Could anyone share a recent CRM implementation success story? Anything you would change?

Customization to fit the sales process, User adoption as a priority (training based on user), and Phased implementation

Keep it (very) simple.  Involve sales leadership and a select team of sellers (sounds obvious). Make it all about helping the sellers be the best they can be at their job.  Design the work flow from the sellers point of view.  Simple, helpful, streamlined.

From any software implementation I have been involved in, including crm. The most important things have been (and theres a reason that these are the always highlighted but not followed steps!) advance planning, knowing what you expect and knowing where you will go with it.

Especially now that you can get a crm for free, you need to be planning for scaling, you need to be planning for teh features your business needs. does your business need a forecasting tool, do you need a service management, invoice management, etc tools. A basic crm with add ons that you NEED, is not necessarily better than a paid crm with the features you need, and with add ons that you may need.

Be thorough

Our company has Oracle for manufacturing deployed. The deplyment process was very hard and self made, since Oracle didn't send an implant to help analyze our company's requirements. They sold us all Oracle modules, including CRM. CRM is not widely used. For manufacturing, all functions are used Excel-like. Each query done on Oracle has an output in xls. All messages are done and used as emails, but with less traceability. I recently tried activating the CRM module of Oracle. I talked with the IT leader, and he told me "everything could be done" if I made on paper all routes and processes I needed. It is very difficult and not promising enough to follow this road, since the outputs we can get are only xls. So, I decided to deploy on my own (without IT support) a different CRM, called Dollibar. It is open source, and free if used locally. Deployment has been a breeze and everyone in my area is pleased. The only problem is it is not connected to Oracle and the manufacturing side, and the rest of the company are keen on not using anything different than Oracle, since they already paid for it. As I write these words they are trying to get extra modules to make eveything faster and more user-friendly, trying to avoid the moment at which Oracle will be obsolete and so will their initial investment.