Getting Rid of Your CRM Albatross Doesn’t Have to Be Difficult

A good CRM system should benefit your sales team by streamlining processes and enhancing productivity to support them in achieving their goals. However, if your CRM is not checking off these boxes, it’s become more of a burden than anything. But what are the signs that your existing CRM is letting you down?

For starters, low adoption rates. If your sales team is slow to adopt or reluctant to use your CRM, you’re wasting money and opening yourself up to reduced efficiencies and inconsistent and fragmented data. It’s also important to look at your CRM platform’s integration capabilities. If it’s not compatible with your company’s other software solutions, you run the risk of data silos, redundant data, and a lack of cohesive insights and analytics.

The right CRM platform is not only the right one at the moment but should also be able to scale with your business. Will it struggle to handle increased data volume and user load as you grow? If so, in a few years’ time, you will have to find a new CRM platform that can meet your future needs. It’s worth getting ahead of the issue and finding a future-proof solution that won’t hold you back when you most need it to be at peak performance.

Lastly, how costly is your CRM? In addition to the time you invested in getting it up and running, how much extra did you spend to customize it for your team, only to find that it’s still a clunky system? How much time and money are you spending maintaining the platform to retain some semblance of functionality? Long-term, high maintenance costs will strain your budget for a platform your team is likely not leveraging.

Selecting a New CRM

Before you get far along in the process of identifying potential new solutions, it’s worth sitting down with your team to understand what they like and dislike about your existing CRM. For instance, how do they feel about the interface? A clunky, unintuitive interface is one of the most common reasons a sales team will avoid using a CRM.

Also, consider the analytics and reporting capabilities. Reports are one of the core functions of a quality CRM platform, polling data and comparing trends to provide organizations with a snapshot of all sales and customer relations activity. These valuable insights can help sales teams identify areas that might require attention so they can shift their strategies to improve performance.

Once you consider what aspects of your CRM are and are not working for your team, it will be easier to establish a clear set of criteria for selecting your next CRM. What features will it need to have to meet your team’s needs? What pain points with your existing system need to be mitigated or removed altogether? This “wish list” of key features and functionalities will make it easier to narrow down your options to a select few platforms.

From there, you can begin searching for available solutions on the market, eliminating those that fail to meet your minimum expected criteria. Once you’ve identified a few that fit your needs, engage with their sales teams to learn more about the platform and participate in a personalized and detailed demo. During this stage of the process, make sure to seek out case studies and reviews to understand what other organizations feel they do best or poorly. Try to get as clear a picture as possible about the platform prior to signing any contracts and integrating the platform into your tech stack.

Achieving a Seamless Transition

Successfully implementing a new CRM system begins with your choice of platform. A good CRM will have visual, intuitive interfaces that make adoption much more organic due to an easy learning experience. They will also have an expert team in place to support yours, guiding them through the key steps of implementation and answering all questions along the way.

But what about your old system? There’s still a cache of valuable data that your team will need to leverage in your new platform. Before creating any migration plans, your first step should be to conduct a data cleanse. The purpose of transitioning to a new platform is to leverage the power of a CRM to help your sales team be as successful as possible. However, even the best new platform is only as good as the data you put into it. Before you move over all your data, take the time to remove old or duplicate information from the mix. Also, ensure that your formatting will align with your new CRM organization system.

Once you’ve cleaned up your data, work with your IT team and new CRM partner to develop a migration strategy that includes timetables, data transfer processes, and strategies that minimize overall downtime. Ultimately, with the right new CRM platform, getting up and running should be a matter of days rather than weeks or months.

In this day and age, a good CRM platform can make or break a sales team, either bolstering their success or setting them up for failure. However, with such a saturated CRM marketplace, this doesn’t have to be the case. With careful planning and research, companies can find a new CRM platform that will not only check all the boxes but also help them meet their sales goals.