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January 18, 2017

In 2017, It’s all About the Customer (and Automation)

There’s a lot of science involved in today’s sales practice. The teams that are most successful have embraced data-driven marketing and analytics, and the balance is shifting away from the art of the sale and toward the automation enabled by data intelligence. All of that is a good thing for sales teams. However, even in an age when tech drives business and robots rule, personal connections will remain paramount.

There are several ways this will play out in the new year.

Congratulations! You’re in sales (and customer service and marketing) now.

If you think you work in a non-customer-facing department, you’ll have to readjust your perspective in the months ahead. To align internal departments and reach shared business goals, teams like product development and others that haven’t traditionally been exposed to customers will have to seek out that exposure. To productively support sales teams and help the whole company win, non-sales staff should join customer calls and find other ways to create real connections with prospects.

As the tech gets better, humans can focus on what they do best.

We’ll see leaps in the sophistication of sales and marketing technology in the coming year. Solutions will get more intelligent, more automated and more able to curb manual interactions. As those advances make administrative tasks more automated, sales pros can get out from behind their desks and spend more time in the field with prospects.

Data will get small, and ROI will get big.

Big data buzzwords aside, we’ll see more sales teams able to sort data into smaller categories with specific goals in mind. The returns of will be significant. When sales pros can build customer personas and analyze specific user behavior patterns, sales pros can more easily uncover insights and act on them. Smaller data = better data.

Goodbye, single-use tech tools.

Business owners will benefit from the increasingly competitive technology space. Instead of buying multiple, single functionality tools, they’ll be able find their email client, product management and file-sharing in one product. If they’re in the market for CRM, they’ll be able to adopt solutions that come with added security and automation. Technology will work harder to support the goals of B2B companies, and that will leave teams with more time to build relationships with customers.

Learn how to find the right CRM for your business.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

November 16, 2016

Practical Solutions for the Office-less Entrepreneur

For decades, going into the office for the typical 9-to-5 defined productivity. Nowadays, perfectly legitimate and successful businesses function without any ties to brick and mortar. Still, small business owners can feel they’re losing touch with the outside world, and work-from-homers can feel disconnected from their teammates and out of the loop. How can professionals with no office to go in to stay ahead of the game? Here are some key things you can do right now to stay organized, productive, inspired, and in control without setting up shop in cubicle land.

Carve out some space

While not everyone needs a physical office (and while we know entrepreneurs love their freedom and flexibility), it’s still essential to have some sort of dedicated working space and schedule (more on this soon). Without these two things in place, you’re more likely to work wildly inconsistent hours or never stop working at all. Neither are good for your productivity and can seriously damage your health.

Choose a spot that’s tidy, comfortable and away from distractions. No, it can’t be your bed. Make sure you only perform work-related tasks there. No personal phone calls, online shopping or meal times. It could be a TV dinner table that gets folded back up at day’s end. If it gives you access to everything necessary to be productive, it’s your space.

When you walk into the kitchen, you probably think about food. When you walk past a bathroom, you “remember” you’ve been holding it three hours. Your dedicated work space will be no different. Whenever you enter your work area, which is where your work magic will happen, your mind will know it’s show time.

Set your hours (and don’t play yourself)

A dedicated work space can help keep your work-life balance in check, and having a generally consistent schedule, too, will help prevent burnout and–if your industry allows for flex scheduling–lets you work during times when you function best.

Whether you’re a night owl or early bird, walk the dogs at 11 a.m. or take the kids to soccer practice by 4 p.m., having the flexibility to create the perfect schedule and tailor it to your life an increase your productivity overall. Take advantage of that! If you know you don’t mentally get going until 10 a.m., don’t start your day at 8 a.m. and waste two hours producing sub-par work and feeling miserable every morning.

A fairly consistent schedule also lets your team and your customers know what they can expect from you and when.

Get a headset and participate

Feeling out of the loop because you haven’t checked in for a while or are missing out on sometimes-valuable office conversations can be unsettling. Prevent this by getting connected and staying visible. Call into those meetings and don’t be afraid to set a couple up yourself as status updates for your team. Check in, touch base, and remind people you’re alive. Use CRM that connects you via laptop or phone and gives you access to all the info you need without chaining you to your “office network.” You’ll also have contact management features that are customizable and more fleshed out than your average office directory. Instead of using speakerphone, get a headset. You’ll be able take notes or get work done because you’ll have both your hands free.

