Slay the Salesforce Adoption Dragon

Maybe you have wondered, “Why do companies invest so much money into a CRM system?” It can be for many reasons: to better forecast sales, to more efficiently manage prospecting efforts and sales pipeline,  increase visibility, to remove bottlenecks that will help a team drive more sales, to encourage collaboration (via Chatter), and for numerous other reasons.

In spite of these benefits, a company will meet its worst CRM enemy – resistance or adoption challenges. In a LinkedIn poll, 52% of sales managers said reps don’t use their company CRM like they want them to. Reps resist the change from the fear of increased visibility, and because something new has entered their already high-stress world of customer demands and achieving quota. In a team of 50 sales people, we could assume they have a total initial investment of $200,000 just for the CRM system alone (source: Destination CRM).  That would mean this 50-salesperson team would have thrown away $104,000 (because 52% of the sales team isn’t using the CRM correctly). Try explaining that one to your boss!

So what is a company to do when trying to slay the adoption dragon? ePrize was also fighting the battle internally of getting our sales team to complete the ‘industry’ field into their Account records in Salesforce.com. Fewer than 50% of Accounts had the industry field defined. To address our Salesforce.com adoption challenge, we launched a 10-day contest called Industry Quest. Every time someone completed the industry field they would get a point. In the first two hours, there were over 40 accounts updated. After the automatic leaderboard email went out the next morning – over 300 accounts were updated by the end of the second day. At the end of the Industry Quest contest, over 1,400 accounts, bringing us to 90% of the accounts with the defined industry field. (Click here for the full story).

When is the best time to drive adoption? Right away. Jay Thornton, Senior Account Executive at Salesforce says, “Adoption during the first three months after moving to Salesforce will determine the success of an implementation.” Are you in your early stages of implementing Salesforce.com? Consider adding a contest that taps into your sales teams competitive nature and allow yourself to utilize all the benefits of this robust CRM tool.