If you’ve invested significant time, effort, resources, and money to launch and deploy your CRM yet the ROI appears elusive or lower than you expect, it’s time to reboot your CRM.
What are some of the common causes of low ROI that we encounter?
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The Lead, Account, and Contact data are polluted.
Under-resourced, disjointed, or not-yet-mature sales operations and marketing operations functions are the primary culprits here. Clunky processes and myopic data hygiene can also be contributors.
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Pipeline and sales forecast is unreliable.
The heart of this challenge starts with the senior sales leadership and their continued reliance on spreadsheets and toleration of Pipeline or Forecast data that does not reside in the CRM. Sales Operations and Finance organizations also contribute to this ailment by asking for pipeline or sales forecast data to be provided in different forms to support revenue forecasting processes.
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Use and adoption are low, particularly among the sales organization.
This challenge usually goes back to the initial deployment. In this situation, initial training and roll-out were done as one-time learning events or webinars with limited, if any, post-deployment support. One-time learning events have very low retention rates, often less than 5% retention in as little as two weeks after the event. The other big miss here is lack of one-on-one coaching and support of the sales leaders. Sales leaders set the pace when it comes to doing things right and doing the right things. If they are comfortable in managing the sales teams by leveraging the CRM and they find it a productive way to work for themselves, then they will make sure their teams follow the same path.
So what’s the prescription?
First, admit there is a problem, and gain support or consensus to get things back on track. We’ve seen $100B organizations begin to get on track within six months and $100M organizations not get to first base in a year. The key is a commitment to change.
Second, get outside help. If your teams are struggling, it’s typically because the majority of them are going through this for the first time or they’ve contributed to some of the challenges by doing things their own way. There are companies, like ours, that make their living by helping companies drive results and ROI through CRM leverage.
Finally, prioritize. If you are experiencing more than one of the challenges above, fixing it can appear daunting. By focusing on pragmatic and incremental steps, improvement will come faster than you think, and the change will not only be powerful but will also be durable.