Find your village

Being an entrepreneur, small business owner or remote worker can get a little lonely sometimes. It’s easier than ever to connect with people virtually, but we still need basic in-person interaction.

This is where your village comes in. Your village is made up of people who relate to what you do, offer an ear or advice when needed, and help you keep your skills sharp. They also use your industry’s lingo and understand your puns (so you can stop telling the bagger at the grocery store your hilarious programmer jokes and wondering why he doesn’t get them).

Find a meetup group in your area and go have some fun. You can also try office sharing, if available in your area. It’s a great way to meet like-minded, ambitious people who are also living the office-less life. Both these casual networking encounters can sprout new working relationships or customer referrals. You’ll wonder why you haven’t tried it sooner.

Not going into an office every day doesn’t mean you can’t stay a step ahead of the rest. You get to be part of the non-traditional work force and you’re not chained to a desk, so you’ve got room to make moves, experiment and customize as you see fit. Make sure you’re putting all that freedom to work so you can mold and shape it into something that works its absolute best for you.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

October 6, 2016

How A Cloud-Based CRM Keeps Everyone Connected

Choosing the optimal CRM system is challenging for any business, but for those with multiple offices or telecommuting employees, the challenge can be even greater.

Telecommuting presents businesses with many advantages; happier employees, lower overheads and the ability to hire the best workers possible, regardless of where they call home.

On the downside, having a lot of employees outside the office or a number of offices in different locations can make it can tough to keep everyone connected and in the loop.

This is particularly troublesome without an online CRM – you can’t afford for anyone working with out-of-date information when dealing with your most treasured assets.

Fortunately, the cloud can solve this problem for you.

What is CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is precisely what it sounds like – a catch-all term for the numerous tools available to help a company to manage, keep track of and develop its relationships with existing and prospective customers.

If you only have two or three customers you can do CRM in your head, but larger businesses – or those hoping to become large – will need to turn to computerized solutions.

The capabilities of each system are diverse, but most basic CRM software will let you store customer contact details, information about purchases and other interactions (such as emails), and allow users to make notes that their colleagues can read.

More sophisticated systems could offer social media connectivity and trawling, track purchase habits, recognize patterns, create network maps, generate invoices, automate certain actions and make suggestions for future strategies – the list of features is endless, and growing every year.

It sounds complicated – and likely terrifying to a beginner – but it’s easy to learn and actively master.

Why does it matter?

Put simply, CRM provides you with powerful insights and knowledge about your customers’ behaviors, preferences, concerns, desires – even their personality, their friends and their business networks.

It can tell you at a glance what they might be most interested in hearing about, when they’ll be the market for it, and the right way to get in contact.

Think about how well a skilled bartender knows his regulars – CRM software essentially acts like his brain, helping you get to know your customers as individual people with individual personalities, rather than as simply a list of names on a computer screen.

For example, Mr. Smith may strongly prefer to be addressed as such, rather than by his first name. Some customers don’t appreciate over-familiarity (and some salespeople don’t realize that), so knowing this could be the difference between a sale and a goodbye. If it’s in your CRM system for everyone to see, no one getting in touch with Mr. Smith will make that potentially expensive mistake.

Likewise, you’ll know Ms. Jones typically prefers email contact, that Mr. White will be in the market for a red-hot deal in September, and that Dr. Pigeon is far more likely to respond favorably to a good deal on bird seed, not cat food.

CRM can save you time and substantially improve every customer relationship you have. Just getting in touch with the right customer at the right time is worth a million words of marketing spiel; no growing business in the 21st century can afford to do without it.

Keeping it in the Cloud

CRM systems come in many forms, each with their pros and cons, but for businesses with employees spread out around the country or world, a cloud-based system offers many advantages over their on-premise rivals. Here are six of them:

Access Everywhere

If you’re big on telecommuting, a CRM system which is easily accessed from anywhere is an absolute must, and in a fast-moving world, information that is even one hour out of date can prove costly.

Cloud-based solutions are accessible wherever in the world your employees are, on almost any device they may choose to use. And they automatically update and sync in real time – keeping everyone, no matter where they are, fully up to date.

Quick and Easy Startup

With cloud-based CRM, there is no need to go through the time-consuming and potentially difficult chore of distributing and installing software on dozens, hundreds or even thousands of different machines.

Telecommuting workers can use their own devices, and getting a single piece of software to seamlessly operate on all of them is unlikely to be easy.

