CRM Certification: When it Does and Does Not Matter

CIO - Certification programs for administrators and developers go back to the days when the mainframe was young, so it's not surprising to see these courses and tests showing up for CRM systems now. It's a sign of competency in one technology or another — so what?

In technology infrastructure products (such as network or OS), certification might well be dismissed as a "nice to know." But in applications that are evolving rapidly, certification is an ongoing process that must be renewed at least once a year (in the case of Salesforce.com's program, it's four times a year). This is because not only are things changing fairly quickly in the application features and use-cases, the object model and APIs are being extended on a regular basis. Somebody who wasn't keeping their certification up is more likely to do something the hard way (through custom code or an external Web service) even though there's a new internal capability that could get the job done for free.

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Further, certification is enough of a pain (20 hours or more per year of non-billable time) that it's a good indication of the commitment and focus on the consultant's part. As there may be several levels of certification to complete, the test fees and unbillable hours easily amount to thousands of dollars. Typically, an individual consultant can afford to be certified on only one of the CRM systems.

What to Check For

A classic game played by consultancies is to have only a small portion of their consultants certified. The firm will claim "vendor certified," but that's no guarantee that the individuals working on your project will be.

While it's overkill to insist that everyone on your project be certified, it is essential to have at least one certified consultant on your project. You will likely pay a little more for this, but it's cheap insurance against expensive missteps with the CRM technology. That said, most vendors focus their tests on the most advanced features and "full-feature" editions of their products. Consequently, if you're using an entry-level version, don't expect the certified consultant to know everything about working with your stripped-down version. This principle goes double for down-rev versions of on-premises CRM systems.

Certification programs vary considerably, so you'll need to investigate the vendor's specific certification levels and their terminology. You'll find that the following generalities apply:

• Certified administrators are what most projects will need. It really speeds the project along to have one when you're implementing or expanding the use of CRM features. Nobody has any public statistics on this, but my guess is that less than only about 20% of individual consultants earn this certification.