5 Reasons Why Your Sales Reps Won’t Use a CRM
We all know the drill. You spend months fighting for the budget to purchase a new CRM, invest weeks or months in implementation, pay for staff training, and roll it out with a flourish, only to have your salespeople reject it. The brand new software is called “outdated,” “unnecessary,” and, worse, “not helpful for converting leads.”
Why the backlash? What drives this resistance? Those are the questions we are here to answer. We’ve talked to sales reps, managers, CMOs, and CEOs.
We’ve talked to professionals across many verticals and know what is working and what is not.
This email series is a guide to your salespeople's brains. It explains why the intended user isn’t using the software you fought, budgeted, and paid for. By dissecting these thought processes, you’ll understand what your salespeople are thinking, why they are feeling it, where you can help, AND what you must demand from your CRM.
“The CRM is too bulky.”
When your salespeople tell you the CRM is too bulky, they tell you one of two things. One: they didn’t get adequate training on the product. Or, two: the software is, in fact, too bulky. For everyone’s sake, let’s hope it is the former.
How do you know the difference?
When your salespeople tell you that the CRM is too bulky (but inadequate training is the real culprit), look for these little clues: they say there are “too many” features, they are “overwhelmed,” or they don’t know where to “start.” Inadequate training means they might not know how to open the program on their desktop.
Or how to find the information they are searching for. Or what those little “tag” buttons mean. This can all be resolved through training. Training is something you can schedule.
Training is an investment that yields returns over time. Inadequate training is the best kind of problem you could have. A truly bulky software setup is another beast entirely.
If your salespeople tell you your CRM is too bulky, and you know exactly what they mean—because you are swimming in a sea of too many menus, buttons, and options—you have a problem. Your salespeople are not your programmers or software engineers. Your sales team was hired to sell. They aren’t interested in spending hours learning the complexities of a brand-new computer program.
Salespeople are, by nature (and training), people people. And you want to keep it that way. Your sales team must be cultivating relationships and qualifying leads, not watching endless online tutorials trying to make sense of an overly complicated customer relationship management system.
A good CRM has a clean interface, intuitive organisation, and simple use. A bulky CRM is precisely the opposite.
How do you know where on the spectrum your system lies?
Do a little internet anthropology. Ask your salespeople to create a new contact. Then, sit back and observe. A good CRM won’t have you sitting back for very long.
A new contact should be created, populated, and saved with only two or three mouse clicks. And your salespeople should have been able to add this new contact from whichever screen.
They are working from their CRM, which is crucial. We know when introductions happen, and they do not happen when you are camped out on your system's home screen.
Warm introductions come in when you are on a call with an existing client, deep in a conversation about another deal, and they remember Ms Smith from the company Smith & Co Ltd., whom they have been meaning to introduce to you.
If your salesperson has to navigate back to the home screen, select ‘add contact’ from a drop-down menu, wait for a new page, click through a pop-up and chisel the information into a stone tablet to document that introduction, it’s time to drop your CRM.
Look for a CRM that makes contact management easy. Purchase a CRM that creates new contacts with a few clicks of the button and puts the tools your team needs in front of them when needed.
"The CRM doesn’t integrate with the tools I use."
When your salespeople have developed an online rapport with a prospect, they need to keep that conversation on the platform that nurtures that particular relationship; maybe they shoot emails back and forth or stay in touch on LinkedIn.
Either way, they have a good thing going, and your salespeople aren’t going to give up the game just so the management can see it on their dashboard. This is where you come in.
You want management to see it in their dashboard. Who can blame you?
Tracking where sales conversations come from and when they are converting is exciting and essential for many reasons. Data like this makes coaching more effective and determines where the resources go. Still, you can’t gather that information at the expense of your bottom line, i.e., by forcing your salespeople off the platform working for them and onto the CRM. You have to balance these competing priorities. An intelligent CRM will help you do just that.
Evaluate your existing or prospective CRM for platform integration. Does it track which conversations start in Outlook and easily sync with your email? What about LinkedIn? How about Facebook? Can you easily capture new leads from those social networks? You should.
Look for a CRM that offers plugins and extensions that allow your salespeople to stay in Outlook while they save information to your CRM database.
"The CRM sucks on mobile."
