I have been using multiple CRMs for the last 14 years and I have noticed one thing. Sales teams don’t like using them. It is almost like pulling teeth to get the information into them. How many times have you sat in a meeting and watched everyone on your team take notes? Or better yet, an in-side Account Executive having a conference call with a customer is on the phone in their CRM (can see it on their monitor), and taking notes on a legal pad of paper? Well it happens all the time. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. By the way, the notes from the meetings or conference calls rarely make it into their CRM and if they do, a two hour meeting is condensed to two sentences. Can you build sales strategy based on this? Absolutely not, but this is a topic for another blog.
So here you go, 3 Reasons Sales Team Don’t Like Using CRM:
1. Not Intuitive – CRMs don’t match the flow of what really needs to be captured in customer interactions. There are too many steps or places to input information just to capture the details of meetings. There is just too much redundant effort.
2. Does not depict what Sales Teams do everyday – Sales teams are in meetings everyday and work inside of opportunities day in and day out. 95% of this work is updating activity from the day’s meetings.
3. Not designed for Sales Teams – CRMs are designed for management but lack the ease of use that Sales Reps demand. This is very evident by how a CRM is designed, multiple pages, each having a numerous input fields.
The key to get your sales teams to use your CRM:
An intuitive solution – Single input, Multiple output. This allows Sales teams to populate the multiple CRM objects with real data all by doing what they do naturally. In other words a method that depicts ‘A Day in the Life of the Sales Team’. For the Sales team, the solution has a single interface to document customer interactions in a browser or a mobile device (it must provide for offline capabilities to document meetings) and to update their CRM either in real-time or in a matter of seconds. For Management it must provide all the key metrics for detailed reporting and dashboards to accurately forecast revenue.
It would be great to get your feedback and real life stories around how you use your CRM solution.
