Audaxium Blog

User adoption is key to ROI

CRM vendors all promise fantastic ROI by helping your company increase sales productivity, improve customer satisfaction, and enable marketing effectiveness.  However, those benefits only come to life if your employees actually use the system.

WII-FM:  What’s In It – For Me?

To maximize user adoption, you need to figure out the answer to this question: “How can we make them WANT to use, or even depend on, CRM, even though it might require more discipline on their part?”

Generally speaking, people resist change, they already have too much on their plate, and some even struggle to learn new software.  The last thing you want to do is give them a system that gets in their way, rather than making their life easier and more productive.

WII-FM:  Questions to ask yourself

• What dashboards will help my employees make better decisions with their time?
• What reports do they need quick access to?
• What information are they searching for frequently?
• What tools will help them get more work done in the same amount of time?
• What reminders will help them get better organized?
• What real-time performance metrics will help keep themselves on track?
• How do I make it easy and fast for salespeople to keep their forecast up-to-date?

How to answer the Questions

Many people make the mistake of simply asking a few trusted people in each functional area what they want/need, and then turn that into a requirements list.  Observation and measurement are better tools.  Talking to existing CRM reference customers about these questions is another way to find out what works, and what doesn’t.  Watch how your most effective employees get things done.  Replicate some of their methods, and remove obstacles from their path.

What to expect if you don’t consider user needs

There’s no question that a modern CRM system is a wonderful tool for managers and executives.  You get better visibility into the key metrics in your business, you get real-time reports that allow you to make quicker decisions, and you get tools to manage employee performance.

This only works if your whole team uses the system. For example, if only 60% of your salespeople enter their leads, log their phone calls, and manage their sales pipeline, your dashboard is only 60% accurate, at best. Your visibility becomes more than a little foggy.

The Bottom Line

When planning an implementation of a CRM system, put yourself in your employees’ shoes and you’ll make better decisions that will maximize user adoption and accelerate your ROI.

Questions?

Audaxium consultants are former employees of companies who have implemented new CRM systems.  We’ve been through the learning curve and can provide you with some ideas to accelerate user adoption and reduce the impact of change.  Contact us for more ideas.

Customer Relationship Management.  Perhaps the worst descriptor ever used to describe a class of products.

Why?  Because a CRM application does so much more than simply manage lists of companies and contacts, opportunities and orders.  It’s a business management platform that can manage any kind of information you want.  Well, almost any.

It’s also a bad description because CRM should, in the best implementations, be used to manage performance.  And the best way to manage performance is to set goals and targets for yourself and your business.

If you’re looking at CRM for the first time, here are three things to ask yourself as you examine your different options.

What are the 3 most important goals for my business, or my different business areas, this year?

Can a measurement and reporting system help me meet and exceed those targets?

What is the financial impact of exceeding those targets?

If you can answer those questions you’re on your way to figuring out the financial justification of a CRM system.  The important thing to keep in mind is that there are many systems that can measure results.  ERP systems are great at measuring.  But does yours allow you to put in targets and report against them?  Can it measure non-financial data, such as the number of new leads?  The percentage of RFP’s won or lost?  Because a (good) CRM system is so flexible you can measure much much more.

So as you consider either if you need a system, or, which CRM to implement, perhaps take the time to ask how your important goals and targets would be tracked, compared, and presented, and, how doing so would impact your business.

If you’d like to see a demonstration of this, please feel free to contact us.

Here at Audaxium, we have been spending a great deal of time talking to customers about how to get off on the right foot when implementing marketing automation software, in this case, Pardot.

These discussions are as unique as our customers, but there are a few constants in the equation that add up to a successful implementation. It’s important to give these careful consideration.

As point of reference, all of our clients sell to other businesses, and they typically have a lot of customers and contacts at those customers. But they also have a keen desire to both generate new leads, and manage leads sent to them by their partners. Our advice below makes the most sense in that context.

So what’s first? Where do we begin?

What first happens is a discussion of the value of marketing automation tools. Times have changed. It’s no longer appropriate to download lists of email addresses and spam them. It’s not valuable to email your entire customer base each week with every message you want to broadcast.

In a nutshell, you’ll be using an application like Pardot to achieve the following:

• Capture Lead Information
• Track Lead and customer behavior on your website and content
• Measure the “sales readiness” of contacts
• Manage the hand off of sales ready leads to the sales team
• Give customers content and offers they are interested in

But you already knew all that. You’re here to learn about your first steps.

Data Scrubbing

The first step is an analysis of your existing data. Just how good is it? This breaks down into two essential questions. How much data that you need to use to segment your database, is missing? Address, email, company size, industry etc. are typical but there may be others. The second question is, how much duplicate information is there?

While improving data quality should be an ongoing task in your organization, and not a one time program, you’ll need to make sure it’s happening as you move ahead with marketing automation. Clean your data.

Make sure you’re removing or merging duplicate email addresses. Put in place metrics in your CRM system to warn users when they are working with incomplete records.

Your database will never become perfect, but place a high degree of importance on the effort to make it so.

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