Feature:
Creating a CRM Habit

During the time of year that most people are fighting bad habits, let’s think for a minute about creating a good habit –even an addiction– to CRM. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are known for creating greater workflow efficiency, better customer relationships and increased sales. Despite these benefits, one of the biggest challenges pervading CRM deployments is user adoption. While newer versions are more user-friendly and can be more readily accessed by users outside of the office than ‘older’ versions of 2-3 years ago, even these newer versions are not the magic bullet that executives and IT specialists have been hoping for. So the question of how do I get my team to use CRM has a four part answer:

Create a “CRM Culture”
Your corporate culture must support use of your CRM system, and this must permeate the organization from the top down. This means “Thou shall not command the sales team to update CRM and then manually reenter pipeline data into a separate document.” It is vital for management to demonstrate to all users that they are serious about the utilization of the CRM system. Management must be educated about and use the system themselves, as well as listen to and address end-user concerns and suggestions.

Integrate into everyday processes
An absolute non-negotiable is complete email integration. Emails should easily be attached to CRM records. If you are using an older system that is not integrated with email, you need to upgrade or ditch it. You are simply missing too much communication if you aren’t capturing emails, and this is where users see a huge advantage to using CRM. When users can reference old conversations and coworker interactions with clients, it suddenly makes sense to start using the system. In addition to linking your CRM to Outlook, you will also be able to leverage Excel and mail merges directly from the system. A surefire trick to increase user adoption among sales people is to integrate expense reports by tying them to contact, accounts and/or opportunities.

Train for all users
Training is one of the most effective ways to increase end-user adoption of your CRM system. Training should start with a user survey to assess the skill level of each employee, then break out the users into groups based upon skill level. This enables you to tailor the training classes to the developmental needs of each group, saving your company money on less training sessions needed. Finally, encourage end-users to create their own reference documents, or cheat sheets, to increase their comfort level therefore increasing their system utility.

XRM
CRM solutions today are flexible and should mold to your business practices, not the other way around. This means you have lots of opportunity to take advantage of the latest evolution of CRM: XRM. XRM isn’t a new type of technology; it’s a new way to approach using CRM. XRM means leveraging the advances in software that allow you to better model your business using technology. CRM is no longer limited to Customer Relationship Management. It might now be PRM for Patient Relationship Management, DRM for Donor Relationship Management, CRM for Constituent Relationship Management, MRM for Media Relationship Management, etc. The more personalized your solution is to your business and your users, the more value you will get out of it.

Margaret Wise is a Business Development Manager for Infinity Info Systems and has spent the last 10 years working on CRM with senior sales and marketing executives for a number of Fortune 500 and mid market companies throughout the southeast. For more information, contact Margaret Wise at mwise@infinityinfo.com or 678-642-3892.