CRM Adoption: 11 Ways to Maximize CRM ROI
- Published:
- Updated: October 7, 2024
Levi Olmstead
The CRM market is projected to grow from $101.41 billion in 2024 to $262.74 billion by 2032. Investing in an enterprise CRM is critical for the success of any organization and is central to managing customer relationships and analyzing data. When implemented effectively, a CRM pays dividends and is a driving force behind key business outcomes.
However, simply implementing a CRM isn’t enough. CRM software isn’t a magic solution that instantaneously drives more revenue.
In this article, we’ll explore the importance of CRM user adoption in achieving your sales organization’s goals, CRM user adoption metrics to track, common challenges that hurt adoption rates, and user adoption strategies to maximize CRM ROI.
What are the best ways to increase your CRM adoption rate?
- Involve your employees in the change process
- Personalize your CRM experience
- Create a CRM onboarding & training plan
- Provide your users with on-demand performance support
- Monitor adoption rates of different CRM features and functions for additional training opportunities
- Highlight early CRM improvements and wins
- Offer incentives to increase engagement
- Provide CRM users with alerts for process and workflow changes
In order to take advantage of all the benefits your CRM has to offer, your organization must have high levels of user adoption. And that’s more than just adding an onboarding event to the calendar and providing a link to additional online CRM resources.
It means creating an entire employee CRM training and continuous support strategy to drive user adoption that empowers employees.
According to our CRM research of over 500 enterprise companies that recently implemented a new CRM:
- Improved CRM adoption rates saved an average of $8.7 million.
- 90% of companies said improved CRM adoption led to higher sales rep productivity and reduced sales cycle time.
- 70% of enterprises said personalized CRM guidance and self-help training improved their overall CRM use and adoption rates.
The Risk of Poor CRM Adoption
CRMs are significant investments that provide real business value – but without a clear CRM digital adoption strategy, your sales team is set up for failure.
Slow and low user adoption of CRM is an undeniable contributor to implementation failures.
These failures are costly to enterprise organizations. For example, Cigna’s infamous failed CRM system implementation reportedly cost the organization around $1 billion across lost revenue, technology costs, and change implementation costs.
CRM Adoption & Usage Metrics to Track
The importance of driving CRM adoption across your sellers and customer-facing teams is clear – but how do you measure and analyze your organization’s CRM adoption rate?
You must first track the right CRM adoption metrics to help you benchmark your current adoption level and begin to identify trouble areas to drive adoption.
There are three distinct types of CRM adoption metrics:
- Usage metrics: Tell you how many sellers actively use your CRM and for what purposes.
- Data quality metrics: Tell you how accurate the data quality in your CRM is.
- Performance metrics: Tell you how effectively your sellers use your CRM, its processes, and its strategy to achieve outcomes.
CRM usage metrics
The first type of CRM adoption metric to track is basic usage. Here are a few common CRM usage metrics to track that are fantastic indicators of seller adoption.
- % CRM licenses used: This basic CRM metric lets you know how many of your CRM subscription licenses are being used over your total number of CRM subscription licenses that are paid for.
- Login numbers, frequency, and rate: These adoption metrics give you insights into how many sellers log into your CRM, the frequency at which they log in, and the rate at which they log in. Benchmarking daily and monthly active user counts will help you to identify poor adoption trends.
- Interaction count: Tracking CRM interactions such as calls, emails, and notes will provide insights into how many interactions it takes to close a deal and how many sellers interact with a single opportunity.
- Dropoff rates: Dropoff rates enable sales leaders to understand friction points inside a CRM and work on improving the CRM user journey through better in-app guidance, training, and user support.
CRM data quality metrics
After ensuring your sellers actively use your CRM, it’s time to move to step two of the adoption cycle – ensure sellers use it correctly. This includes ensuring your sellers correctly enter data and move deals through the pipeline. To maintain CRM data quality, you should consider some key metrics. These metrics include:
- Form field data quality: Track the data captured from your form fields to analyze their accuracy and completeness.
- Attribution: Track where leads and opportunities came from, who closed a deal, etc.
- Prospects with missing information (last 60 days).
- Opportunities with a close date (last 60 days).
- Accounts with missing information (last 60 days).
CRM performance metrics
Finally, it’s time to track how effectively your CRM is performing. This will provide a more nuanced view of how well your sellers have adopted your CRM and its core processes, and if it has improved their efficiency in the expected ways.
