SuccessRM – your blueprint for CRM Success, with Microsoft Dynamics 365 or any technology

CRM Success Shouldn’t Be Left to Chance

Would you build a house without a blueprint? Or without seeing other houses?  Probably not. So why take risks with your CRM—one of the most critical investments in your business? Without a solid plan and understanding, CRM projects can quickly spiral into chaos, wasting time, money, and patience. Enter SuccessRM, our battle-tested blueprint for making CRM work the way you actually need it to.

What is SuccessRM?

SuccessRM is a structured, proven framework designed to guide your CRM journey — from idea to implementation and beyond. Whether you're setting up Microsoft Dynamics 365 and / or Power Platform for the first time, upgrading, or rescuing an underperforming system, SuccessRM gives you the clarity, direction, and confidence you need.

We’ve spent over 20 years helping businesses crack the CRM code, and we know what works (and what doesn’t). SuccessRM ensures you’re investing in a CRM solution that fits your business like a glove, rather than one that collects dust because no one uses it.

Why You Need SuccessRM

Without a clear roadmap, CRM projects often:

• Miss the mark—Users don’t adopt it, data is a mess, and it doesn’t deliver value
• Drag on forever—Scope creep turns it into an expensive headache
• Fail to integrate—It doesn’t play nicely with your other business tools
• Cause frustration—What was meant to be a solution becomes a source of stress

SuccessRM helps you avoid these pitfalls by providing a step-by-step approach that aligns CRM with your business objectives and ensures smooth adoption.

How SuccessRM Works

Our methodology focuses on five key pillars:

✅ Discovery & Vision – We define what success looks like for your business, ensuring your CRM aligns with your strategic goals.
✅ Process Mapping – Understanding your workflows so CRM streamlines, rather than complicates, your day-to-day operations.
✅ Technology Fit – Making sure Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform are configured to work for you, not the other way around.
✅ User Adoption & Training – If your people don’t use it, it’s not successful. We set up change management and training to ensure buy-in.
✅ Ongoing Optimisation – Business evolves, and so should your CRM. We help you fine-tune and scale your system as needed.

Who is SuccessRM For?

SuccessRM is perfect for:

🎯 Businesses implementing Dynamics 365 for the first time
🎯 Teams struggling with CRM adoption or efficiency
🎯 Organisations looking to optimise or upgrade their CRM
🎯 Leaders who want to ensure their CRM delivers measurable success

What you get with SuccessRM

SuccessRM gives you and your team the understanding and hence the power to be able to make the best decisions.

SuccessRM derisks your project.  The common language developed by the education reduces the amount of rework - so saving you money, and enables you to maximise on the out-of-the-box functionality - so saving you time and money!  The investment required for the education is repaid in reduced development and rework.

A few years ago, I was working for a client who was really struggling to achieve user adoption.  When I started to dig into what was happening, I found that their developer had created a monster of a lead form.  The developer had added hundreds of custom fields to the lead.  I discovered that this had happened because in the business they used the word 'lead' for all potential customers, right through to the completion of the project.  Rather than take advantage of the lead-to-cash sales process in built into Microsoft Dynamics 365, the developer had added hundreds of fields to the lead.  Then, to add insult to injury, this was poorly integrated to their financial system.

So, this organisation paid for huge amounts of unnecesary development to get a poor result!

SuccessRM would have saved this organisation money in two ways:

• The developer would have known more about the out-of-the-box functionality and so would have been less likely to embark on adding the hundreds of unnecessary fields to the lead
• The client would have been less likely to insist on the lead doing everything as they would have experienced the lead-to-cash sales process in Microsoft Dynamics 365.  Had the developer added the fields anyway, the client would have been more likely to spot the error sooner, and so avoid the size of the disaster.

Additionally, the organisation would have achieved better user adoption probably from the outset.

I have dozens of similar stories - this is why I have created SuccessRM - your blueprint to CRM Success.

Silos of expertise are another cause of challenges.  Projects of this nature require a wide range of different expertise and skills.  If this expertise is provided by a large number of people, each of whom is an expert in their own field, but knows little of the other areas of the project, there is a large opportunity for misunderstanding.  Expertise silos hinder our work in many ways.  These misunderstandings lead to mistakes and errors, which often cost significant sums of money.

I am aware of another project which has fallen victim to expertise silos.  This project is now massively late and over budget because the implementer tried to save money by reusing some earlier development.  Reusing earlier development is fine - as long as as both projects have the same requirements.  In this case the requirements were very similar, but not identical.  That small difference is a major cause of the problems.  The decision to reuse the earlier development was made by a project manager assisted by other people.  However, the earlier development lacked documentation, the decision makers lacked technical knowledge and so a poor, and very expensive decision was made.  Not surprisingly, this reuse decision was not the only poor decision caused by a lack of technical understanding laced with arrogance in this project.

SuccessRM complements both agile and waterfall approaches to a project. Which of these two approaches is best for you depends entirely on the scope of what the project should deliver. A smaller project may work better with a single go-live, so a waterfall-style project. A larger project will almost certainly work better with several smaller releases, so a more agile approach. Regardless, your success is far more likely when the roadmap, or scope is decided early on in the project.

A SuccessRM CRM project has a lot in common with other approaches to CRM implementation.  The key difference is that the project leads with education covering the business, the technology and the methodology of achieving change.

Because your CRM projects sit at the interface of the business and technology, project success requires people who understand both your business and the technology.  Success needs a couple of people with knowledge of your business and the technology.  These people form the linchpin of the project.

This does not mean that we want to make your senior executives become CRM implementers – far from it. What we want to achieve is a common language. Businesspeople need to understand enough about the technology, its strengths, and its limitations to be able to make decisions that get the best from the technology and deliver what the business needs.  The technology team members - internal and external should understand about the business, what it does, who the customers are, how it operates etc.  This understanding helps them make good design decisions.

When organisations proceed with a project which relies on the business knowledge and technical understanding in different, entirely separate, groups, it can easily fall into a situation where key details are ‘lost in translation’ –  or Chinese whispers. This image of an apocryphal story from the First World War sums this up beautifully.

The gist of the story is that a request from the front for more men (reinforcements) was received by confused officials in Whitehall as a request for money for entertainment!

A frightening proportion of CRM projects are deemed to have failed.  Although the project sponsors cite many reasons for the project failure, analysis of the reasons distill them down to a lack of understanding somewhere in the project.  I spoke about this for the European E-Commerce and Digital Marketing Week in 2021.  You can watch this presentation here   https://www.opsis.com.au/resources/videos/all-roads-lead-to-rome

A CRM project can be simple when there is broad understanding of

• the technology,
• the methodology of how to achieve success and
• the business. 

This is what SuccessRM provides because of the education embedded into the project.

SuccessRM avoids what I have seen too often – the blind leading the blind! The embedded educations opens the eyes of both sides!

Let’s Build Your CRM Success Story

A CRM should be a powerful business tool, not a costly frustration. With SuccessRM, you get a clear, structured path to a CRM that actually works for you. Let’s turn your CRM challenges into opportunities for growth.

Ready to take the guesswork out of CRM success?
Book a complimentary consultation with our CRM Success Catalyst today!