Lucky for you, your salespeople take their work on the road. Unlucky for you, your CRM doesn’t go with them. Conferences, client dinners, and flights are all ripe for introductions, sales discussions, and relationship cultivation. But what happens when your sales team can’t track these conversations immediately? Details get lost in the delay. This sucks for you, your salespeople and your bottom line.
Your salespeople shouldn’t wait until they return to their desks to introduce a new contact to your database or update a contact card. When your salesperson is on the road, the CRM should be with them – easy to access on their phone, tablet, or laptop. When your salespeople walk away from the conference floor after five conversations and a cocktail, they want to be able to pull up your CRM on their phone, add new contacts, take a few notes and move on with their night, confident that none of the essential intel will be erased from memory over the flurry of the next couple of hours. Help make that happen.
When shopping for your CRM, look for management systems that feature native iOS and Android apps. You’ll want a CRM that makes data entry on a mobile device a snap and syncs data across devices so your salespeople can track this conversation and move on to the next one.
"I’d rather be calling leads."
Hallelujah! Your salespeople have fire in their bellies and want to get on the phone. This is excellent news! Sales is a numbers game; you are blessed with a salesperson who keeps new business rolling in.
But what about conversions? What about lost deals? What about your pipeline?
As it turns out, sales is not just a numbers game. It’s also a relationship game, and conversion is just as important as the introductions. When your salespeople say they’d instead be calling leads, they mean that they want to do the work that leads to the sale.
We all know data entry feels like a time suck. We also know it’s imperative to identify which processes and relationships are actually creating closed deals. If your salespeople won’t use your CRM because they think it takes them away from successfully conducting business, who can blame them?
Your CRM must make it super simple for your fired-up sales staff to track their momentum and pace themselves for the game. You want the process of entering and updating contact information to be a breeze. You also want a simple way to track the tasks and outcomes associated with those calls.
Did leads become prospects or turn into deals? Your CRM should make it easy to make those changes quickly. It should also help you and your team keep track of the more nuanced developments of the sales relationship and help your salespeople track the work needed to seal the deal. Look for a system that allows you to make changes and take notes with the touch of a button. You need your sales rep to dedicate some time to updating their calendar and creating task lists, but not too much time.
Look for a CRM that provides you with enough data fields to track essential information about your prospect but not so many that your rep sounds like an automated system instead of an authentic human being.
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"It doesn't help me sell more."
Well, it should. Your salespeople are in the trenches, making calls and counter-offers day after day. And while they are tracking closed deals, they probably can’t tell you exactly how much is in the pipeline or precisely where an offer went wrong. It’s not that your sales rep doesn’t care about their missteps during the sales cycle; it’s just that they don’t know they are making them. This is where your CRM comes in.
Your CRM shouldn’t be a bottomless bucket into which you constantly pour water. It should operate like a machine and add value to your sales team’s raw material—their data. A CRM is not an address book or a database. It is a customer management system, and it should operate as such. Look for a CRM that generates reports that you can use to monitor and improve your sales process.
It doesn’t stop with a dashboard and a contact list. Find the CRM that spots trends and generates insights. Look for a management system that allows you to set goals and track progress meaningfully. By meaningful, we mean visual. A full-colour pie chart tells the story much better than black-and-white line items. Pull a report if your salespeople constantly lose deals during the negotiation stage. They are much more likely to shore up their game when they see their weak spots in a full-colour chart than if they had just said something one-on-one.
Pipedrive – the brilliant, useful CRM your team will use.
An intelligent CRM can make a good sales team great. An outdated CRM wastes time and demoralises salespeople. If your sales team neglects your CRM, talk to us. Pipedrive is the next-generation customer management tool designed to boost productivity and keep your team on track. Pipedrive was designed and optimised to make the customer management process straightforward, insightful, and relevant for the new sales generation.
Pipedrive is a cloud-based sales CRM system. We use it to help our clients streamline their sales processes and reach their goals.
You’ll get powerful features like:
- It’s pipeline-focused, giving you a clear view of your sales pipeline and any deals that need attention
- It automates repetitive tasks and automatically tracks emails, calls, and progress on deals
- The interface is clean and intuitive and gives you all the information you need in one place
- It allows you to track your team’s performance and use customizable KPIs
- It’s easy to implement, and it integrates with your emails (along with many other integration possibilities)