The founding fathers' "Join or Die" flag symbolizes the problem many large CRM customers have: What to do with your 7 (or 27, or 37) CRM instances?

When it comes to CRM systems, large companies are anything but centralized. CRM vendors love to get in through the business units and at the department level. Even if your company makes centralized CRM decisions, it may have merged or made acquisitions that Balkanized the systems. IBM (IBM) announced it's going to spend $20 billion on acquisitions — how many dozen CRM systems do you think they're going to be bringing in over the next 24 months?

The IT reflex is to move towards consolidation. Of course there are economies and efficiencies to be had, but CRM systems aren't like infrastructure purchases. The users' reaction to the system — not just the features, but the configuration and the data quality — really matters to the system efficiency. Since the users are "gold collar" workers — some of your most expensive personnel, yet with the widest variations in productivity — their happiness with CRM system is what determines its business impact. So it doesn't matter if you are able to save 10 percent on CRM costs, because that is miniscule in comparison to just a 2 percent improvement in sales productivity. That "small" revenue increase can mean a 1 percent increase in company profits, something that IT cost efficiencies won't achieve. You don't want to spend foolishly, but at the same time you don't want to focus on consolidation's cost savings at the expense of revenue.

As I wrote previously, there are clear strategies for consolidating multiple CRM systems. But there are also business situations where CRM consolidation is unrealistic or more politically expensive than it's worth. What then? (...)

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