Why do your sellers ignore the CRM?

A constant complaint from sales managers is that the CRM is not up-to-date. And if sales managers are not complaining, then it’s the CEO or CFO grumbling that the data is not useful and they can’t see what’s happening. Pretty much every company suffers to some extent. (If yours doesn’t, please comment herehttps://www.linkedin.com/posts/benmiller4_why-do-your-sellers-ignore-the-crm-a-constant-activity-7294985271823982592-WiXu?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAATcTMBoKbG3QaBsvJyxtoIgMgf2SgDoJ8, I’d love to buy you a drink!)

There are two reasons why sellers will maintain the CRM.

1. It’s useful to them

2. They can see it is useful to somebody else

The second is less obvious and I’m going to come back to it below.

The first is more obvious. If the CRM is helping the sales team, then of course they will use it. Therefore, please make sure that all the relevant integrations are in place. Call recording must automatically link calls to the Opportunity/Deal. Email integration and LinkedIn integration must work. Ditto Slack or Teams. Minimise the amount of work it takes to maintain the CRM, and maximise the value of a single source of truth for all deal related content.

Also make the tool itself easy-to-use. Have consistent, shared views where sellers can update key fields in line – don’t force them to click into individual records to update fields. Make sure that sellers, managers and C-levels know what the correct views and reports are and are all using the same or similar.

There is a belief that sellers don’t like putting things in the CRM when it’s providing data for other people. I disagree. Sellers are human beings who, like all of us, want to be helpful and supportive of their colleagues. What they, and all of us, hate is providing information which is not used. All too often, somebody in the company will say we need to gather XYZ datapoint for all Contacts / Leads / Opportunities / Accounts. And they will be right that this is potentially interesting. But unless somebody actively looks at the output of this information and consistently acts on it, then it’s a waste of time. This will drive sellers, and anyone else asked to populate the information, up the wall.

So if you want additional information, please follow the following rules.

* Make it easy to add, ideally in a field which is editable in-line in a view which your sellers are already accessing regularly.

* Make sure you review this information regularly and ask sellers for any clarification.

* Critically, regularly tell your sellers what you have learned from this information and how it has helped the business.

When the CEO uses the standard views, and finds something curious which leads them to ask a question, sellers know that their data is valuable. When Marketing shares an insight from the data that sellers have provided, sellers know their time has not been wasted. When their manager looks at the same information that sellers look at and works on it with them, they know it is adding value.

How have you improved CRM adoption? What tactics do you find work best? Please comment here or reply.

Ben