We have thousands of sales reps. How can I motivate them to give up their “tried and tested” sales tools (notes jotted on paper, contacts stored in their heads, excel worksheets stored on their hard drives, etc.), and start storing their leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, etc., in Salesforce?Executive Adoption: The most essential aspect of any CRM implementation is executive-level sponsorship and adoption. Your C-level sponsor should have full access to Salesforce.com; as should their peers. If they don’t have it, get it for them. Your executive team will spend most of their time in the Dashboards, so spend a decent amount of time developing custom, C-level executive dashboards. Ask, “what would I want to see, if this were my company?” (because it is). Give your executive team Salesforce 101 training, covering the essentials of navigating within the tool, drilling into dashboard reports, and diving into the detail records below. Check in periodically (quarterly, bi-annually), and ask for feedback on what they would like to see added or removed from the Dashboard. Encourage them to monitor and engage your sales team on things they see happening through their Executive dashboard. When sales reps become aware that senior level management is in the tool, it will drive greater adoption and use.
What’s In It for Me? As a CRM Project Team, you need to make sure the system is LOADED with automation and other tools that directly benefit your sales team. If it’s simply another platform in which they insert data, it’s really not much improved over a basic spreadsheet. Instead, the tool must work for them. Consider AppExchange add-ons, like OneSource – which automatically populates contact data (titles, phone numbers, email addresses) and company data (company size, revenue, industry, etc.) when the Sale Rep enters some basic account information. Add personal dashboards that help the sales rep focus on their best prospects, key opportunities and sales pipeline. Design triggers that provide provide automated reminders for follow-up calls, etc. Integrate tools like DocuSign and DrawLoop, so that you can save your Sales Reps time with automated quote generation and electronic contract signatures. Integrate with back-end ERP systems, so that the Sales Reps can monitor post-sale activity. Use free tools like Ideas, Answers, Content, and Chatter to build a more collaborative work environment.
Make It Simple: Make your system simple for your sales teams to use. For your mobile warriors who live out of the cell phones, take advantage of Salesforce Mobile. Give them the ability to easily create or update leads, contacts, accounts, opportunity records from their handheld devices. Keep the input requirements minimal – don’t configure a dozen required fields on a new lead, when 2 or 3 will do.
Ride Alongs: Periodically ask if you can join members of your sales team as a “ride along”. Carefully watch and ask questions about their job, how they keep track of their day to day tasks, how they use Salesforce (or other tools). Always ask, “How can I make this system easier, so they have more time selling?”
Lead Assignment / Distribution: For inbound sales teams, adopt a system that distributes new leads based on each individual Sales Rep’s use of Salesforce. Example: Sally and Joe both have 10 leads currently assigned to them. Sally’s leads have a lot of recent activity (logged calls, email activity, trip reports / site visits), all logged within the system. In addition, she converted 3 leads to opportunities in the last 7 days. By comparison, none of Joe’s leads have been updated in the past 3 weeks, and he hasn’t converted any leads. Joe might have been contacting these customers, and making appropriate follow-up – he just hasn’t bothered to log it.
Don’t adopt a lead assignment method that evenly distributes leads to Joe and Sally. Reward the behavior you want your sales team to adopt by weighting your lead distribution system toward the CRM system users. Make sure it’s know to your Sales Reps how the lead distribution system works, and that it can be easily tracked on individual and team performance dashboards.
In addition to activity (recency metrics), consider a lead scoring system and how that might be used to influence lead distribution. In lead scoring, the “completeness” of a lead is used to calculate a value. For example, a lead that only has information in the customer name and phone # fields might have a score of “2”, while a lead that has information in the customer name, phone #, email, industry, company size, or other custom fields (budgeted amount, prospect urgency, etc.) might have a score of 7. The more fields they populate, the higher the lead score. A lead distribution system could use the cumulative score of recent closed/won or current funnel activity when determining how the lead should be routed.
Develop Dashboards for Sales Managers: Design your dashboards and reports in such a way that Sales Managers can see how well their team is performing against all the KPI they are measured on within the organization. Join their sales meetings, and listen to the topics they review – they design dashboards that show data along that same flow. Get the Sales Managers to drive their 1:1 and/or team meetings from these Dashboards. “Ok, team, let’s start with new leads this week. Joe, looks like you got a couple of leads listed as “hot”, but when I drive down into the detail record, I don’t see any recent call activity or notes to suggest why they are labeled that way – fill me in. <… listens …> That’s great. Let’s get that info updated into the lead please, before next week’s team meeting!”
If Sales Reps are keying their data into Salesforce, it’s important that Sales Managers use the tool for their status updates. The worse thing we can do as managers is to have our sales reps all this valuable information in the tool, but then when we call them into our meetings, ask them, “So, Sally … what did you do this week?” Sales managers need to be reviewing this information and be aware of what’s happening BEFORE they enter meetings with their team!
Tie Incentives / Compensation Plans to your CRM System: Your commission system must be based on information out of your CRM system. If the lead/opportunity is not in Salesforce, the Sales Rep doesn’t get commission. That’s a pretty simple, but it’s important to go beyond awarding sales just based on closed/won sales. Adopt incentive programs that enhance or accelerate commission based on the sale rep’s pipeline growth, timely lead nurturing / conversion, detailed account/contact/opportunity updates and activity / follow-up. Incent the behavior you want your Sales Team to adopt!
Remove their dependency on other systems (email clients, excel worksheets, etc.): Salesforce.com has a method for sending email from within the tool. Furthermore, when emails are sent through this method, the user can see if the recipient opened the email, how many times they opened the email, when they last opened the email, etc. Why would you ever send an email from Outlook? If the answer is, “that’s the system I’m familiar with”, then teach the new system! Show the benefit of being able to see when a customer reads an email, and act on that. Implement triggers that alert the Sales Rep, so they can do a follow-up call within the hour of the email being read. There are similar productivity tools for coordinating meetings, setting up reminder calls, automated email follow-ups, etc. Get the tool working for them, rather than make them work hard to get data into the tool.
CRM is a not a tool, it’s a strategy. Understand that you will be forever tweaking and optimizing your CRM system, so that it evolves as your business evolves. Make the process and the tool smarter, not harder.
And don’t hesitate to let me know if I can help!
