The Savvy CIO

It’s the classic CRM problem.

Management puts massive amounts of time, energy, money, resources and excitement into a new CRM system. They’re giddy with the possibilities of sales forecasting, reporting, customer satisfaction, and all sorts of information that will help marketing and sales to be more effective.

The big training and launch take place, there’s a flurry of activity…and a week later 20% of the sales reps aren’t even using the thing.

CRMs don’t work unless sales reps use them. And sales reps won’t use them unless there is something in it for them. Entering call reports at the end of each day doesn’t exactly get a sales rep fired up, and there’s no direct line between that thankless work and the next commission check.

When deploying a CRM, you need to keep your end users in mind.

The system has to be easy to use and valuable for reaching the goals of the reps (not just the goals of the company).

Here are some ways we’ve seen it done in our work with SugarCRM:

Easy to Use

Make your CRM mobile friendly. There are other things I could say here (play nice with Outlook, make the CRM easily customizable, etc.), but the mobile access is so far and away the critical issue that it gets this space all to itself. If you have outside sales reps, chances are their smartphone is the primary “computer” they use day after day after day. Getting basic CRM functions onto the phone puts the CRM in the path of a sales rep’s daily rhythm and increases the chance of usage astronomically.

Valuable

There are several ways to make a CRM valuable.

1. Place valuable information in the CRM that reps can’t get any other way. Have inbound leads or pre-qualified leads assigned to reps in the CRM, so they have to log in to get them.
2. Place the entire sales process in the CRM. We’ve found quoting tools in the CRM to be incredibly valuable to sales. In two minutes or less a rep can have a nicely formatted PDF quote that can be sent directly to the customer. That’s a time saver and super valuable. For the Holy Grail, extend the quoting screens to a mobile device or (even better) an iPhone app. I’ve seen this done, and the ability to create and email a polished quote to a customer while standing right next to them is remarkable.
3. While we don’t always like it, you can also use a big stick. Some companies require CRM sales entries in order to receive commission for a sale. Consider the impact of actually enforcing this before going through with it.

Deploying a CRM that doesn’t help your sales reps won’t get used. No amount of cajoling, cheerleading, threatening or posturing will change that fact if the CRM isn’t easy to use and immediately valuable to your reps. Keep their needs front and center, and you’ll see much better results.

Have you seen other ways to make a CRM easy to use and valuable to sales reps? Add a comment below.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 11:58 am and is filed under Customer Relationship Management (CRM). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.