"I have five things I want CRM to do to start with," says Jay Pieper,vice president of corporate development and treasury affairs ofPartners HealthCare in Boston, who is now evaluating CRM applications."Everyone who comes in here has 25 other things CRM has done for othercustomers. We have trouble even putting together a spec sheet becausethe vendors won't talk about just the five things we need."

"It's a very difficult process to stay on," Balliet says. "They'lltell you all the things they can do. Even if you tell them, 'I don'twant to talk about all that,' you won't get a presentation that onlytalks about what you want."

Vendors up the ante on features because, frankly, they're competing.If one vendor offers a feature, everyone else must too. Also, the morea software company sells up front, the better. Incremental deploymentsare anathema to vendors because, quite simply, they are lessprofitable.

What's more, the ramifications of feature overload aren't beingbrought to light in the evaluation. Why would a sales rep bring up theneed for new hardware, new policies and retraining if the buyer's notasking?

The big bang myth