What You Can’t Overlook in a New CRM Deployment

Brian Vass, Vice President, Sales & Marketing Technology, Paycor

Deploying a CRM system can be hard. But it doesn’t have to be if you take the right steps and get the right culture in place before you even begin.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or ditching and replacing a CRM system that just isn’t working for your organization, keep in mind these lessons my team learned while adopting a robust CRM system that was well-deployed and adopted.

Revamp the relationship with marketing.

Prior to our new revenue goals, marketing was relegated to traditional practices and not focused as much on demand or revenue generation. This became an important part of our strategy going forward — to turn marketing into a more revenue-focused discipline that could drive demand, create leads for sales, and measure the impact on the business. We knew we needed to have a really good CRM system to do that, as well as a strong, complementary marketing automation system.

There’s no doubt that marketing and sales alignment can be challenging. You have to be committed to it. That means ensuring strong communication and involving marketing and sales in the same meetings. And your chief sales officer and chief marketing officer have to be best friends. It’s sometimes tough for folks to set the ego aside and focus on the broader goal. But, if you can do that, it’s a lot of fun and you can make a ton of progress.

Encourage adoption.

Since our former CRM system was so bad, our salespeople were already excited to reap the benefits of moving to Salesforce. But we still had to really focus on doing things the right way for adoption.

At the outset, we identified the different user groups, whether these were an inside sales person, a field seller, a manager, and so on. We made sure to sit down and talk, do ride-alongs, and that sort of thing to find out what they need. There’s really no substitute for understanding how they think and how they work.

From these conversations we built up some “peer champions” that ended up being part of a beta program. It was fantastic because they gave us a lot of great feedback about whether we were on track or off track with what we were building. At the same time, we were building up this group of evangelists who were starting to spread the word internally. Ultimately, they became a very valuable group for us as we were rolling out the live training and encouraging adoption.

To read the complete article, What You Can’t Overlook in a New CRM Deployment, visit Quotable.com.