You invested a lot of time as well as money trying to implement a CRM solution across your organization but it ended up as a failed project.
How does it feel? It doesn’t sound cool. Isn’t it?
But this is often the case with many organizations who are unable to derive value from their CRM implementation even after making huge investment in this regard. The biggest reason for CRM project failure is low CRM adoption among the end users of the system. If sales leaders can lead their team to adopt CRM faster, they can quickly start reaping tangible benefits out of their CRM implementation.
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| Photo by Mikael Blomkvist from Pexels |
Here is what you can do to drive CRM adoption within your sales team:
By the way if you are still looking for a CRM software for your sales team, do check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM.
1. Keep team involved from the beginning
When you are implementing a CRM solution in your organization, try to involve the end users from the beginning. Listen to their challenges, ask for feedback, implement their feedback. This way you make them a stakeholder in the implementation. When you respect others’ input, they tend to associate themselves as a part of the project. They tend to own it end to end. This way you stand lesser chances of failure since the end users are going to drive it in future on their own.
2. Choose an easy to use CRM
One reason why users tend to avoid using a CRM is due to the complexity of using it. The objective of implementing a CRM is to make the lives of the sales team simpler and easier rather than making it more complex by asking them to use a hard to use CRM. Always ensure to take trial of the CRM software and test its usability and user experience before making a final purchase.
3. Provide adequate Training
If the end users are not familiar with the terminologies, various stages and workflows in a CRM, they would hardly use it to maximum potential. Always provide adequate training to your end users on the various functions of a CRM and the purpose of using it. Making people familiar with the basic controls and letting them know the purpose of using it makes it much easier for driving faster adoption.
4. Provide appropriate user guide
When you are providing training, the users may tend to forget it overtime unless and until they are actually using it. Conducting regular CRM training sessions may not be feasible for numerous reasons. Assigning a peer to help a new employee to learn the tool may not bring out consistent knowledge transfer. This problem can be solved if you have a well documented User guide. It can serve the purpose of looking up for some on-demand information or clarification which the end user may have. You may request your CRM vendor to provide the same or may also refer to the knowledge base section of the respective product page such as we have it for ToolsonCloud Sales CRM.
5. Establish easy to follow CRM processes
Often the sales team tends to think of a CRM to be a database rather than a modern tool to manage your sales process. This ideology may prevent them from updating their sales activities in real time and they will end up updating the tool once in a while just to keep the data in place. This way the CRM system will end up reflecting stale and unusable data for the sales leaders to analyze and get insights as to where they can step in for certain tangible help. To solve this, you may need to establish well defined guidelines and processes which can serve as a single stop blueprint for your team to follow.
6. Create CRM Advocates
Creating CRM advocates or ambassadors from the end user of the tool is always helpful. Modern marketing revolves a lot around influencer marketing. You are much more likely to religiously try a new product if you were told about its benefit by an influencer having a similar background as yours. Your sales team will be able to appreciate the value of crm implementation only when they start using it. They will religiously use it for sometime only when you have CRM ambassadors from the team guiding them on the best practices and effective utilization of the tools.
7. Reward early practitioners
Getting the sales team to adopt a new tool can be tough. But it can be made easier if you start rewarding those early adopters who shall be setting up a benchmark and advocating best practices to peers. Reward the users who religiously update the tool and keep the status up to date. Reward the users whose CRM data is clean and is of high quality to derive fruitful insights out of it.
I hope you will find these tips useful for you.
If you are looking for a CRM solution for your team, feel free to try out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. It’s Free!