Salespeople đź’”CRM
Customer Relationship Management tool is a crucial part of any business. The basic purpose is to track your sales pipeline, record new leads, recognize the potential upselling opportunities etc. If we think about this on a very elementary level: the CRM is a selling tool for sales.
A good CRM will keep your opportunities, contacts, records and tasks in one place. Sharing information is easier and management has an overview of the big picture. We at Hailer have learned important lessons about Customer Relationship Management Softwares and salespeople while doing implementations to our customers. Check out a few reasons for the love-hate relationship!
So, the management team has invested significant amounts of money to complex software and integrations. They are excited about new opportunity diagrams, sales volumes, the idea of a helicopter view and efficient information sharing and often you hear “Did you fill that in the CRM?” And salespeople are still using their notepads, spreadsheets or post-it notes, why?
1. Complex and expensive
Salespeople are focused to close deals, sell more; this is their priority 1. They might not be interested in learning new apps or fluent in computing skills. If entering data to the CRM requires more effort than writing it on your notepad or spreadsheets, obviously, when you are in a hurry you will use the faster option to re
cord your notes and to-do lists. Use the familiar option for you. The important data on sales opportunities and customer meetings are siloed into salespeople’s personal f
iles. This is totally opposite to efficient information sharing.
Complex software is often costly to maintain. Each change in the process or workflow requires expensive consulting and out of the box solutions r
arely match the operation models without any configuration. In short, simple is the best. In our opinion, there are good user-friendly options like Pipedrive, Hubspot CRM and of course, Hailer.
2. Lack of training - poor user adoption.
Encouraging people to use new systems often requires skilled change leadership and patient user support. Also, the fact that the system you are implementing is user-friendly makes a difference. It might be that the CRM mobile app is not as functional as it could be or it is not available for mobile at all.
We have written about the user adoption and app overload earlier, check it out here.
3. Shit in. Shit out. - Bad data
What information do you get out of your CRM? If the integrations are not fully functional, or the data you are starting with is not relevant up-to-date or even correct. It is quite clear that the end-users will not embrace the system. The challenge here is that the most current information of opportunities and contacts is in the unconnected spreadsheets in the salespeople’s hard drive.
Our advice is to clean the data during the CRM implementation project. The import should easy and simple so that anyone can do it. Poor quality data does not increase the sales or help the salespeople in their work. It might cause confusion, errors, delays and dislike of the system providing the data.
4. What is the concrete benefit for sales, or where?
Do the salespeople really get a tool that works as they do? Where does the work actually happen? Are the different stages in the CRM as the actual sales process in your company functions?
The salesperson is required to spend time on feeding data in a cumbersome system, which is not connected to their actual daily work. The time is reduced from the actual value-adding and customer-facing activity. Furthermore, reduced from the salesperson’s paycheck, unless the paycheck depends on the data in the CRM.
What now?
Explore your options to restore the relationship. Does your staff need more training or motivation? How could you help them? Better mobile app? Thorough cleaning of the data? Adjustment of the software to match the real-life workflows? Is your CRM driving more sales or increasing the sales cycle speed? If the system is clearly wrong for you, consider changing the entire software to a more suitable one.
Hailer functionalities are not limited to CRM. It can be used as an effective project management tool, event management app or whatever your work is!
