A CRM implementation is more of a cultural change than a technological change. That’s because adopting a new system requires changing habits, and changing habits is hard. It’s hard for those who want to change, let alone those who do not.

Most people demand change, but resist it when it comes. Resistance to change is natural, so it’s crucial to help CRM users through the process of embracing change. When it comes to CRM adoption, users need your help, they need your reinforcement, and they
need that culture of accountability.

Here are four practical, actionable steps before, during and after the CRM launch.

1. Be Aware of Data Integrity

System-to-system consistency, or the integration of multiple systems, is crucial for a strong cadence and user adoption. If you’re migrating from one CRM to another, or merging CRMs, or changing CRM providers, ensuring the data is successfully merged and consistent is crucial to having data integrity. Without data integrity, this process often results in duplicate data, unstandardized or inconsistent data, and missing data. Preparing for these data mishaps in advance, as well as having tools in place to clean and prevent them from happening, will ensure CRM system integrity.

2. Be Clear About the Goal of CRM

Your CRM users are looking for the why behind the CRM system. If you’re not sharing this insight, you’re wasting your CRM investment because users simply won’t adopt it. Deliver clear rationale and a cause for your CRM. As a sales example, CRM gives users visibility that enables continuous sales improvement.

3. Hold CRM Users Accountable

It’s important to empower your CRM users, and CRM adoption should focus on that. However, empowerment without ownership is going to lead to neglect. You can give your users the most pristine, high-end CRM, but if they don’t care, they’re not going to use it. Establish the CRM users as the owners of the CRM, and then, in the context of ownership, empower them to use it. Otherwise, they’ll be negligent and passive.

4. Manage Detractors

If you’ve got ten sales reps using your new CRM, and eight of them are adopting it beautifully while two of them are struggling, you must work hard to get the two back on track. Stay strong and don’t lower your standard, or else the other eight are going to start to slack as well. By not diminishing your expectations, holding users accountable, and providing help and assistance, all 10 sales reps will be completely on board.

5. Demonstrate Real Results

Look for opportunities to showcase the relationship between CRM adoption and the positive sales performance that results from it. Explicitly call these results out when they happen. Here are three examples of these opportunities.

Sales reps quickly follow up on leads delivered in real-time via the CRM resulting in higher lead conversion. Call it out!

6. Provide Ongoing Support

Be extremely responsive to the sales reps’ questions and challenges, and try to support them in real-time. Refer them to your documentation and add their questions to your feedback list if you haven’t addressed it in your documentation.

7. Be Mobile

Reps do not want to have to go back to their desk and spend an hour everyday updating a CRM. This creates detractors. Allow users to update the CRM system in real-time, including while they’re in transit, when they’re coming out of a meeting, and so on. Mobile CRM enables users to access their CRM without pulling out a laptop and connecting to WiFi. Mobile deployment is a critical part of CRM user adoption.

8. Keep the User in Mind

Don’t introduce so much change that users can’t swallow it, and they can’t adopt it even if they wanted to. Pushing too hard or too much will deepen the mindset of existing detractors and create new ones. Your CRM success will only be as strong as the rate at which it can be adopted, not the rate at which it can be implemented.

The CRM adoption process is a journey, not a destination. When asked if the CRM adoption process is ever done, the answer is simply, “No, it’s not.”