Are you among the reported 80% of business leaders unsatisfied with the performance of your customer relationship management (CRM) system?
Your CRM collects a lot of data that is used to better manage customers, products, relationships and business opportunities. But if you don’t have a point person responsible for the design, execution and onboarding of your implementation, it may be doomed from the start.
We call this person your CEO for CRM. This person is ultimately responsible for the success of the CRM project, and arguably, plays the most important role in successful implementation along with high user adoption.
You can either have an internal CEO for CRM or bring in one from the outside as a partner. When choosing your CEO for CRM, I recommend they have these role requirements:
- Has experience using a successful CRM system
- Believes in the value of a properly implemented CRM
- Is a good listener and team motivator
- Is a respected sales leader with the power to make changes
- Understands how sales, product specialists, marketing, service departments and management coexist
- Is a good delegator and knows how to work as a team
- Has good management, presentation and organization skills
- Has the bandwidth to spend the time needed for success
- Is IT savvy (but does not need to be an IT expert)
- Must understand how CRM works with other information systems
By having a dedicated point person, you can improve adoption rates in three ways:
The Right CRM Design
Getting the system design right upfront is critical to achieving your business objectives with a CRM implementation. Having a dedicated CEO for CRM ensures it gets done right.
The CEO for CRM makes sure the design meets the business needs as well as the customers’ with a focus on sales process automation and optimization.
The CEO of CRM oversees a detailed audit that is performed at the beginning of the implementation. They make sure each stakeholder is interviewed to capture the methodologies and processes they are accountable for today, and the ones they may follow in the future.
In this stage, sales processes are base-lined and performance gaps are documented. Elements are considered like:
- What key fields should be tracked?
- What KPIs should be measured?
- Levels of product or service taxonomy
- Data governance and hierarchy needs (accounts, divisions, branches, vendors, products)
Functional dashboards are then built to capture key performance indicators (KPIs) and any other benchmark data deemed critical for each role.
The goal is to use the data gleaned from the design phases to create a cost-benefit analysis that concludes with a well-documented roadmap, including a logical phased-in plan for complete and easy adoption.
Project Execution
Most businesses lack the necessary skillset in-house to effectively design and execute a CRM implementation. Quite frankly, it’s often assigned as an additional task to personnel with already limited bandwidth. The reality is that CRM is a major project that requires close cooperation between IT, sales and marketing departments. It needs strong leadership.
The execution stage is critical to data parsing and establishing hierarchies from product categories, business units, major accounts, parent/child relationships and team selling groups. It’s at this point, the CRM implementation team must prove connections and functionality between quoting systems and other bolt-ons with the business ERP.
Having a CEO for CRM at the helm ensures the project stays on course and focused. Without one, many of the critical components needed for a successful CRM are missed, leading to failure.
Onboarding
The Brandon Hall Group reports that effective onboarding will increase retention by 82%. Bamboo HR says if you have a good program, employees are 18X more committed to the company, but Gallup says only 12% of companies deliver a good onboarding experience.
Why is CRM onboarding so challenging?
Setting up, configuring and integrating a CRM within your organization is a complex process, and one that requires a deep analysis of the company’s needs. Adoption rates for outside salespeople are extremely low because the time it takes to learn how to use the product is time that may hinder productivity in their roles.
Without effective training during the onboarding phases, your new and existing sales team may not experience the value of CRM, and eventually abandon it altogether.
All companies train on the “how” to use CRM: which dashboards to use, how to add contacts, activities, opportunities and more, but I find that most companies don’t spend time showing stakeholders the benefits – the “Why.” Management’s investment is not only for better operational data, but for everyone to effectively use CRM to support growth. It’s to simplify daily tasks, improve team communication, drive near real-time collaboration and to close more deals. That benefits everyone.
Brian Gardner, the founder of SalesProcess360, is the author of ROI from CRM: It’s About Sales Process, Not Just Technology, a compilation of 25 years of experience in sales management and CRM. Brian served as a sales manager for a major regional industrial distribution rep company for 15 years before building Selltis, an industrial sales team CRM solution with roots in process improvement. He took his passion for sales process improvement to the speaking and coaching world with SalesProcess360. He is also a Subject Matter Expert in CRM at Texas A&M University. Reach him at brian.gardner@salesprocess360.com.