Do You Want Better CRM Adoption? 7 Reliable Tips

Table of Contents

1. Talk to Sales

When you engage with your reps to understand their sales methods and preferences in how they track deal progress, you can begin to tailor your CRM to support their unique strategies. Ultimately, the collaborative effort motivates the sales team to use the tool effectively because they had a hand in its design, which fosters a sense of ownership and accountability for its success and, in turn, drives better utilization and improved sales outcomes. While it’s important to talk with Sales Reps about their processes, it’s also important to talk with the Head of Sales because they may want to implement a company-wide process. 

2. Translate Processes into Your CRM

Once you’ve identified the process(es) that Sales wants to follow, it’s time to add them into your system. How this is done and to what extent you can properly transcribe them into your CRM depends on your tool. Some systems enable you to add sales playbooks, some have email templates, and others have workflows. Utilize these features.

One feature every CRM has is the ability to track deal stages. These are the major milestones that are needed to close a deal. Each stage signifies key benchmarks that reps must complete in order to move forward. Check out our previous article for more details on how to set up your B2B CRM deal stages.

Be sure to take advantage of your CRM if it has workflows. You can automate processes that mirror your sales workflows. For example, you can set up automation to assign leads to specific sales reps, trigger follow-up reminders via tasks, and send automated emails at various deal stages.

3. Add Key Fields

Sales Processes and deal stages aren’t the only updates that may be needed in our CRM. We should identify and capture the right fields as related to companies, contacts, and deals.

• On the company level, we need to think about how we want to segment our accounts whether it’s via country, state, industry, or company size.
• For contacts, we want to know who to reach out to and how, so we pay attention to job title, email, phone number, and lead score.
• In deals, we may want to filter our data by deal stage, close date, or total contract value.

When we capture the right data, it supports effective customer management, enhances data accuracy, and informs better decision-making. Check out our previous articles for more in-depth looks with the proven ways Sales Operations can optimize your business and CRM; both Part 1 and Part 2, and 15 Essential Deal Fields We Need in a B2B CRM.

4. Help Sales Upload Their Data

It may be that your CRM was freshly implemented yesterday or in use for the past 5 years. Either way, your team may have data elsewhere, such as Excel. It’s unreasonable to ask Sales Reps to copy their data from Excel and manually enter it into a new tool. If you expect this to happen, then also expect your system to go unused or to have missing data. Furthermore, sales reps should not have the permissions to import such large quantities of data. This is a role for the CRM administrator. Talk with sales, ask them where their data sits, work with them, gather and clean it up, and then import it into your new system on their behalf, so all of their data is in one place; the right place.

5. Offer Ongoing CRM Training

Ongoing training is essential to encourage and empower sales reps to use your CRM more effectively. When you hold regular training sessions, it helps reps become more familiar with the system’s features, which boosts their confidence and increases their likelihood to use the tool. For a fulsome explanation of CRM training, check out our article, 8 More Proven Ways Sales Operations Can Optimize Your Business and CRM (Part 2 of 2).

6. Get Management to Use The CRM

When management actively uses a CRM, it sets a powerful example for the team. The likelihood of the team’s adoption and effective use of the system significantly increases when this happens. Let’s assume that your Head of Sales has a Monday morning pipeline call with their team of 10 reps. Now imagine that all of the deals are reviewed in Excel instead of in your tool. The end result is that your reps will use Excel instead of your CRM. Management must lead by example.

7. Utilize Consensus Building

Consensus building is a process of actively working to develop widespread agreement within a group. That’s exactly what we want here. We want to build a group understanding that our CRM is our key source of record. We want everyone to agree to use it to house their pertinent information. This doesn’t mean we want everyone to blindly agree that everything is perfect. Rather, we want our team to be champions of the product whereby they speak their mind when they think a change is needed. 

Wrap Up

As we read, there are multiple steps we can take to get our team to use a CRM. It starts with conversations and understanding, and ends with a consensus that we all use this system. We have to remember that at the end of the day, our team’s use of the tool is not just for the sake of it, but because there is a very real impact on the overall success of the business.