Why Would a Sales Rep Use Your CRM?

CRM – it's a topic that's guaranteed to derail any meeting with a 15-minute side-bar into why our reps don't use it.  CRM is so frustrating because very few companies have been able to crack the code and really build a CRM system that is a core part of how they go to market.

There are many reasons why CRM fails…Incomplete data.  Duplicate data.  Inaccurate data.  Too many fields.  Too time consuming.  Not user-friendly.  Redundant.

These are all reasons why CRM is often viewed as a burden and why reps don't use it.  Although each of those problems must be addressed, there's a bigger problem that they often mask and it can be traced back to one simple question – why would a rep want to use the CRM?

From the rep perspective, how much better is using the CRM than their own way of selling that they've built over their career?  They view CRM as a necessary evil, whose mandatory fields are needed to get resources or help their manager send forecasts up the ivory tower.

Very rarely do reps use the CRM because they believe it actually helps them sell better. And therein lies the problem.

As you're thinking about investments in CRM in 2012, look at every potential investment through that lens.  Here are some additional questions you may want to ask yourself:

-  Is your CRM built back from how your best reps sell?

-  Is your CRM designed to help your customers through the steps in their purchase process?

-  With buyer behavior changing dramatically across the last 3-4 years, and with the simultaneous increase in the complexity of selling – has your CRM system kept up?

Now before you go running off to ask for a $1M budget to overhaul your CRM – because that's really easy in today's business environment (insert sarcasm) – the good news is that you don't have to entirely re-tool your CRM to help your reps sell more effectively.

Earlier this year we profiled how ADP built a sales process to align with its customers' buying process and saw significant impact on sales results.  Technically, their CRM system is still built around the old sales process – but reps and managers use the "Buying Made Easy" tool to better understand where the customer is in their process and help them sell better.  Because of this tool, reps now enter and track opportunities in the CRM based not on rep actions, but customer actions in response to selling activities.  As a result, forecasting accuracy has gone through the roof.  So has the quality of Sales Managers' deal-level coaching.

Granted, ideal state would be to have everything embedded in the CRM system.  ADP has acknowledged that this transformation will be an iterative process that will likely take a lot of incremental changes. Still, the folks at ADP have started working towards a world where their CRM is there for the purposes of "guided selling" – meaning that as you track opportunities through the pipeline, the CRM system will recommend a suite of tools that you could use to help your customer through the stage in the buying process they're currently dealing with.  And because of that, more business will close.

Now that's a pretty far stretch from the CRM world we live in now.  But as we've uncovered in our previous CRM research, if we're trying to solve a CRM adoption problem when what we really have is a CRM design problem, all of our efforts will be in vain.  Even worse, we'll only be further distancing ourselves from where we ultimately need to be.

While CRM hygiene (data quality, sales force automation) is a good investment to make, also be sure to evaluate CRM investments in 2012 based on whether or not they help your customers through their purchase process and whether they help your average reps sell like your best reps.  Because anything other than that might not be addressing the root cause of the issue.

SEC Members, for more guidance on CRM, visit our CRM topic center. And for more information on ADP's Buying Made Easy process, review the case study or listen to our recent webinar on the topic.