Having a functional CRM is table stakes in today's business environment. The ability to have a single version of the truth of all your customer interactions from customer service, sales & marketing is transformative for your business and helps fuel exponential growth. So it is surprising how few people are yet to adopt a CRM solution, according to DiscoverOrg 23.8% of sales organisations aren’t using a CRM!
CRM Utilisation is here to stay
In 2014 SaaS based CRM's represented 87% of the installations globally. With cloud-based solutions lowering the barrier to entry there are more vendors offering varying price points, from Insightly and Zoho CRM's free solution to premium SaaS vendors like Salesforce, Hubspot and Close.io. This variety means that there is a solution out there to meet your price point so there is no excuse not to migrate away from using spreadsheets to an agile tool that can assist your workflow, help you have better interactions with your customers and provide you the visibility to better manage your business.
One word of warning: your CRM won’t be the panacea for all of your business reporting ills.
Adoption Challenges
Companies have been migrating to SaaS CRM's in droves but there is still a huge push back from their core users - Sales reps. Gartner stated that CRM adoption is less than 50% and positive adoption is less than 26%. We hear many reasons why they resist in adopting the technology;
"It’s time-consuming to enter all of the data."
"It is a distraction from what you pay me to do."
"It feels like a management reporting tool and not an asset to my daily workflow"
The reality is, they aren't wrong. CRM's were initially positioned as a management tool so very few come out of the box delivering the ideal workflow for your business. Here are a few tips to turn your CRM from a management reporting tool to a sales productivity tool that will have your sales & marketing teams humming along and give your management team the data to make the right business decisions.
Start with your sales process
All sales processes start should start with the customer. Map out the sales and marketing process, right from the start of the marketing funnel, through to closing the sale, then managing the account. Understand how they are interacting with you and the metrics you would want to capture and measure along the way.
1. Keep it simple
"56% of companies said they faced major or moderate challenges when customising their CRM" Click to Tweet
SaaS based CRMs are built for a broad audience but are highly customisable so you need to de-clutter the CRM, remove the additional fields, metrics and apps that aren't being used. Ensure that the minimum amount of different tools are used and information is captured along the journey. You want your reps focused on selling not data entry.
2.Automate, automate, automate… did I mention automate?
Think about what you want your sales team is spending their time - on the phone, email and social media. Secondly, automate the CRM workflow to match the sales process. If you finish a phone call, do you write notes? Once you have finished a demonstration, do you book a follow-up task? You should set up your CRM to be intuitive, guiding your sales reps to their next obvious action that will capture the data in the minimum amount of clicks. Automate it!
3. Seamless integrations
"49% of companies said they faced challenges when integrating a CRM with other technologies" Click to Tweet
(Also from RingLead)
Make it easy for your sales team by integrating your phone, email and social apps directly into the CRM and sales process, minimise data entry and mouse clicks. This can be as simple as having click to call functionality that means your reps don’t need to pick up a phone and dial a number, it all happens automatically when you click on a customer's number in the CRM.
It doesn't stop with sales tools either. It is important to integrate your marketing technology. Not only will this help deliver crucial customer buying triggers to the sales team, like when someone has downloaded a white paper, or is looking at your pricing page right now! It will also close the loop on your marketing activity so you can measure the impact of your marketing campaigns.
Integration isn't as tough as it used to be, most CRMs have out of the box integrations with the leading tools, if not companies like Zapier, Bedrock Data, IFTTT leverage the available APIs from your favourite tools to make this process simple.
Remember, sales reps are the ones spending the most time in the CRM, it is their input that ensures management, marketing, finance and support teams get the full value of the CRM. Get their buy-in early, help them shape the vision and journey for the CRM and support them through their adoption challenges and you will be on your way to CRM and business success. As you seek to get more out of your CRM there will always be a trade off between management sophistication and sales rep productivity, be mindful of the old adage that your the quality of your reporting data is only as good as the data put into your CRM, so make it easy for your reps!
