Would a CRM help you keep in touch?

Last week, I talked about the need to stay in touch with many people if you want to develop new clients. Sounds like a job for a computer. But which program should you use?

According to the website for LexisNexis Interaction, over 60% of AmLaw 100 firms use Interaction as their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to track clients and prospects. If your firm is one of them, or has installed another CRM that is working smoothely, you already know the answer and can skip this week’s post.

But if you don’t already have a CRM in place, in my opinion you face some very tough choices.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because for the last few months I’ve been putting a lot of time into my own CRM. LegalBizDev currently keeps in regular contact with about 800 people, and the number is going up. For the last 10 years, we’ve used one of the market leading CRMs – ACT -- and had a love/hate relationship the whole time. We loved the power of the system for tracking contacts and tasks. But we hated the time and money it took to keep it running. Every installation and upgrade led to problems, and synchronizing data from multiple users was never as easy as it should have been.

This came to a head in November when I bought a new laptop, and I needed to move ACT from my old computer to the new one. A few weeks ago, I wrote in this blog about the problems I had, including several hours on the phone with technical support people who needed English lessons. After I wrote about those problems, it got worse.

When the technical support person tried to get ACT running on my new computer, she rapidly deleted a number of related files. I started having new problems with other programs before we even got off the phone. When I asked about the problems she had apparently caused with other programs, she replied: I can’t help you with other programs call Dell. So I did. This led to several hours on the phone with Dell technical support people. They not only spoke English, but they were nicer people who cared whether my problem was solved. They ultimately reformatted my hard drive to undo the damage that may have been caused by ACT support.

One result of my experience with customer service was that I felt a renewed loyalty to Dell. (It’s a good thing, because some unrelated problems appeared after the hard drive was reformatted.) Another result of my experience was a new determination to consider alternatives to ACT.

For years, I had been thinking about switching to Salesforce.com, in part to simply get away from ACT, and in part because I love the fact that Salesforce is web-based and so several of us can work on the same data in real time. But I knew the transition would require a great deal of time and effort, so I kept putting it off.

As a result of this latest fiasco, I signed up for Salesforce’s 30 day free trial, and bought Salesforce for Dummies. I had hoped to switch within a few days. But the transition wasn’t easy, and I spent most of the 30 days being frustrated by things that did not work as I had expected, and changing my mind about whether it was worth the trouble.

A few weeks ago, I finally switched to Salesforce. Moving names and addresses was relatively easy, but I still have not found a cost effective way to move all the data about past phone calls and emails that I have in ACT. Right now we are using Salesforce for the present and future, and referring back to ACT when we need details on the past. Despite this, our conclusion after 2 weeks is that we absolutely love salesforce. Ask me again in 6 months.

The reason I told you this long story is partly to vent, and partly as a warning: CRMs are complex and powerful programs that take a lot of time and effort to maintain. If you need to coordinate a large business development effort with many prospects, you will get a huge payoff. In all the time I was frustrated with ACT, I only considered which other CRM might be better, and never once considered trying to live without a CRM.

But many of the lawyers I coach have trouble finding enough time to take their top clients to lunch. If time is an issue, I say use a spreadsheet or word processor table. It won’t be as slick or as powerful as a CRM, but you will have a whole lot more time to do what you should be doing: building personal relationships with the people who matter most to your practice.