Steps to a Successful Sales Process with CRM: Part 2
Last week, we talked about how building a defined sales process into your CRM system can improve the service you deliver to your customers. This week we tackle how to encourage your people to use CRM.
Indeed, system adoption can be the biggest hurdle you encounter once your sales process is set up and integrated with CRM. This is frequently more difficult than actually designing or implementing the sales process and is also the most critical component. The best-designed process won’t do you any good if nobody is using it after 3 months.
Here are our steps to gaining buy-in for your sales process:
- First and foremost, make sure it is easy to use and that it will actually assist the sales staff in managing their opportunities. If it takes too much time to keep CRM up-to-date (or even if it is perceived as taking too much time), staff will resist doing it and fall back on whatever methods they were using in the past.The process should help them out and make their lives easier by providing ways to keep track of their pipeline, the current status on opportunities they are working and things they need to do. Once they realize that following the sales process is helping them stay organized – and once their sales numbers improve through repeated use of the process – they will be your biggest supporters.
- Second, drive all reporting out of CRM, and the sales stages within the process. When a salesperson is meeting with the sales manager to discuss their current deals, the reports they are looking at should be CRM reports and those reports should be utilizing information from the sales process.This helps the salesperson because they don’t need to compile any extra reports for their meeting and it helps their manager because he or she can check out what’s going on anytime they want by just looking in CRM. The better the reporting in CRM, the less time is needed to individually review each deal, saving time for both sales staff and management – time that can then be used to close deals.
- Tie the credit a salesperson gets for sales to the data available in CRM and they will strive to keep that information updated. The best way to get a salesperson to do something is to tie it to their commission check, so consider basing commissions on how accurately sales are tracked in CRM.If they can get credit for a completed sale that was not entered in CRM and did not follow the process, they will quickly learn that they don’t need to use CRM, and you will lose the value of the process and the reporting.
- Finally, you need to have the support of upper management to enforce usage of the system and the process. Again, if the salespeople are not required to use the sales process in CRM by their managers, they will avoid it.If the managers are not viewing the data and reports in CRM, and are checking their own spreadsheets instead, the sales staff will be more concerned with the spreadsheets than CRM. Their job is to sell and to prove they are selling they need to keep their managers aware of their actions. If the manager isn’t looking in CRM for that data, they have no reason to put it there.
Accurate Data Drives Sales & Revenue
Having a sales process in place can help drive additional sales and revenue for your company, and managing your sales cycle within a tool like Microsoft Dynamics CRM makes it easier for salespeople to keep track of their pending opportunities.
Plus Microsoft Dynamics CRM excels at providing better and easier reporting and data mining, while helping salespeople stay organized and selling. By combining the tool and the process, your organization gains additional insight into the sales pipeline, driving company growth and long-term success.
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