What Your Salespeople Really Think About Your CRM

It’s no secret that user adoption is one of the biggest obstacles to a successful CRM implementation. According to a survey made by Merkle, approximately 63% of large CRM implementations fail, and 49% of those failures are due to slow user adoption.

Even within companies with an active CRM, getting salespeople to use the software correctly can feel like pulling teeth. There’s a good reason for that: Your salespeople simply don’t love your CRM. In fact, here’s what they actually think about it (and what to do about it).

CRM is a waste of time

Salespeople don’t join the profession so they can log activities. All that time spent logged into a piece of software recording the details of their day feels like a complete loss at best, and a way of letting their superiors spy on them at worst. Perhaps they view the CRM as just a graveyard of information. So why bother?

The solution to this problem is simple in concept, complex in execution: Make it worth their time.

What I mean by that is that sales people should be provided with tools that help them navigate the sales process and win more deals. A true sales effectiveness platform (vs a traditional CRM) provides salespeople with guidance, feedback, and enablement resources. Such a system requires commitment and investment up front, but pays substantial dividends on the back end.

They never needed CRM before, so why now?

Salespeople who have been in the business a while, are usually still in the business because they’ve been highly successful. And if they’ve been highly successful for a long time without CRM, why should they suddenly start using it?

To solve this problem, we must solve the first--make it worth their while. But even so, many salespeople won’t use the CRM, for the simple fact that they’re not used to doing it and, perhaps, intimidated by it. 

The solution, therefore, is training and reinforcement. It’s not enough to implement a CRM or effectiveness platform and then expect that your salespeople will automatically use it. Habit is a powerful force, and must be combatted with good training and consistent reinforcement.

CRM is a pain to navigate

Let’s imagine you’ve solved the first two problems, but salespeople still aren’t using the CRM. In this case, the problem may be that the CRM is a pain to navigate. Take a minute to watch a salesperson using the software. Does it take more than two clicks to input information? It may be that the system is over complex and not intuitive.

The solution here is either to redesign the system to make it easy and fast to use, or to cut your losses with your old system and get a new one. Up-front customization may be time consuming, but it yields productivity benefits and user adoption that is well worth the investment. Some software is naturally easier to customize and more intuitive, so if you’re considering a new platform, it pays to take this into account.

CRM ties them to the office

At the end of a long day of field sales work, the last thing a salesperson wants to do is sit down and record everything they did that day. And many salespeople simply cannot afford to sit in the office all day when they should be out selling.

That’s why your sales effectiveness platform or CRM absolutely must be mobile. A mobile app allows salespeople to record information on the fly, and it can also enable them to communicate quickly with their manager, access data, and download training and information on an as-needed basis, all while they’re out in the field doing their job.

CRM is beneath them

At the end of the day, a sales department can solve all of the above problems and some salespeople still will not engage with the CRM. Some salespeople simply feel that the administrative duties are beneath them--you hired them to sell, and using software is not in their DNA.

In these cases, to maximize the time spent with clients, companies have solved it by hiring an inside salesperson to manage most of the administrative details inside the software, and to push and pull information to the salespeople on an as-needed basis. This person can be responsible for helping salespeople ensure that no important steps and milestones in the sales process are missed, while simultaneously reducing their administrative workload. 

Getting salespeople to love their tools may feel like an unrealistic goal, but we don’t think so. It may not be achievable using only your traditional CRM system, but with the right software and internal support, 100% user adoption is quite achievable, and many salespeople really do grow to love it once they see how it improves their bottom line.

What about your organization? How are you doing on user adoption, and what are you doing to improve?