5 Ways To Get Your Sales Team To Actually Use Your CRM
If you’ve got a sales team that you’ve tried to get to use Customer Relationship Management software, you can probably attest to the fact that it’s often a difficult chore. No one likes change, especially when it comes to technology (unless, of course, it’s the iPhone 6. That’s another matter entirely.)
But you as the business owner know that implementing this CRM system will help you capture more opportunities and stay in better touch with your leads, so you really, really want your team to use it. Rather than forcing them to use it, these five tactics are better strategies for encouraging adoption of your new CRM.
1. Get them involved early and often
If you didn’t include your sales team — the people who will actually use the CRM — in the selection process, they may not feel vested in it. So it’ll be hard to get them excited about it. On the other hand, if you include your team in the selection of the CRM platform and its implementation, they’ll want to get involved. Give your team a voice, and they’ll feel like they were part of the decision to adopt this software.
2. Fit the CRM to your processes
Your business is unique, and the way you use CRM will be unlike how any other company uses it. And that’s a good thing. Taking the time to configure and fit the CRM to your business processes will make it more intuitive to your staff, and encourage them to use it to make their work easier.
3. Incentivize usage
Everyone loves a little fun in the office, so try giving your team more reasons to try out the CRM. For example, at the end of the month offer an extra vacation day for the user that enters in the most call notes. Some CRMs use gamification to encourage usage, and you’d be surprised how quickly people will cotton to the software when there’s a healthy competitive reason to do so.
4. Keep data clean
Nothing demoralizes a user more than when he looks up “ABC Inc.” and there are five duplicate records in the database. Data stewardship — the act of ensuring there are no duplicates and that data is clean — provides confidence and builds trust with users. If your team knows the data in your CRM is up to date and scrubbed clean, they’ll opt to use it over your legacy system.
5. Integrate the CRM with other systems
On a typical day, your sales team uses a number of applications to get their work done. If your CRM is connected with the other core system(s) your team uses, then your staff will quickly realize the benefit of avoiding double entry or looking up the same info in two different systems. Integration between these systems will prove to be a real time-saver, and who can’t get on board with that?
Be patient but firm when implementing the CRM system. Make it clear that it provides real benefits to not only the company but also each salesperson, and that you’re willing to provide the training necessary to really dig into maximizing the effectiveness of this as a sales tool.
This post first appeared on http://www.business2community.com/sales-management/5-ways-get-sales-team-actually-use-crm-0976770M