‘I’m too busy’. ‘I’m not great with computers’. ‘I’ve got my rolodex, I don’t need a CRM’. Salespeople are a tricky bunch. The great ones have their idiosyncrasies and sales managers will often be inclined to overlook them as long as the team delivers new business.
But a good team is only part of the equation and good systems can be just as important. So how do we achieve the holy grail of a good team using a system that enables them to work even more effectively? It’s all about objection handling.
Well-designed CRMs add value
‘What’s in it for me?’. It sounds a little mercenary, but if you ask that question from your team’s perspective, you’ll be well on the way to improving user adoption.
A good place to start is saving time by reducing tedious and repetitive tasks. Today’s sales professionals spend just 34% of their time selling. Introducing templated emails for the sales process, producing and sending templated proposals and contracts to prospects, tracking service delivery and support cases; just a few ways a well-designed CRM can save users time.
It’s possible to automate just about any transactional process in Salesforce. The best designed systems will automate the ‘slack’; the things your team shouldn’t be wasting their time on.
Make it indispensable
If your CRM is the system of record for client information, if it holds clean and insightful data, your team will be more inclined to use it. If you can use CRM as a place where group conversations about an account are hosted, your team will begin to use it as a place of reference.
If your CRM hosts revenue data by client (as opposed to just pipeline data), think about using CRM to host commission summaries and performance against target. Take a strict approach to deals ‘outside’ CRM; insist that if it isn’t in CRM, it didn’t happen.
Live reports, trend reports and dashboards within Salesforce are really powerful tools. If you’re manually exporting data and forcing it into spreadsheets, you’re working from static data and introducing the opportunity for error.
Customise the user experience
One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to systems. Typically, organisations will have a number of user types or ‘profiles’. All of those profiles need an interface that works for them. If a user doesn’t use the field, make sure it doesn’t take up valuable screen ‘real estate’. If you have products or services with different sales cycles, think about designing the user experience around these. A well-designed CRM should be so intuitive that you don’t need to be ‘good at computers’.
Salesforce Sales Cloud has the capacity to solve all these issues and more. Appdraft helps businesses implement and recalibrate Sales Cloud to optimise it for their teams. With senior level ‘coal-face’ experience of sales and marketing, we work with organisations to review systems in the context of your process.
We’ll work with you to identify opportunities for automation and ensure that your CRM solves challenges for your team and becomes something they are grateful for, instead of an admin chore. It’ll host clean, valuable data and reporting that means something, allowing users to track progress live.
Getting CRM right can be transformational for a business. By developing ‘user stories’ we will understand what your users really want from a CRM and prioritise those changes to drive user adoption.
For more information on implementing Salesforce or recalibrating your Salesforce org, contact us using the form below.