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IN THIS CHAPTER

❯❯ Recognizing and addressing the resistance to new strategies and processes

❯❯ Building a team that uses your CRM effectively

❯❯ Creating a singular vision for everyone in sales, marketing, and operations

❯❯ Teaming up with IT to build a data-driven culture

❯❯ Making CRM an integral part of your corporate culture

CRM is more than a software package. It’s a mindset and a collaborative effort that spans the entire organization and includes your leads, customers, vendors, and partners. Making CRM work requires a culture that supports it.

In this chapter, you discover how to gear up internally to implement an effective Complete CRM. You develop the knowledge and skills to anticipate common roadblocks and clear them with confidence. You build a creative, collaborative environment united behind the common purpose of improving customer satisfaction and developing customer relationships that drive profit and growth.

To make Complete CRM work, you need your team on your side. You build a culture that involves everyone, forming a solid foundation for your CRM to grow from.

Overcoming Resistance to Change

Change requires effort and energy to overcome inertia – the reluctance to adopt new ideas or to change processes or procedures. Not everyone will be on board right away, but if you know the underlying reasons for the resistance, you can address whatever that’s holding those individuals back.

In any group of people, generally speaking, 80 percent will resist change. This 80 percent finds excuses to remain in the familiar patterns. To institute a change in your company culture, you need to anticipate this resistance and address concerns that may be standing in the way. In this section, I explain how.

Preparing for “not invented here” resistance

One main reason people don’t like to adopt new ways is because they feel as though they’re being forced to act in ways they didn’t come up with or hadn’t considered on their own. It’s commonly known as “not invented here” resistance. Generally speaking, the more powerful a person’s ego, the more likely that person is to resist change if he didn’t come up with the idea and doesn’t see a clear benefit to make the change.

Make the benefit of change clear to everyone in your organization. Start by showing how what’s currently in place falls short of what the company needs. Then sell your vision of how the changes provide the benefit that matters to each person. That benefit may be doing their jobs better, making their lives easier, saving time, helping them innovate, earning more money, or a combination of these.

Confronting the ghosts of failed initiatives

Many organizations have launched initiatives that haven’t turned out as planned. For example, someone in the company may have come up with the brilliant idea to switch to a new accounting system that’s worse than what everyone in the organization was accustomed to using. Now, everyone is dealing with the fallout of that person’s bad decision and is more reluctant to try something new.

CRM is one example in the world of failed initiatives. In fact, according to a study completed in 2014, over 60 percent of CRM implementations were perceived as “failures” by the company’s employees. That number climbs to over 80 percent when any sales or marketing automation is involved. In the modern era, it doesn’t have to be that way.

When dealing with employees who’ve been burned by failed initiatives, be prepared. Develop an integrated approach to CRM and clearly explain the benefits everyone will gain from it. Be honest about the learning curve and the fact that transitioning to a new system is never easy and always carries some risk. People are often willing to invest in a new initiative if you give them reason to believe that they’ll realize significant benefits later and you acknowledge the difficulties in making the change.

Be prepared to make tough decisions. For example, when confronted with resistance to new software, you may need to push through the difficulties or abandon the software to pursue a better solution. If your leadership team determines the current software and/or management team responsible for your CRM is unable to achieve the company’s objectives, commit to finding a new, better way and give it a reasonable amount of time to succeed.

Overcoming the fear of accountability

At its core, CRM is about accountability – individually and collectively. Everyone throughout your organization is responsible for ensuring customer satisfaction and contributing to the health of your business. This level of accountability can be very scary, especially to people in the company who are unaccustomed to being held accountable. Sometimes negativity surfaces in the form of unsupportive questions and comments such as “Why don’t they trust us?” and “I don’t want someone looking over my shoulder.”

Part of your role of CRM champion is to demonstrate how accountability actually is a good thing. Accountability encourages participation by everyone, fostering an environment of collaboration and growth.

Figure 2-1 shows a widget on a CRM dashboard that gives you insight into what people in your organization are doing. You can see at a glance how active your team members are. If, for example, you want to set a target for each salesperson to make 20 calls in a day, you could see whether your sales team is achieving that goal.

FIGURE 2-1: Activities can be monitored through a CRM dashboard.

When instituting organization-wide CRM, the organization’s leadership team must communicate how crucial the company needs to succeed and its employees to reap the benefits of that success. For CRM to be effective, everyone needs to embrace it. Everyone plays a role in running the company efficiently, increasing income, and raising the level of customer satisfaction. Any negative attitudes toward CRM need to be addressed and corrected.

Don’t let negativity spread. People who are proud of their performance and know they’re doing everything they can to benefit everyone around them will see CRM as a way to help them do their job better. Those who resist may be doing so because have something to hide. If you allow resistance to take hold, you condone lack of accountability as a culture. Ultimately, this lack will kill morale and result in the demise of the organization.

Conducting internal research

A first step to take toward understanding how your CRM will be used is to survey your team to see what they already use. Find out what software they have in place, how many people use it, and what it is used for. This information translates to requirements for your CRM.

In an ideal world, your new vision for your CRM includes all the existing processes your organization uses today. Processes may improve over time, but the end result of serving your customers should not be sacrificed. In a perfect world, that can all live in a single piece of software. While this may seem like a pipe dream, the more you understand how employees do their jobs, the more straightforward the transition to a new Complete CRM will be.

Before selling your CRM initiative to employees, identify potential sources of resistance and the reasons behind that resistance. If you work in a small organization, you may be able to sit down with people and ask them about their jobs. In a larger company, you may have to send a survey to everyone to gather feedback.

As you gather feedback, take note of what people like and do not like about the systems currently in use. This helps get buy-in from people who struggle with inefficient software or procedures. Any time you can streamline people’s jobs and make them more effective, the happier they will be. Through your investigation, you can find allies who would benefit from the change you’re proposing with your transition to a Complete CRM.

When you sit down with members of your team to discuss your CRM, you also have an opportunity to share your vision. Listen to the challenges people face, and let them know you’re doing your best to address those challenges and help them. When you share your vision and the benefits of your CRM, they’re more likely to get behind you and what you’re trying to accomplish.

At its core, this internal research is about developing a comprehensive list of requirements and “nice to haves” for your new CRM. Compile information from people who will use your CRM to build this requirements list. Here are common questions to ask in a survey, but you can ask for a deeper explanation if you have the resources.

❯❯ What is your job?

❯❯ What software do you use now? What do you like about it?

❯❯ What roadblocks or inefficiencies do you deal with?

❯❯ What do you need your software to do for you now that it currently doesn’t do?

❯❯ What parts of your job directly impact revenue generation and/or customer satisfaction?

❯❯ In a perfect world, what would you like out of new software?

Compile your internal research information in a spreadsheet so you can see how many people work on each of the main functions in sales, marketing, and operations. This process helps you weigh the level of effort for transitioning these teams to your new CRM. Break out your spreadsheet into functional groups (for example, sales, marketing, events, account management, HR) for easier organization.

The more you know about what you have in place, the better you can ensure anything you move to (even if it’s an enhancement of your existing CRM platform) won’t sacrifice current capability. Communicate these requirements to your potential CRM vendors as early as you can, so you can focus on those who are best qualified to help you. Be sure to include access rights, so you can control who can see and influence what in your CRM universe.

Identifying formal and informal leaders

Every organization has formal and informal leaders. Formal leaders have a title, while informal leaders are those who are the most influential among their peers. Both are important when getting buy-in for your new CRM plans, but pay special attention to the informal leaders. Their influence will carry over into many aspects of your business.