Once you’re signed up to a cloud system, your workers can simply log in through a browser and they’re good to go.

Predictable Billing with no Large Initial Outlay

When you sign up to a cloud-based CRM system, you won’t have to make the substantial upfront payment that you would when buying in software to install on your machines.

Cloud solutions typically operate on a subscription basis; there may be a small upfront cost when you first sign up to a service, but the bulk of your outlay will be in the form of a fixed, easily manageable and very predictable monthly fee that covers everything – access, storage, maintenance, support, and features.

Reduced IT Overheads in the Long Term

Cloud-based CRM systems do not require the attention and maintenance from your IT people that an on-premise solution would; nor do they require you to deal with backing up and storing your data.

No Unexpected Upgrade Surprises

Making periodic upgrades to on-premise software can result in unexpected compatibility issues with other systems – make one update and you could end up needing to make three or four.

A cloud solution lives away from your machines, removing this possibility from the equation.

First-Rate Reliability

Whether you’re a business or an individual, system crashes and hardware failures are an inevitable part of life. We can’t stop them happening, but the impact can be lessened (or eliminated entirely) by backing up data and building in redundancies.

Cloud CRM systems keep your data safe because everything in the cloud is backed up; if one server goes down, another will instantly take its place.

Sure, you could build such a system yourself, but it’ll be expensive to put together and maintain – and it’s unlikely you can do it as well as a dedicated cloud host can.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

October 5, 2016

Back To School: Manage Parent Communication With Your CRM

Parents have an endless array of questions for teachers at this time of year, and parent/teacher communications can easily be misplaced or forgotten, falling through the cracks if they aren’t promptly followed up on by all involved.

The need to have all those new school year and new teacher questions answered quickly and the need for consistent and regular communications about every aspect of school life can quickly become stressful and frustrating for parents, teachers, and administration. Add the variations of when homework is due, the schedule for music lessons, P.E. days, art shows, science fairs, whole school special events, parent participation days…it can easily become overwhelming trying to keep up.

For teachers trying to keep track of kids and all the individual, class and whole-school activities, it’s easy to imagine how some things can get lost, forgotten about or wrongly prioritized.

It’s stressful just to think about!

That stress can be brought under control easily, though, with the implementation of a CRM. It’s easy to set up a simple system that helps teachers stay organized, and provides parents, teachers, helpers, and administrative staff with regular and relevant communications.

Using a CRM can eliminate wasted time and missed communication by easily and quickly sending information to everyone who needs to know at once.

Emails and texts can be set up to send to many specific groups. For example: classes, reading groups, family groups, sports teams, and clubs.

Links can be set up between sibling groups, so all relevant teachers and parent/guardian groups can see all past communications pertaining to the family. Communications can also be subdivided into interest groups (eg, choir, baseball, homework, essays due, the class trip) making it easy to find just the information relevant to that topic.

In this modern time of co-parenting and double families, communicating in this way means all involved in the child’s care can easily access relevant information, too, which of course means that all parents and caregivers know exactly what is going on in their child’s school life, and when.

Targeted communication benefits all who use the system, and ensures that people aren’t spammed with information that doesn’t relate to them.

It’s simple to set up email groups for sending reminders of projects due, of upcoming picture days, field trip permission slips and even to ask for parent volunteers.

CRM templates can save teachers hours each week. They can set up targeted reminders and timely information emails in advance, and quickly respond to any queries. All related communications are attached to each contact record, so notes won’t be lost or misplaced.

Completed or one-off tasks can be kept and archived in the virtual system, keeping the paper clutter and waste in both the school and the home to a minimum. No more filing cabinets filled with school communications, no more letters left lying in the bottom of school bags with last month’s now moldy oranges.

Parents and teachers alike can access any communications in virtual real time, making information sent back and forth much faster than ever before – great news for the parents and teachers of those kids that consistently forget to hand in permission slips or can’t remember when their homework projects are due.

Having all this information in one easy-to-access place ensures that no communication falls through the cracks and no child gets left behind due to a forgotten permission slip.

Using a CRM in a school environment ensures that your teaching staff can spend less time chasing down paperwork and calling parents, and more time channeling their precious time and energy into actually teaching our children.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

September 29, 2016

Insightly Recognized By Gartner

Insightly places on the new FrontRunners quadrant for CRM software!

