CRM systems can be a boon to sales teams with 81 percent of companies using these systems to drive more sales. But for many businesses, despite those metrics, it’s often very challenging to implement a new CRM. Why? Because salespeople are traditionally resistant to trying new things.
In fact, change management for salespeople can be incredibly hard, even under the best circumstances. After all, when one’s income is heavily based on performance, it’s easy to fear new technologies that may interfere with established (and successful) routines. Ironically, the very same characteristics that make salespeople so good at their jobs – tenacity, resourcefulness, and an unwavering commitment to overcoming any challenge or roadblock – are also those that can make the adoption of a new CRM so challenging.
This is why overcoming your sales team’s resistance to new CRMs requires a new approach that is crafted to engage reticent salespeople.
Reduce the Toggling Tax
Research has found that switching between two applications feels similar to context switching to the brain – and in either case, this is an incredibly challenging exercise. Moreover, the “toggling tax” manifests itself as an increased production of cortisol, the primary stress hormone, which in turn makes it harder to concentrate.
For this reason, as well as for simple convenience’s sake, online learning content should be made available within the application itself instead of requiring users to switch back and forth between screens or systems. Users shouldn’t have to interrupt what they’re doing to find the answer to their question; the information they need should be presented to them in such an intuitive way that they don’t even realize their questions are being preempted. Presenting information in this way increases engagement while also encouraging proper and holistic use of the CRM.
Overcome the Forgetting Curve
If you think a mandatory single-day training session is the ultimate way to meaningful CRM adoption and engagement amongst your salespeople, think again. Sure, this training is a good starting point, but it must be supplemented with real-time, bite-sized learning content delivered at the exact moment it’s needed. Think reminders, alerts, announcements or information pop-ups with learning or development-related links and videos.
Why does this approach work? Researchers have found that most people forget the majority of what they’ve learned during a single-day training session – and even more after only a day or two. To successfully overcome this forgetting curve, you will need to do more than provide salespeople with stand-alone training and then expect them to use it. Rather, training should be treated as an interactive, ongoing process, not a finite exercise.
The good news is that new technological advances are allowing content creators to quickly and intuitively build learning content directly into applications, which will help to empower your salespeople to leverage your CRM.
Stay One Step Ahead
Advances in AI are making it possible for organizations to analyze their CRM application usage data to identify where in the application their salespeople may be running into challenges that cause their activity to drop off. In this way, AI-derived insights allow businesses to discern which teams, regions, departments or users across the extended enterprise are having the most difficulty adopting certain workflows. Additionally, AI can ease digital adoption by automating repetitive and mundane tasks (for example, proactively answering mundane questions) and providing tailored recommendations, accelerating the learning curve for users and enhancing efficiency.
These insights help businesses see which users or teams are struggling to adapt to certain workflows, which can then help them prioritize the development of educational content that will address these areas while circumventing more user confusion and abandonment.
Organizations can take this important step even further by using this data to identify evolving patterns or trends in user behavior, which will help them make informed decisions regarding future software implementations. This approach will accelerate the rate of future CRM decisions and implementations- and success.
Salespeople know better than most that we no longer live in the Stone Age. While our ancestors lived in environments where one small misstep could spell critical disaster, luckily, the modern salesperson isn’t in such peril. Nevertheless, those lingering survival instincts manifest in the form of aversion to new technologies, which is why a new approach to change management is vital. Altering how your salespeople are trained to use a new CRM tool will help ensure the system is leveraged to its fullest potential, resulting in solid ROI and helping high-performing salespeople reach the next level.
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