No leader wants to bring their team aboard a sinking ship. Here's how you can ensure your new CRM implementation efforts don't go to waste.
No business really gets started until something gets sold, whether it’s a product or a service.
That’s why entrepreneurs need to at least have some sales know-how to even begin dreaming about success.
And get this—when you’re an entrepreneur, it’s not just potential customers that you need to convince to buy in.
From time to time, you need to turn those powers of persuasion and salesmanship on your own people, especially when you’re thinking of making a big change to the business.
Like switching to a new CRM, for example.
Now, I’m sure you’ve heard all the horror stories: over half of CRM implementations fail outright, businesses spend outrageous amounts of time and money on a system that doesn’t work for them, and so on.
Me, though? I’ve lived through them countless times.
Just like any other app out there, not every WORKetc implementation works like gangbusters. Thankfully, most of them do—or else we wouldn’t have lasted this long.
The good news here is that over the years, we’ve been able to identify common recurring threads in the implementations that do become successful.
In this post, I’m collecting a few of those tips that can help you turn your new CRM implementation plans into a resounding success.
Get Your End-Users Involved
Unless you’re a one-man outfit, you definitely won’t be the only one using your new CRM.
People from different departments or teams will use the CRM in different ways, maybe even ones you never thought were possible.
This is why you need to take steps to ensure employee buy-in even before you decide on which CRM you’re going to try out.
Even if you already have a list of potential CRMs for your business, it’s always best to involve some key people in the selection process.
This is even more important when you’re aiming for a complete business management solution like WORKetc.
Sales, projects, support, finance—pick stakeholders from these departments in your company and have them help you evaluate your choices.
These are the people who will be using your new CRM the most, so you have to make sure to give them the chance to identify potential benefits and bottlenecks in each CRM on your list.
Form a Scouting Party
Once you’ve picked a CRM, it’s time to poke around and kick its tires. This is where a free CRM trial comes in.
During a CRM’s free trial period, you have a chance to really dig deep into the system and see if it fits your business processes.
Don’t expect to master each and every aspect of the system if you’re going to go at it by yourself, though.
Even a system built specifically for small businesses like WORKetc still takes time to learn, and free trials can’t go on indefinitely.
Instead, form a “scouting party” similar to the one you created for the selection process. In fact, have the key stakeholders who helped you select a CRM candidate in the first place put it through its paces.
The benefit for future implementation here is two-fold. First, you’ll get immediate feedback from the people who will actually be using the system if you go ahead and implement it company-wide.
Will it streamline your current sales process? Will it let you take complete control of every single project that comes your way? Will it let you help customers in a fraction of the time?
These questions and more can only be answered by having actual people who are doing the work, the ones down in the trenches, use your CRM candidate.
And second, you’ll have people already familiar with the system who can help train their own team members in using it in the future. Training and adoption can go much smoother.
You can even go a step further and keep having this team try and push the boundaries of your CRM even after implementation with a pioneering team tasked with exploring the possibilities of WORKetc and then bringing along the rest of your team at a later date.
Focus on Small, Quick Wins
So you’re done with the selection. You’re done with the trial. Now it’s time to get everybody on board your new business management software.
This period is especially crucial in ensuring complete employee buy-in. You can make the transition go much smoother by focusing on small, quick wins first.
Choose key, high-priority areas to focus on during the first phase of implementation, and then deliver the benefits to end users as quickly as possible.
Let’s say you head up a fast-growing company. You’re getting more and more clients—almost more than your support team can handle, in fact, what with your company’s current time-consuming support process.
And since you brought along a someone from support during the selection and trial process (if you followed this post’s advice), you know that this is a hot-button issue for the entire support team.
This particular issue—streamlining the support process—would then be among those you focus on first during the early stages of CRM implementation.
Solving it means tangible benefits to your business, and those benefits are what you’ll need to communicate to your employees in order to get them on board.