Great news, you’ve bought into BuddyCRM after meeting us and are planning to implement it throughout your organisation. Hopefully, you will have read our article on having a plan to succeed with your CRM.
But it’s easy to make mistakes in implementation in your excitement to get started. Here are the most common mistakes companies make in implementing CRM in their organisation.
- Don’t guess what your teams actually do.
We mean this from your buyer’s point of view. As a buyer you are likely to be removed from the daily minutiae of the business activities of sales, support and marketing. If this is the case you need to involve all parties who will be affected by the CRM to gauge what requirements each has. This check will define what is actually needed from those teams, not a blue-sky scenario which isn’t grounded in reality. When putting your CRM together, the features must benefit the individual roles at all levels who use it. - Don’t fall for gimmicks
Be careful when evaluating your CRM to ensure that it is effective and based in the real world. Gimmicks are short-lived and don’t give your team the necessary tools to improve; they are a distraction. When putting your new CRM in, focus on “Must haves”; actions your team do the majority of the time and how this new CRM make that better. If you can answer that, you are on the right path. - Don’t do it all yourself
CRMs which allow you to “own the project” are, in fact stating you will set it up. Don’t underestimate the need for industry knowledge (CRM industry) when setting up a CRM to help your practical processes. What works on paper doesn’t necessarily translate to software features in practice, so having expert assistance and support will save time, money, and improve the chances of success, giving you that all-important ROI. - Don’t underestimate your role as a leader
The team will look to you for reassurance, guidance, and confidence in this new software. Be careful as to what you say in reference to the CRM – the first chink of concern from you will allow inaction to creep into your team. This will be the beginning of the end. If the team think you don’t believe in what you are doing, they will feel they can get away with not using it. If they don’t use it you won’t get accurate reporting and if the reporting is inaccurate you won’t trust the reports. This virtuous circle will lead to the team abandoning the CRM, and then you are back to square one, looking for a new CRM to solve your culture and business issues. - Not appointing a champion or expert in your team.
No matter how skilled your team members are, change is always difficult to accept. Many long-term team members may be entrenched in their ways and reluctant to alter their tried and tested methods of excel spreadsheets and daily ring rounds. So, to avoid this, always appoint a champion in the team who has the respect of their peers and can be encouraged to train and motivate others to use and adopt the new system.
This ‘train the trainer’ approach always works well. New hires typically respond positively to training by established players but long-term members can need extra encouragement, so it can often be beneficial to appoint a team member that may be most reluctant but also could gain the most from the change to be your CRM change champion. - Not integrating with other key systems
Ensure that when you introduce your CRM to the team, you connect it with your other systems, including accounting, inventory, and marketing. Without these connections, team members only see part of the customer story. This can lead to a disjointed and disconnected experience for employees and customers. They will only know their actions with the customer, not those of other employees or departments. Far better for the CRM to be connected via webhooks and APIs to show information from the accounting, logistics, and marketing departments.
With third-party software integration, your CRM system creates a holistic, 360-degree view of the customer and their interactions with the business. Every department with access to the CRM will know the true state of play with a customer from sales, payment, recent orders, calls, appointments, emails and more. - Failing to train employees properly
There is a common misconception that software is inherently intuitive without an ounce of training or guidance and this isn’t the case. Training is essential to ensure that team members can effectively use a CRM to manage customer interactions and relationships. Without proper training, employees will struggle to use the CRM effectively, leading to lost productivity, wasted resources, and accusations that the CRM is causing problems rather than solving them. We all think iPhones are intuitive now but this has come with years of demonstrations, advertisements, and our peers showing us new features. This points to a need to be guided, even if the software seems easy to use. There are good and bad ways to use CRMs and having expert training that is focussed around YOU is incredibly important to adoption in your workplace. - Not setting goals and metrics
Without clear goals and metrics, it can be difficult to measure the success of the CRM and determine whether or not it is delivering the desired results. Businesses should set specific and measurable goals for their CRM implementation, such as increasing customer satisfaction or improving sales, and track progress against these goals over time.
You can also tie in bonuses to metrics in your CRM. Team members who follow best practise and meet their targets in the CRM (ie. the number of calls completed, appointments gained, tasks completed, etc.) should, for the first six months or more, be incentivised. Nobody likes a bribe, but if it helps gain acceptance and then your team see the benefits of using the - Not having a plan for data migration
Data migration is the process of moving data from one system to another. It is a critical step in implementing a new CRM system, but it’s often overlooked. Without a proper data migration plan, you may struggle to move essential customer data from the old system to the new CRM, leading to lost data and disruptions in service. - Not involving key stakeholders
This includes employees, customers, and other key stakeholders impacted by the CRM. By involving these stakeholders in the implementation process, you can ensure the CRM meets their needs and addresses their concerns.
There you go. That’s the top 10 mistakes we see in CRM implementations. Things don’t have to go wrong, though. Through many years of experience, we know exactly how to get CRM working for you and your team. It’s the buddy difference.