Increase CRM Adoption

No teaspoon of sugar here, let’s get right to the point: sales people hate using CRMs. Big or small; they hate them all… There, I said it, and I actually feel much better now. Ok, now that that glaring generalization is out of the way, we can move on… 

Unfortunately, we have some cause and effect to deal with here too, because the result of sales people hating CRMs is that they just don’t use them. If they don’t use ‘em, you don’t get your data captured in one unified platform and it makes it very difficult to track the verifiable outcomes that your team is delivering  through the use of Solution Selling® and to forecast your opportunities. Remember, the customer is at the center of creating a Solution-Centric Organization, but without information about them, information gets lost in translation.  The buzz word to describe your sales team’s unwillingness to use the CRM is ‘user adoption’. If they don’t use it, it will fail. When technology initiatives fail, money goes down the drain, time is wasted, and the company is jaded when it comes to trying new technologies and concepts in the future. 

Following are some basic guidelines to increase your odds of good user adoption amongst the sales team:

1. First, send them surveys to gauge your sales team’s interest in CRM solutions. Find out why they don’t like them and don’t traditionally use them.
2. Next, involve your sales team in a pilot program to try before you buy. Use survey tools to ask the team questions through the trial process to ensure that you are capturing subjective information, and not simply, “I don’t like this one”.
3. Ensure that when they are actually working through the trial, that they are using real leads and opportunities to get a good feel for how it will work for them in the office and in the field.
4. Additionally, if you need good data to do good coaching (trust me, you do), then don’t hesitate to put a simple mandate in place: if your opportunities and their associated verifiable outcomes are not in the CRM, then you don’t get paid – simple as that.
5. Consistency needs to be in place when coaching and delivering pipeline reviews. Focus on running your pipeline reviews with the CRM’s pipeline report in front of you; discussing the strength of the opportunity, and reviewing the verifiable outcomes – which you need to require the reps to capture in the CRM.
6. Ensure that there is not a lot of extra work involved for your sales reps. In a company that I used to work for, they invested a significant amount of money into a custom CRM solution. Although, at the end of the each month, the sales team was forced to compile custom reports in excel detailing their pipelines and forecast data. Ensure that you can get the reports and data necessary to drive a Solution-Centric Organization.

In summary, there is no magic bullet to ensure that your sales team focuses on using your CRM solution. Although, when you remember that the customer is at the heart of Solution Selling® and each of your company’s initiatives, you need to ensure that you do the right things to have the right information to do the right thing for your customers. Additionally, you can control some of the drivers in the race of ensuring user adoption by making reps a part of your selection process, ensuring that you are consistent in how you manage the data, and using the information to ensure consistent coaching.

Comments

[MP]

Ken, this is so true! Sales teams hate using CRM's unless they see the value. Spending a tremendous amount of time to fill out information for "management" isn't enough to be exciting. Getting paid if you don't do it is an incentive thats for sure.

One item I would add is we are flooded with the idea that the "cloud" is better for CRM. Truely review your sales team to see how often they'll be away from their desk. Compare the SPEED of a local v. web - based solution during your evaluation. If you have teams needing to make high volume calls (I am not just referring to 100 a day dialers; even 50 a day) and the solution takes forever to update over the web - productivity, appointments, sales, and the mood of the sales team sinks. They now have to put in more work to get less results = pain & no value.

[Gil Hod]

Dear Ken!

Nice article!

You must make the end users part of the process pirior to the GO-LIVE
It will be harder for a salesman to avoid using a system that he was a part of its creation from day one.

http://crm-period.blogspot.com/2012/02/adoption-starts-earlier-youbuilt-rolls.html

Gil