s the market space itself is getting very crowded. There’s a new one popping up every minute.
So, you know, it’s very hard to expect any company and any, you know, leaders to invest heavily in any one of these for their own personal use because who’s to say that company is gonna be around or, you know in Salesforce’s case they have their own AI widgets that you can buy as well as third party widgets. So, you know, and even if you did a project today, who are you gonna look at and, and, you know, next week there might be three more in that space. So it just becomes very, very difficult. But I hope it all comes down and I think that’s just an education thing and people being more comfortable with what they can expect as to being surprised with, oh my God, you know, I can draw a goldfish on a piece of paper by saying more goldfish. I mean, you know, I didn’t even know I needed to do that. And so I think there’s a lot of that there.
Mike Boyle:I couldn’t agree more about the education part that’s always most important… Michael Hudlow, thank you for joining us today to talk about CRM adoptions. It’s been fun and you have an open invitation… Please come back.
Michael Hudlow: Any time.
Mike Boyle: I will be putting a link in actually several links in this show’s notes about both of your books and also a little information about Michael as well and even how you can get in touch with him. So Michael, thanks, look forward to having you come back.
Michael Hudlow: Thank you.
Mike Boyle: Thank you, sir… To the audience… If this is your first time listening to our podcast, we’re so glad you came upon it and we would be grateful if you’d give us a five-star review – if you think we earned it – on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And also you can subscribe to the podcast anywhere you get a podcast, you’ll find this one.
I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Thank you so much for joining us for the “Salesforce Simplified” podcast. Our next episode is just around the corner…
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