CIOIN

CRM Strategy | The CEO has called and asked for some training on the CRM system. That’s a great opportunity for CIOs to get some face-time with their CEOs, but there are a hundred things that CIOs could train their CEOs on. But where do they start, and where do they place their bets?
CEOs are smart in both IQ and EQ, but they're also really busy. And that means they simply don't have the time for lengthy training sessions. There’s a ton of business-school research that indicates that a CEO will almost never give a CIO, or anyone else, more than five (precious) minutes of undivided attention. CIOs must earn the right to talk for anything more than that. So how are CIOs supposed to communicate anything of value about CRM systems in the time of a commercial break?
 

Start with Your CEO’s Priority List
It’s a fact well established that different companies have different operational priorities—it depends on the company’s size, age, industry, and other factors. But any CEO has an internal priority list, in which, say, revenue growth may be more important than immediate profitability, or manufacturing may be more important than customer service. As a CIO, in charge of training the CEO, his first job is to figure out the four or five top things on the CEO's mind, and deliver actionable information for at least one of them. A good place to start is the measurements the Board has in place for the CEO.
Suppose a CEO really values customer retention. A good topic, then, is measuring repeat business along the lines of revenue, profitability, and customer "churn." The CRM functionality his CIO would want to show would illustrate trends in customer retention, and highlight sales strategies that clicked and those that tanked. 

Develop an Opening Gambit
Given the limited time CIOs have to make an impression—and to get permission to go longer than five minutes—it's important to start with a grabber. Starting with architecture or first-principles arguments is pretty likely to the CEO and will not only waste the CIO’s opportunity but also end up wasting the CEO’s time.
It’s great to start with a question or even a business puzzle, something that invites curiosity and an open-ended conversation. The opening gambit could be something like: "With customer satisfaction at 95 percent, how come our XYZ line gets only 20 percent repeat business?" Developing an opening gambit of that sophistication will take some work (off to the data warehouse!), but a good gambit allows CIOs to illustrate the power and business value of a solid CRM system. It also shows CEOs that CIOs are keen to improve business and that will give IT leaders credibility and more than five minutes of their boss’ time.
To be able to do that, CIOs need to play their smart cards. It’s obvious that for most CEOs, revenue is a lot more interesting than cost. So CIOs should bias selection of opening gambits to things that affect this quarter's sales results. If they don't have enough data to focus on the revenue pipeline, then they should at least bring in revenue proxies like "new customers" or "sales inquiries."
 

Keep it Bite Sized
The best outcome for CIOs is not a long sit-down meeting. If they can have a 20-minute session that the CEO actually remembers then that’s terrific, particularly if she's actually asking for a follow-up session. One of the tricks is to create a personalized feature that answers a very specific CEO question in a simple, usable way.
If CIOs possibly can, they should have four or five of these goodies at the ready, so they can deliver information and functionality in bite-sized chunks. What CIOs don't want to do is deliver them all at once: Less is more. IT leaders should keep some dry powder, and have a planned sequence of "bright shiny objects" for the boss.

Beware Dangerous Sizzle
It's tempting for CIOs to focus opening gambits on some piece of CRM tech that gives great demo, but involves risk (either of uncertain results or of losing control of the conversation). Let's look at some examples of dangerous sizzle:
 Dashboards would seem a natural for showing off to the CEO: They're the top-down view of key success factors in the business, right? Problem is, dashboards are dependent on correctly constructed reports (particularly the filters and joins), and it's all too easy to show some report that leads to bogus conclusions. Perhaps more importantly, dashboards expose (or even magnify) problems with data quality and semantics. If an organization’s data has dupes, dashboards will show double-counting. If the data is incomplete (or has blurry semantics), the dashboards will show holes.
 Mobile apps certainly check the "sizzle" box, but they can only look as good as the platform they are on. While an iPhone mobile CRM app usually looks great, if an organization’s corporate standard is Windows Mobile, the story won't be so pretty. There's an additional twist: As most serious mobile CRM apps involve extra charges per user, they risk some optics that backfire.
 The latest greatest CRM features also check the box for sizzle, but they can be high risk territory. The slickest demo of cool social CRM goodies can be beautiful, until CEOs discover that the demo shows stuff that isn't really part of the product. Setting expectations around something cool that actually requires expensive consulting engagement in order to work is not likely a CIOs best move.
The key to an effective CRM training session for CEOs is to keep it at a high enough level that the conversation is around business value and board-level topics. Anything CIOs talk about in the training session must be bullet-proof (and idiot proof)—so they need to do some homework and careful orchestration.