Stimulate CRM Adoption with Carrots, Not Sticks

According to Aberdeen Group, stimulating CRM expansion is critical to the success of your business. With full CRM adoption from all users, you will have the ability to achieve sales quotas, turn more quotes into orders, have greater access and use of mobile CRM, and empower your team with the technology and messaging they need to make more personalized connections. But because sales reps are not using CRM the way it is intended, they end up blaming the system for inconsistencies in data and other problems. Here are some ways in which you can help stimulate CRM adoption and sell it to your sellers:

• First of all, it is important to understand that CRM serves the needs of individual users first before providing benefits to managers – when users can see then benefits CRM gives to them specifically without thinking that they are doing it just for managers, it becomes a daily necessity in their lives which they are happy to work with
• Integrate CRM with social, marketing, networking, configure-price-quote, sales intelligence, contract management, electronic signature, and other sales effectiveness enabling tools – this makes it easier for sells to know their customers and more effectively sell to them
• Empower sales reps with mobile devices that can allow them to not only “see” customer data when they are working out of the office, but also manipulate the data virtually on their tablet or smart phone – with greater access to mobile CRM and the ability to work within the system, sales reps can spend more time actually selling
• Take time to for additional CRM training to update skills and also learn any new additional tips and tricks. Talk with users individually about their role within the system to make sure they are comfortable with any new updates

Once users can see first-hand how CRM adoption leads to better sales workflow, it will be easy to take CRM from “nice to have” to “need to have.”