FrontRunners is a new research methodology on Software Advice, powered by Gartner Methodology. Similar in design to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, the FrontRunners quadrant provides a data-driven assessment of top performing products that offer the best capability and value for small businesses. It’s driven by real user reviews and ratings, and verified product data.

The FrontRunners methodology assesses products on two primary dimensions: Capability on the x-axis and Value on the y-axis. The Capability score is based on three criteria: user ratings on capability, a functionality breadth analysis, and a business confidence assessment. Learn more about how Gartner selects top contenders.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

September 28, 2016

Top 3 Ways to Use MailChimp With Insightly

When it comes to connecting with customers on a personal level, email is a critical tool for organizations of every size – and it can particularly make or break small businesses. Email marketing allows businesses to share timely messages with customers and support sales funnel growth. Solutions such as MailChimp, which offer list management, campaign creation and reporting features (among others) are designed to help such businesses turn their inboxes into sales powerhouses. However, as email produces greater ROI for companies, email marketing platforms are constantly evolving – and as a result, some longtime users aren’t using solutions like MailChimp to their fullest potential.

We asked our customers: what’s your favorite ROI hack for MailChimp and Insightly? Below are their top responses, and three ways you can start using the integrated solutions to increase your email marketing value today:

Cut repetition by sharing contacts between MailChimp and your CRM.

When you import your MailChimp subscriber lists to Insightly as new contacts, and export leads from your CRM to MailChimp, you immediately broaden the amount of people you’re reaching on an ongoing basis – and save yourself the hassle of repeating work between platforms. Even better, you can schedule regular imports from MailChimp, and never worry about letting a new lead go cold again.

Communicate with your qualified leads on an individual level.

Recently, Derrick Duplessy, founder of Scream Club and host of the Purpose Rockstar podcast, realized he needed a creative way to connect with his email subscribers. He sent one simple message – a “gratitude email” – thanking his extended contacts for their engagement and asking what they’d been up to lately. The results floored him – with more than 50 responses, five invitations to connect in person and five new sales on his results list (as well as eight babies born among his contacts), Duplessy realized he’d hit the reader engagement nail on the head.

Using MailChimp and Insightly together, you can segment your contact list to find the perfect readers with which to engage, send emails ranging from gratitude check-ins to any messages in Insightly’s vast library templates, then use your CRM to track responses and results. Not only can your actions lead to sales, they’ll promote loyal customer relationships on a long-term basis. (And, as in Duplessy’s case, you might wind up with more than 500 percent more happiness in your startup life.)

Analyze data to constantly improve your campaigns.

An email newsletter and outreach program can be the ultimate communication and sales tool for SMBs and B2B organizations alike. According to Bredin, SMBs increasingly prefer engaging with vendors through email newsletters. In one survey, 25 percent of organizations rated email newsletters as a top way to receive business management tips and advice; in another, SMBs rated email third out of 33 different information sources from which they learn about products and services for their business. By updating MailChimp user information with CRM data and leveraging the platform’s in-depth segmentation features, you can ensure that your email newsletters are reaching customers on the devices, schedules and channels they prefer.

Interested in more ways you can use MailChimp and Insightly? Check it out HERE.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

September 21, 2016

Tools Every Sales Person Needs in Their Arsenal

Small businesses run lean – one person is often tackling the role of sales, marketing and customer service. But as we all know, sales are what keep every business going, and every minute counts when you’re trying to close a deal. Unfortunately, when you’re strapped for time and money, researching and trying out tools that could help you do your job better is pretty much impossible – a catch 22. So we did the research for you and compiled a list of the best tools (most of them are free!) that can help any small team fill their sales pipeline.

Boomerang

Boomerang acts like a snooze button for an email message. It lets you clean up your Inbox without losing track of important messages and helps you manage messages that you can’t deal with today, but that need attention or a response later. With Boomerang, you can focus on the most important messages and respond faster to potential leads.

GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting is a web-conferencing tool that allows you to start online meetings, view presentations and reports, and watch meeting participants and presenters. Users can instantly open a meeting, add participants and share screens. It is a great way for team members in different locations to collaborate.

PandaDoc

Create contracts instantaneously with PandaDoc. With templates, you can plug in client-specific information and the software digitally delivers proposals. With PandaDoc’s e-signature functionality, document analytics and in-line comments, prospects can request specific changes to the proposal and execute the contract from their desktop computers or mobile devices.

Lastly, every business needs a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Insightly gives you everything you need to make your customers feel special. Stay on top of your sales processes at every step ‐ from initial lead management and customer communication, through reporting, invoicing and customer payment.

