According to Art Hall at Alvarez & Marsal Business Consulting, 87% of Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs) are driving towards CRM deployments that are on-demand versus premise based. And SMBs are driving the CRM space as a whole. Even more interesting was a survey of SMBs by AMI-Partners showing that nearly 83 percent said that getting staff to use the software was their biggest CRM challenge, and the critical driver behind this was the complexity of the user interface.
My wife's company is looking to leave their industry leading Sales Force Automation (SFA) product and go with a different one. Aha, I'll show them the future. Online, on-demand, Web 2.0, AJAX, browser based encryption. And more. Problem is, they don't know the stats out there and want to stay in the same vein as before. Unfortunately, that other one is just as hard, tied to Windows (server and client) and doesn't appear to add any new features or simplicity. Why then change? There's no overbearing IT department there. I guess it just like one of our political candidates who is showing very popular with their offer of "Change" coupled with no details. "It may be bad, but it's new and that's change!"
Funny, my wife's company hails from the same city as that political candidate. Up there, they make changes all the time to the Cubs organization and the Cubs just get worse.
ARGHHH, some things never change.