- Pipeline: You should track pipeline growth before and after your new CRM. Pipeline should grow as your sellers become better CRM users.
- Deal cycle and stage times: Measure how long it takes for an opportunity to move between sales stages and cycles. As you improve CRM adoption, these cycle and stage times should decrease.
- YoY win rate growth.
- Activity type by assigned owner(s).
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7 Benefits of Strong CRM Adoption Rates
While it’s obvious that a strong CRM adoption rate means your workforce is actually using your new CRM investment — but why does it matter?
Here are a few of the benefits a strong CRM user adoption strategy brings to your organization:
- Increased sales efficiency: New CRMs bring together automation and big data to turn manual, repetitive tasks into automated ones – allowing your sales team to focus more on important customer relationships. With a high adoption rate, these CRM tools allow your employees to become more productive and efficient.
- Better CRM data management: Strong CRM adoption rates provide a ton of insightful customer data, which can be used to identify trends, make informed decisions, and drive business growth. By analyzing this data, businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers’ behavior and preferences, as well as the effectiveness of their sales and marketing efforts.
- Increased revenue and profitability: Strong CRM adoption rates can lead to increased business revenue and profitability. Businesses can drive sales, reduce costs, and improve their bottom line by improving customer satisfaction, efficiency, and data management.
- Stay ahead of the competition: By driving user adoption of a new CRM, your organization can take advantage of cutting-edge features in customer-relationship technology – giving your organization an advantage over your competitors.
- Reduced burden on IT support: With better CRM proficiency and adoption, your team will not have to rely on your IT team to answer CRM support-related questions – allowing them to be self-reliant and expert CRM users.
- Improved customer satisfaction: Strong CRM adoption rates empower businesses to better understand their customers’ needs and preferences, which allows them to provide personalized service and support. This, in turn, leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
CRM Adoption Challenges
CRM systems are powerful tools that help businesses manage and analyze customer data, streamline business processes, and improve customer relationships. However, implementing a CRM system is not without its challenges.
From resistance to change to data quality issues, businesses must navigate a variety of obstacles when adopting a CRM system. Understanding these challenges is critical for businesses looking to successfully implement and benefit from a CRM system.
Here are the top six challenges to anticipate with CRM adoption:
1. Resistance to change
Employees may resist changes to their established work processes and may be hesitant to adopt new technology, which can slow down productivity and derail morale. They may worry that the new system will be difficult to use, will disrupt their work, or simply isn’t worth the time and effort to learn. This resistance can make it challenging to encourage employees to adopt the CRM system, even if it ultimately benefits the organization.
2. Lack of training and education
Insufficient training and education are common CRM challenges that can lead to low adoption rates and reduced productivity. Employees may not fully understand how to use the system or the benefits it can provide. Without proper training, employees may be hesitant to use the system or may use it incorrectly, leading to data quality issues or inefficiencies.
Easily create interactive sandbox environments of enterprise apps with Whatfix Mirror
Enable your end-users with risk-free, hands-on training in replicate application environments.
3. Integration with existing systems
Integrating the CRM system with other business systems can be complex, leading to data compatibility issues. If the CRM system is not integrated with these existing systems, employees may need to switch between systems, leading to frustrating roadblocks and potential errors.
4. Data quality issues
Poor data quality can lead to inaccurate reporting and decision-making, which can negatively impact business performance. And if employees don’t trust the data in the CRM system, they may be hesitant to use it or may not use it at all.
Data quality issues can arise if employees fail to enter data accurately, if data is not updated regularly, or if data is imported from other systems without adequate quality control.
5. Implementation costs
Implementing a CRM system can be expensive. Organizations may need to invest significant resources in deploying and customizing the new system, which can include costs associated with purchasing the software, hiring consultants or developers to customize the system, and training employees. These costs can create a barrier to adoption, particularly for smaller organizations or those with limited resources.
6. Security concerns
Businesses must ensure that customer data is kept secure and protected from unauthorized access. Organizations may be hesitant to store sensitive customer data in a new system without adequate security measures in place. This can include concerns about data breaches, unauthorized access, and data loss. If employees do not trust the security of the system, they may be reluctant to adopt it fully.
How to Improve CRM User Adoption
CRM adoption doesn’t happen on its own. Your HR, IT, and sales departments must come together to provide a comprehensive CRM adoption strategy that supports your customers on their adoption journey.
