Do you ever feel like you’re not getting the most out of your CRM investment?
You’re not alone.
Sales leaders across the globe struggle with Salesforce adoption and utilization, which is why we asked Cirrus Insight CEO Ryan Huff to join us for the most recent broadcast of our Modern Sales Leader Hangout: Get a Higher Return on Your CRM Investment.
Here are fifteen of the best insights Ryan had for sales leaders everywhere struggling with how to get the most out of Salesforce.
14 Tips for Increasing Salesforce ROI
- “We all go into a CRM implementation project with high hopes and knowledge that having one consistent place to have all your sales data is a good thing. It’ll enable you to have a better understanding of who your customer is and how you can better serve them. But despite those high hopes … it always seems to be a little bit hard to get everybody at the end of the day using Salesforce as much as you’d hoped. A lot of times, unfortunately, your hopes fall short of reality at the end of the day. I don’t think it has to be that way.”
- “The biggest place that you can focus energy is in improving adoption in general, both from a sales rep standpoint all the way up the chain to making sure that reports that management gets are answering the right questions.”
- “At the end of the day, CRM is just a database. But if you collectively look at all of that data, you really can pull out some valuable information.”
- “It comes down to the core premise of CRM in general, which is really just a place to house your sales data.”
- “At the outset of the project, there’s agreement on what kind of data needs to be there, but whether or not we can succeed in getting that data there is the challenge that most of us faced when looking at a Salesforce project.”
- “I think one of the challenges is that success with CRM is a hard thing to measure. At the end of the day, you’re spending money on licenses, on training, on customization, on all of that stuff. And it’s not a profit center. You’re not making money on it. So ROI is kind of a nebulous thing to try to quantify. So I think it comes down to some of those intangible things: Are you able to get the answers to your questions and are those answers actionable?”
- “I think an important thing that is often underlooked is coaching — whether or not managers can look at Salesforce and the data there and help their reps do a better job at selling, whether or it’s looking at a call script or email template and really giving them insight on how they can improve when touching customers.”
- “The whole premise of Salesforce and CRM is great. In modern society, I don’t think you really can run a business unless you have a handle and a finger on the pulse of who your customer is, who your salespeople are and what kind of activity you have going on there. So you have to have some way of tracking that. I think Salesforce is the best tool out there for that job.”
- “You need to have an implicit understanding throughout the organization of why you’re doing CRM from the top to the bottom, and a lot of times, I would say, from the bottom to the top.”
- “CRM is a selling tool. Sales reps are the one who foot the bill in terms of time of getting that data in. And we need to have an understanding throughout the organization that it needs to help them and that a big part of the focus on the implementation needs to be about how we make CRM a better tool to help reps close deals and get more done in their day.”
- “If you have good data going into Salesforce, then you can do all sorts of reporting that really was the original need for the CRM to begin with.”
- “As you embark on a Salesforce implementation project, you need to have a goal in mind. And I think a lot of times we know generally that we want to track activities and make sure that our contact information is up to date and things like that. But I think sometimes, we don’t know exactly what outcome we’re looking for.”
- “I think [CRM] adoption training is in a pretty miserable state … I think in general we train for tactics … go to this screen, hit this button, enter these fields. There’s absolutely no value that’s going on in that training process. The rep is certainly not getting anything out of it. As a result, you’re going to have spotty usage of those particular types of features. So I think instead of training those tactics, we need to train the strategies. If the strategy is finding out the status of a support request [before going into a renewal discussion with a customer] – that’s what the value of CRM is about, and that’s getting back to showing reps how it can be a selling tool.”
- “As you get bigger, as your organization gets more complex, you’re naturally going to spend more on [CRM] systems because there’s more going on.”
Haven’t had enough yet? Check out the full recording here.
