The Best Strategies for Getting Your Team to Engage With Your CRM

The Best Strategies for Getting Your Team to Engage With Your CRM

Carl Taylor | October 3, 2022

A good CRM can help your business become more efficient. However, your team needs to use the system properly before your company can reap the benefits.

CRMs have become a powerful tool in business. With recent developments in technology, having a CRM has become a necessity, especially for companies that rely on detailed customer data.

However, a CRM is only as good as a company’s ability to utilise it. Businesses that can’t integrate CRM and use it in coordination with their processes and strategies aren’t getting the most out of these systems.

Unfortunately, many companies suffer from these very issues.

In the U.S. alone, just over a third of employees and managers are properly engaged in their workplace’s CRM. The rest of the workforce is disengaged to a certain level.

This disengagement creates a productivity loss with a massive cost not just to these businesses, but to the general economy.

To prevent the same thing from happening in your business, you want to unlock the full power behind your CRM.

The crucial step here would be to make the system available for everyone in your team at all times. Furthermore, you’ll need to provide the necessary support for your employees to help them adopt the CRM.

This article will explain the most effective strategies for engaging your people with your CRM of choice.

9 Strategies for Helping Your Team Engage With Your CRM

Getting your entire team engaged with your CRM requires a combination of different approaches. Here are some of the best practices you can implement:

1. Focus On User Needs and Benefits

One of the easiest ways to encourage your team to use CRM  is to showcase how the system can boost user productivity.

CRMs can vastly improve contact management and boost sales enablement. However, your team members might not be aware of these benefits. If you can inform your team of everything the company could gain from CRM adoption, you’ll increase the chances of employees getting more involved with the system.

Besides the CRM itself, it’s worth directing your team’s attention towards various integrations that can boost productivity even further.

For example, there are tools that deal with sales intelligence. These tools allow end-users to save time on searching for prospects, extracting data, and entering it into the CRM.

There are also various possibilities for email tracking, which gathers information about clicks and opens. This data can help users determine the most effective points of customer engagement, improving their communication with prospects.

Contact syncing tools can update contact data regularly, improving billing and communication between sales and development teams.

Of course, there are even more benefits that come from a fully integrated CRM. But as stated, your first task should be to educate your employees about the possibilities, giving them the motivation to engage.

2. Offer Educational Resources

Once you get your team members interested in the benefits of using your CRM, you need to supply them with the necessary resources to learn about the system.

This includes training, examples, written material, and practical tutorials. Give your employees everything they need to understand the systems they’ll be using.

Besides the resources, you also have to provide your team members enough time to explore the systems and learn their way around your CRM.

Once the training starts, you can begin to engage team members by giving them opportunities to test their knowledge. This will ease them into making CRM a part of their regular processes.

If done properly, employee education can create a company culture that’s open to improvement. It goes without saying that the practical results, in terms of business effectiveness, will be staggering.

3. Ask Your Team About Things That Don’t Make Sense

When your team starts working on CRM, some aspects of the system might appear confusing or even redundant.

It would be best to start discussing such matters right from the beginning. Talk to your employees and ask them for feedback. That way, you’ll get a chance to clarify certain issues as they appear, rather than waiting for problems to pop up when the system is already integrated.

However, the chance to make things clear for your team members isn’t the only benefit of early feedback. Some employees might have valuable insight into the way your CRM works and can put forward ideas on how to improve your processes.

In that case, not getting that insight would be a great mistake. If team members identify areas that can be made more effective early on, your organisation will have an easier time implementing changes.

Instead of learning through trial and error, your business could get the upper hand right from the start.

4. Involve Your People in Decision Making

In connection with that last point, another tip to encourage your team members to utilise your CRM is to involve them in the decision-making. When a team member comes up with an insight about the effectiveness of your CRM, you should take their suggestions to the entire team.

