3 Steps for Boosting Sales Productivity through CRM User Engagement

When you implement a CRM solution, you naturally anticipate greater sales productivity and ultimately, more sales. When this doesn’t happen as quickly as you expect, poor user adoption is likely to be a major culprit.

Sales professionals are often asked to use countless tools and strategies to make them more productive. It’s counter-intuitive that they would reject resources that might improve their ability to sell and earn more, but it does happen.

In our experience, engaging sales reps in the implementation phase of the project increases their enthusiasm for CRM and establishes a degree of ownership for its success. Consider including these three activities in your CRM project plan to improve user adoption.

1.     Be clear about your goals for CRM.
Share why you selected CRM and describe your vision for how it will benefit the entire organization. Be forthright about how it will change sales processes and behaviors to improve productivity and collaboration. Ensure your sales team understands that CRM is an essential business solution, not just another IT project.

2.     Engage Sales in defining customer and prospect needs.
Beyond storing contact and demographic information, CRM is a data repository that can provide insights into your best customers and prospects. Make Sales a stakeholder in identifying these and other insights to help anticipate evolving customer needs and deepen customer relationships.

3.     Ask Sales what they want from CRM.
Would you embrace a system that doesn’t have the information you need, the way you need to see it? Who would? Work directly with your sales team to configure and implement a system that enhances and streamlines how they work in ways that makes sense to them.

Actively using CRM is the first step toward improving sales productivity and enabling sales success. Generate excitement and increase user adoption by involving your sales team in the project. Then follow up and make sure their workflow and reporting needs are effectively met.

For more insight on how to boost sales productivity, call me at 330-929-1353, extension 5224.

-- Bob

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