Have a favorite sales tool? Tweet us @InsightlyApp.

September 19, 2016

Insightly Grows With You: Creative Services Industry

Creatives, like writers, graphic artists, and videographers, have to juggle a lot of details, especially if you are an independent contractor. Insightly’s CRM can make your life much easier.

We know what it’s like. When you first start, you have just a few clients and projects are easy to track. You create the thing, and you get paid for the thing. Simple. Then your business starts to grow. You make a name for yourself and recommendations start coming in.

Suddenly, you have half a dozen customers and each wants several pieces of content. Your business is growing, and before long, you’re in danger of losing control. Some customers pay your invoices right away, others pay weekly, twice a month, once a month, net 30, or even longer. Now you’re dealing with deadlines, invoicing, new business negotiations, edits…this is not what you signed up for.

Contact Management

Over time, your contacts grow. You have a client list, of course, but you also have other creatives you trade work with or hire. Writers need graphics, videographers need scripts, graphic artists need text for infographics. We all cooperate with others to some extent.

Networking is another critical component to your business strategy. To help gain attention to your work, you may want to build a network of influencers. When your work is published, an engaged network will help you promote it.

Integrate and Organize

Let’s be honest. Most creatives are anything but organized. While there are exceptions, for the most part, we are messy, chaotic, and distracted. That can make the administration part of business difficult. Who wants to chase payments when we can be creating art?

Insightly integrations are the answer. Having all your information and projects for each client in one place allows you to stay on top of all those details and still get your work done.

For example, you can:

Connect your accounting program to track invoices, payments, and tax obligations. Insightly integrates with QuickBooks and Xero.
Connect with your calendar to ensure you don’t miss client meetings.
Store your files in the cloud with Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive.
Automate your proposals.
Call or text via Google Hangouts from your customer record – so everything you need to know is in front of you.

Task Management

Managing projects is easy with Insightly’s task management features. Set milestones, deadlines, and schedule follow-ups to keep you on track.

As you grow, you’ll likely have to hire help. Task management and Insightly integrations will help you manage virtual assistants, ghostwriters, editors, and other creatives you need to finish your projects. Your dashboard will allow you to see everything you need to know about your projects.

You’ll also be able to track metrics. How long does it take to finish certain types of projects? Which customers give you trouble and waste your time? When an old contact gets back in touch, you can check your history together and decide whether to work with them again. Your data will tell you where to concentrate your efforts to make the most money in the least amount of time. And which projects suck up tons of time without paying very well.

Growing With Your Business

You may eventually outgrow a free account. Your ambition may be to manage a team of creatives, or even coach others on how to build their careers. You may land a giant contract with a major brand. Or you may branch out to related work, like writing a novel or becoming a speechwriter. Insightly scales up as you need it. No matter how big you grow, we’ll be there to provide the organization and support you need.

Want to know how CRM helps creative industry professionals grow their businesses? Download our free eBook! From Chaos to Control: How Insightly Helps Advertising and Media Companies Succeed. We used a third party survey service (TechValidate) to interview over 300 creative professionals to reveal how CRM specifically helps creative pros. Download the eBook now!

September 14, 2016

CRM for All: Government

Government offices aren’t known for being first-adopters of cutting-edge technology. However, as technologically savvy citizens look for more ways to engage with their city officials, it’s become a necessity for local and state offices to adopt and implement tools that will help them to keep track of conversations and incoming requests. Luckily, there is a solution to help build better relationships with constituents. Public-facing government offices are finding value in using customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to help manage citizen interactions and manage incoming projects.

Doing more with less

In an age of stripped-down budgets, government officials and employees are looking for the most cost effective solutions. Thankfully, there are CRM options available that have all the functionality and capabilities of a fancy, enterprise CRM but without the high price tag. And for those agencies that might not need all the bells and whistles of an enterprise-grade CRM, there are solutions that offer a plug-and-play experience so companies can find out which tools work best for them.

Making real connections

Employees of government offices need to be able to keep track of contact information and reference relationship details. It’s critical they have access to historical knowledge of interactions between government officials and citizens, and a CRM database is an easy way to save this information. Being able to reference this historical knowledge is what builds relationships between local offices and their citizens. It gives users a clear picture of problems or issues citizens may have called about in the past and cuts down on callers having to re-explain a problem or issue every time they speak to the office.