Discussing potential changes as a team can be beneficial in many ways. Firstly, groupthink can lead to better decisions. Secondly, when your team is involved in decision-making, each member will feel more connected to your common goals.

Finally, and most importantly, engaging in this level of decision-making will make CRM implementation among your employees much smoother.

When people can help decide about the way a system is used, they’ll feel engaged in a much more profound way.

5. Overwhelmed = Less Engagement

You should keep in mind that CRM implementation is a process. It can’t happen at a moment’s notice.

That’s why you should be patient when creating engagement. Take your team through the process step-by-step, starting from the most straightforward actions to the more complex ones.

A gradual move toward CRM adoption ensures your team members have a thorough understanding of the system. This approach will also help you avoid overwhelming your employees.

You might be eager to empower your team to use every feature of your CRM successfully as soon as possible. However, you can’t get the best results if you rush the process.

Start with the bare necessities and focus on the features that your team members absolutely must learn to use. Then, once the base is established, move on to additional functionality.

6. Integrate Your CRM Into What’s Already Familiar

Another key to successful CRM integration into your processes is to start with the solutions your company’s already using.

This is a vital point that might influence your choice of CRM. If all team members in your business currently use particular software, you should find a CRM that can integrate with it to make the transition easier.

In essence, you’ll be using the same principle as with employee education: going from the more familiar to the less familiar.

If people can start getting accustomed to your CRM through software they’re already used to, they’ll have fewer issues when the time comes to adopt the system completely. And that’s not the only benefit of this approach.

Paying attention to software integrations will save you more time moving forward. Your team members won’t need to learn how to use a new email client on top of the CRM. Instead, they’ll already understand certain parts of the system, making their engagement much easier.

7. Define Usage Protocols

Successful CRM deployment largely relies on well-defined usage protocols.

You should have a clear outline of how the system should be used. Furthermore, that outline should take all eventual uses into account.

If you can define protocols with clarity, your team members will have an easy time learning their way around the system. This is particularly important because having a clear structure can reduce employee frustration when using less common features.

It’s also important to keep usage protocols available to your team members at all times. There should be no obstacles for your employees when they need directions in using your CRM.

You should make every step as straightforward as possible. And having clear, easily available instructions will be essential for a more seamless CRM adoption.

8. Reward Your CRM Adopters

Providing rewards for early adopters will incentivise your team to engage with your CRM.

Similarly, power users of your CRM should also be rewarded. Power users are those team members who utilise the system most effectively and provide an example and guidance to others.

Through these incentives, you can boost the learning process and CRM adoption throughout your organisation. Even better, promoting the most effective team members will have a positive effect on your marketing and sales efforts.

Having a team that utilises your CRM properly will be useful. But having employees who are inspired to keep improving will be absolutely invaluable.

9. Lead by Example

Finally, you can’t expect other employees to engage with your CRM if your management team isn’t doing just that.

Every executive in your organisation should be fluent in CRM usage before you can ask your team members to adopt the system. This isn’t only a matter of inspiration, though.

Executives who understand the system will be able to answer any burning questions and resolve issues that often come with early adoption. Leading by example will prove helpful in many ways and increase your company’s productivity.

Engage Your People

Unleashing the full power of your CRM comes down to how effectively you can integrate it into your everyday operations.

For that reason, every company should spare no expense in resources, money, or time to get their employees on board with CRM adoption. From providing examples, through education, to resolving emerging issues as a team, you can employ several strategies to ensure your CRM becomes a regular part of your organisation.

If you need more help with CRM adoption, Automation Agency is here to help. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, and we’ll get your system set up to fit the needs of your business.

About the author 

Carl Taylor

Carl Taylor is the Founder & CEO of Automation Agency. For the past 10 years Carl has been building businesses and marketing them online through the use of Sales Funnels, Email Marketing Automation, Landing Pages, and Wordpress Websites. Carl is also a #1 author and highly sought after speaker and consultant whose work has impacted thousands of businesses across various industries worldwide.

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