What’s In It For Me? The Root Causes of Low CRM Adoption

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published by sfcg on June 8, 2011 - 6:13pm

In the past two weeks, I came across two perspectives on CRM that I’ve been thinking about a great deal.  Do either of these scenarios sound familiar?

  1. My father-in-law is a highly regarded, long time sales professional and master of his craft.  He has “retired” now, but one of his favorite hobbies is leading productive, high-end sales training courses.  During one of our recent talks he told me, “When I talk to the sales executives of any major company and the conversation turns to CRM, boy, no one is ever happy. In fact, they usually hate it.”
     
  2. A prospective client of mine is a sharp, energetic IT director.  Last week he gave me a walkthrough of a CRM On Demand instance he configured himself. As he walked me through a wide range of very colorful dashboards, charts and graphs, I was impressed with his skills in business intelligence and reporting. There was just one problem, “No matter what I do to this system, adoption is still a major issue. Why won’t they use it?”

Maybe it’s just me, but in my experience, these two scenarios – ironically from two people who have never met each other before – embody two sides of a coin.  Sales people (even sales managers) are rarely satisfied with their CRM system.  IT people are frequently frustrated that no one uses the systems they deliver.  The result is reduced adoption and low morale.

Too often we see sales and IT lock horns in a battle that reminds me a lot of a Harvard/Yale football game – a lot of smart people in the wrong roles locked in a death match that no one is watching. Sometimes the root cause is a petty turf war. Other times it is an impatience to deliver the project and get on to the next thing. Too often either side gets carried away with an emotional issue that is really tangential to successful deployment. But does it have to be that way? I don’t think so.

I was able to make it clear to my prospective client (the bright IT director) with just a few questions. Here is a brief synopsis.

Me: This instance looks fantastic. Why don’t you think adoption is low?
Him: Heck, that’s what I can’t figure out! I think I need to sit down with the VP of sales and find out what he wants; for whatever reason the sales people just aren’t using it.
Me: Well, let’s put ourselves in the minds of the sales people.  Take a step back from the CRM for a minute.  If you were a sales person, what’s the most important thing you have to do?
Him: Sell stuff.
Me: Right.  Sell stuff.  So how does this instance help your sales guy sell stuff?
Him: …(a long pause)
Me: Ok.  That’s where we need to begin.

Now as it turns out there are many ideas for how a CRM might help a sales guy sell stuff and we were able to brainstorm several options before we got to the heart of the issue.  To make a long story short, he and the sales people had never spoken about what they need,  nor had they created a return on investment plan that kept them focused on what the CRM was supposed to improve.  Instead, they were too enamored with the (extremely cool) features of CRM On Demand.

This is just one example of the root cause of adoption problems, but there are many more. Another major culprit is insistence on bad sales behavior, tracked perfectly by a CRM.  I once had a client who discovered via his CRM that the best sales people sent the most quotes to customers.  In fact, the top sales people sent ten quotes per month to customers and everyone else averaged five quotes per month.  So, the client made it a requirement of every sales person to send ten quotes per month.  No matter if the customers asked or not.  Can you guess what happened?  It flopped.  Everyone wasted time sending meaningless quotes, when really the top sales people sent the ten quotes because they had created ten willing buyers, the quote was just something that followed through.

So what do you do if you have a CRM that has low adoption?  My answer:  Take a step back.  Why did you implement the CRM in the first place?  If you cannot answer that question clearly, that is ok, just admit it.  There are many excellent reasons to implement a CRM.  Pick a few that align with your company’s strategy.  With a short bit of work, you can project the likely impact of the CRM and get very focused on delivering a CRM that achieves those goals.

Once you’ve got your ROI in mind, the configuration, requirements (and what to leave out) become very clear. The last thing you’ll need – and the most important – is a plan for changing behavior.  Do not have the illusion that if you build it, they will use it. For systems to work, people need to change.  How?  By making the CRM part of the company culture and by answering this fundamental question over and over again:

What’s in it for me?

- David Ewing

David Ewing is the president and CEO of SFCG. He has led the CRM On Demand practice since 2005. He also played football for Harvard and happens to think “Yale sucks.”