Empower Your Sales Team: Encourage Them to Use Your CRM

I hear people complain far too often, “I can’t get our sales team to use our CRM. They might enter basic contact info, but that’s about it. It’s useless.”

It’s a shame. A good Customer Relationship Management system can significantly improve your sales processes and give you critical information about your future sales and current prospects. Great data collection will tell you where to place your attention and how to spend your marketing dollars to receive the biggest payoff. I’ve seen organizations that fully embrace these systems discover things about their customers that they never suspected until they collected the data and took a hard look at it. I’ve seen them discover huge sales opportunities and eliminate bottlenecks in their sales cycles that cut out days, weeks, and even months. And I’ve seen it show exactly who on the sales team is doing the work that will keep them successful. Imagine what your sales would look like if you could see exactly what your most successful sales people are doing and then shape everyone else to be exactly like them. That’s what a great CRM can do for you.

It’s clear why sales people resist it. They want to be doing the work of sales, making calls, taking meetings and making the final deal. But the true predictor of future sales isn’t past sales - it’s current activity. That’s what a good CRM will tell you. You can see which members of your sales team are doing the work today that will make them successful next quarter.

But some CRMs are clumsy and difficult to use. Your CRM choice should make it completely natural for your sales team members to capture what they’re doing at every moment including who they’re calling or meeting with, what future activities are planned or promised, and collect increasingly detailed information about the prospects they’re working with. If your sales team is collecting lots of data, but waiting until the end of the day or the week to put it into a system, it will never get done and you won’t get what you need from your system.

There are some terrific options available today. Solutions like Salesforce.com are affordable and very powerful. But some organizations need very specific processes and data collected and don’t find most packaged solutions to be a good fit. We’ve worked with a number of customers like this and built them custom solutions that are designed to be a natural part of their sales workflow.

For example, here’s what our customer, Matt Berry, has to say about the CRM tools we designed and built for Healthlinx:

“The tools that Minds On created for us have absolutely revolutionized how we do business,” says HealthLinx COO Matt Berry. “We’ve seen a huge spike in productivity, a substantial decrease in sales rep training time, and an overall increase in awareness of our sales process. This last piece, the Scorecard, is astonishing. It will transform our business. Each rep knows exactly that their numbers are and we know, too. Everyone is tracking the same thing. And we can get to the root of what makes a sales rep successful.”

You can’t cajole, punish or even torture your sales team into using a CRM, but you can make it a natural part of the sales process. If you do, you’ll take greater control of your business. I’d love to talk to you about how you can do this for your business or how to make your existing CRM a more natural part of your sales process. Give me a call (740.548.1645) or send me an email.