58% of companies rate End user adoption of CRM as a Major-to-Moderate Challenge.
We speak with many companies in a week’s time, sometimes 1,000’s. We hear pretty much the same story when it comes to CRM adoption. This is across the board small or large. Story goes like this: “We are paying for salesforce.com for 2 years for 24 users – only 3 people are using effectively out of 24. The rest are still using outlook and excel. It does not help us sell more…”
To which we reply something like this, “Wow that’s only a 12% adoption rate, we can understand your frustration, in fact we’ve developed our entire business strategy around this issue of adoption and end user satisfaction.” Some CRM companies try to add extra features with the goal of propagandizing the sales force to use their system.
Sometimes called window dressing such as making commissions available via their CRM or ability to submit expense reports, but it really does not work as expected, because the users need to see the ROI for themselves.
Window dressing looks great, but it doesn’t really add much value.
They need the meat of their CRM system to be so beneficial that they use it for the purpose it was intended, which is to make more money! Sales people are mostly independent in their thinking and mostly like to do things to get a fatter commission check. Time is their most valuable asset (same goes for others as well).
So, the bottom line is there should be a ROI for the sales people to use it. Meaning, they need to save 20 mins of their time after spending 10 mins entering data. This granular approach is why Soffront CRM has a very high adoption rate. Soffront Salespersons ROI philosophy recognizes that if the sales people dont use the system, the management does not benefit either. Management thrives on data, sales thrives on time. If the time cost/benefit ratio is not positive in the salespersons favor then what typically happens is CRM initiatives fail, and companies waste a ton of money.
Moral of the Story…Use it or Lose it.
But it’s not the money wasted which is the most crucial cost, it’s the opportunity cost of not having a functional Customer Relationship Management system. It’s the opportunity cost of having lead slippage, where countless leads fall between the cracks. The cost comes when that valuable lead is only solicited to once, vs the 80% more effective technique which is to solicit each lead at least 5 times. 
We’re here to help
Joining the Soffront Team means you have the wind at your back, we are very focused on making sure that the end user (often salespersons) adopt and actually use their CRM. This means that management will actually have the sales data to make solid decisions and forecasts. The user interface is so simple. It’s built to be highly intuitive and natural so it takes hardly any training, if at all, to get up and running with your own contact management or email marketing campaigns. We have excellent customer support and knowledge base with full video tutorials on every feature. We invite you to sign up for a No Risk, Free 2 week trial and test out our system for yourself.