Driving CRM Adoption for the Sales Team
(3 minute read)
A common challenge for sales leadership across industry sectors is getting the sales team to adopt the customer relationship management (CRM) system. No matter how good the CRM system may be, it can only provide value if it is fed with the correct information at the right time.
Not surprisingly, sales people tend to prioritize building relationships and customer interaction above the tasks of inputting and updating customer information in the CRM system. However, most sales professionals also understand that business is increasingly becoming more data driven. Full transparency and cross-company collaboration are necessary to getting a warm introduction to a prospect by a colleague or assistance to win a deal. In order to frame an effective go-to-market strategy, sales leaders need visibility to the entire customer journey.
Two pillars are necessary to ensure successful CRM adoption: making it easy to capture interactions and activities in the CRM system, and finding a way to gamify the process to encourage adoption by the sales team. SAP Sales Cloud helps to accomplish the first item by providing standard capabilities that are intuitive and easy to use. For the latter item, NTT DATA Business Solutions has developed a solution that can be deployed with any new or existing SAP Sales Cloud implementation to help with gamification.
The CRM adoption solution helps to keep the sales team motivated to maintain high-value data in the CRM system, and helps monitor business participation at the sales representative, sales manager and company level. It also provides visibility to key performance indicators (KPIs), enabling the leadership team to view and compare how different sales teams or individual sales people are engaging with customers over a monthly or quarterly timeframe.
The following are some additional use cases supported by the CRM adoption solution:
- In this use case, think about sales representatives who are remote and working hard towards the attainment of their quotas. They are making calls, sending follow-up emails to prospects, and doing virtual demos, but the efforts are not proportionally delivering sales numbers due to unknown circumstances. With the CRM adoption program, the leadership team can easily visualize the resiliency of their teams and recognize the sales representatives who are giving their best efforts.
- Let’s assume that there is a new product that leadership wants the sales team to focus on, but they want to keep the incentive compensation plan as-is with a standard/stepped rate applicable for all products. They will need to find ways to persuade the sales team to drive sales for the new product and track their efforts at the sales manager/sales representative level. The CRM adoption program can help to achieve this and empower the leadership team to steer the team in the right direction.
- In any sales team, there are members with mixed performance. Sales leadership often needs to coach these sales representatives to help them pick up the pace in attaining their quotas. The basic fact that needs to be unraveled is whether it is an effort vs. approach issue. The CRM adoption program provides an easy-to-consume chart that compares the efforts of a star performer and any other sales representative. This provides a starting point for a meaningful conversation.
- Having a correct sales pipeline and accurate sales forecasts helps supply chain planners to get in tune with upcoming sales volume. The CRM adoption solution can inspire sales representatives to actively input their deals in the system, which ensures no ‘surprise’ orders. Thus, delivery commitments with customers can always be met.
- Marketing uses the bottom-of-the-funnel intelligence provided by the sales team to run effective campaigns, improve customer profiles and provide relevant information to prospects. When sales teams fully embrace and use the CRM system to record activities and opportunities, the marketing team gains useful information to assess the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.
If you’re interested to learn more about our CRM Adoption solution, please feel free to reach out to us for more information.