A real-world example

Chief of Staff Scott Esty immediately recognized the need to implement a system that would keep track of constituent conversations, concerns or proposed legislation (Tweet this!). More than 18,230 people and 5,200 organizations have contacted the New York State Assembly office since assemblyman Christopher Friend was elected in 2010, and the team needed a simple way to keep track conversations with these contacts and groups.

Since tracking all of its work with constituents, organizations and lobbyists, the office is much more effective in how it assists each of those groups and assesses legislation before the assembly. Every team member can quickly pull up the contact’s record when answering phone calls, which allows them to address their constituent’s needs effectively. Correspondences related to legislative issues are tracked according to bill number, so when it comes to a vote or debate in a committee meeting, Assemblyman Friend can quickly present constituents’ positions on each bill. Whether it’s getting tax refunds, sorting out DMV issues or getting new legislation passed, the New York State Assembly office can manage all of the conversations and subsequent progress with constituents, which helps them to solve the problems of the people in their district.

September 8, 2016

3 Reasons Why CRM Implementations Fail and How To Avoid Them

If you’ve ever gone through the process of shopping for a new tool, you’re probably familiar with the internal objections that inevitably roll around in your mind.

Is this a want or need?
Will I actually use this if I buy it?
Can the benefits promised really help me in my situation?

Although there are plenty of reasons to wonder whether whipping out your wallet is the right decision, there are equally enough reasons to follow your gut instinct.

When you’re purchasing a new product for your team, such as a new customer relationship management (CRM) tool, the objections are harder to ignore. When the other people who need to use the CRM emphasize their concern, you’re face-to-face with the reality that implementation of the new system could fail.

Here are the three most common reasons why implementation sometimes fails and how you can get your sales team to use your new CRM.

No One Likes Change

Change is uncomfortable. It’s awkward and disruptive. So when you decide to change something as impactful to your business as a CRM, it’s no wonder your stomach turns a little.

How much will this affect my work flow?
Will I accidentally lose any leads in the changeover process?
How long will it take me to form new habits?
I know it looks good on paper, but is this really a better CRM for me?

The more thoughts like this swirl through your mind, the more you talk yourself out of making the change you know you need. You feel stuck. You’re trapped with a tool that’s not serving you because the idea of moving to something is too frightening.

It’s this kind of hesitation to switch that holds many professionals back from upgrading to something better. Add in the hesitation of your team members who will be forced to make the switch, and you increase the odds of the CRM implementation failing.

Although the trepidation is normal, it doesn’t have to stand in your way. To help overcome change, create a system for the switch. It could look something like this:

Hold introductory training before making the switchover.
Transition to the new CRM on [date] at [time].
Hold a secondary training immediately after making the change.
Create a message group where employees can reach out with questions and tips.

Having a system of support in place will ease the worries of your fellow team members and make the change as smooth as possible.

Budgets Work as Barriers

One department that might worry a little more than others is the accounting department. These are numbers people who worry any time the debit column increases. The way to get them on board is to show them how that debit column increase will lead to an even bigger increase in the credit column.

Switching to a new CRM should help you turn more leads into sales. By laying out the projected figures in black and white ink, your accounting department and higher-ups will see the clear benefit in dollars and cents. In turn, you will have the green light to proceed with your CRM implementation.

Adoption is Slow

You’ve crossed the first two hurdles of getting your team (mostly) on board with the changeover and getting the budget approved for your new CRM. Now, it’s time for hurdle number three — getting everyone on board and used to the new system.

Although the system is available, everyone may not be willing to go through the process of adopting it completely. And therein lies another implementation problem.

Without your entire team using your new CRM, you could miss out on valuable opportunities. Communication could fall through the cracks, causing you to have lower sales numbers.

There’s a solution.

You might not be able to force someone’s hand in using the CRM, but you can show them why adoption is so important. It’s the why that’s a game changer.

Often during training cycles, the emphasis is put on the capabilities of the new system. The tools and features are important, but if a person doesn’t understand why those tools and features are important, she won’t have a reason to use them.

Just as you sell your customers on why your product or service is such a good buy, you need to sell your team on why you’re choosing to use the new CRM. The clearer that is, the more likely it is your team will adopt the CRM and implementation will succeed.

You Don’t Have to Experience CRM Implementation Failure

It can feel daunting to implement anything new, but it’s worth the effort. By outlining what to expect, the projected increase in sales and why the system is so much better, you will have very little problem getting everyone on board with your new CRM.