Here are eleven proven strategies to improve your CRM adoption:
1. Provide hands-on training for CRM users with a sandbox enviroment before launching
Implementing new sales technologies requires thoughtful CRM user onboarding across end-user groups. Providing tailored training and support that aligns with these unique needs is crucial for driving the adoption of your CRM.
With Whatfix Mirror, create interactive replica environments of web applications for virtual hands-on user training without the risks of live software usage or impacting your data quality. This provides hands-on CRM onboarding and training for your new employees or when switching to a new CRM.
With Whatfix DAP, you can enable new sellers with onboarding Tours, Task Lists, and Flows to quickly drive CRM proficiency. Use Task Lists to provide a checklist of critical tasks to complete upon first logging in and use Flows to walk sellers through complex sales workflows and features.
2. Involve your employees in the change process
Your employees are the ones that will be using a new CRM every day. That is where your CRM implementation project will succeed or fail.
Make your individual sales team members – and any customer-facing team members – core stakeholders during the organizational change research and buying phase and during the CRM implementation and adoption phases. Ask for feedback and gauge any resistance to change in their sentiments.
Feedback should be included before making a final decision on a new CRM. This allows leaders to understand pain points and areas of improvement for which a new CRM can provide solutions that will accelerate change adoption.
Feedback from end-users of your new CRM will also provide insights into what areas of training and support they need to adopt the tool properly.
Be sure to find your internal team members who are trusted across your broader sales organization. Allow them to mediate – and champion – your new CRM implementation. This is critical to driving CRM adoption.
3. Personalize your CRM experience
Your legacy CRM feels more comfortable with your employees because that is what they’re accustomed to. It has certain terminology and custom fields.
While you shouldn’t migrate over all your existing processes, note what works. When you migrate your CRM data, be sure to bring over the things that were working and any CRM terminology that will help mitigate confusion and help drive adoption from day one.
4. Create a CRM onboarding & training plan
With your learning and development (L&D) team, create a plan to lessen the impact of your CRM switch or CRM transformation and shorten the time-to-productivity time for your CRM users with a robust onboarding and training strategy.
Use internal CRM experts, third-party consultants, and your CRM provider’s customer success team to pull together common FAQs and processes for your new CRM and your team’s sales workflows.
Create a variety of employee training types and formats, such as video tutorials, in-person seminars, online courses, and certificates, to provide a comprehensive training and onboarding experience.
5. Support sellers and other CRM users in the flow of work
Your CRM system will have many, many advanced features. Realistically, you won’t be able to teach your employees how to be expert CRM users over the course of a few weeks.
Transitioning away from old processes requires understanding existing workflows before digitizing. Map out current workflows with input from team members. Involving end users in this way can help you understand the guidance they’ll need as you implement a different system.
Use the Whatfix Digital Adoption Platform to provide contextual guidance through Flows and Smart Tips on friction points. Include in-app pop-ups with documentation like SOPs, and a self-help knowledge base. All are embedded directly within the CRM interface.
A DAP such as Whatfix allows teams to embed a self-help FAQ directly into their CRM, allowing employees access to an internal knowledge base of helpful CRM tips, tutorials, external resource links, and process documentation – without ever having to leave the CRM interface.
6. Monitor adoption rates of different CRM features and functions for additional training opportunities
Your training and onboarding won’t be perfect. But by analyzing the data and usage of your CRM and its various features, you’ll be able to paint a picture of how it is and isn’t being used.
With Whatfix, your organization can monitor which features are not being properly adopted and hone in on training and support resources to help provide additional help for those more advanced, intricate CRM features. If users are having trouble with a particular software, they’re unlikely to use it. Leveraging Whatfix’s usage analytics to pinpoint areas of user struggle. You should also understand process completion rates and maintain governance over CRM workflows
Don’t just rely on CRM usage data. Go directly to your CRM users and ask what they’re struggling with.
Send out surveys to gauge the levels of employee self-confidence your CRM users have with the tool – and the areas they would like additional support.
7. Maintain CRM data quality
Many CRM transformation projects happen because organizations realize they need a better data management system that can provide automated analysis for better sales forecasting and targeted sales messaging. However, your CRM can only be useful when your data is accurate. Use Whatfix’s in-app Smart Tips and Field Validations to guide sellers in entering data correctly and in the proper formats, ensuring high-quality CRM data.
8. Highlight early CRM improvements and winss
No matter how user-centric your CRM adoption strategy is, you’ll still have team members who are stubborn and have low adoption rates. Nothing provides better support for using your new CRM than hard data.
Pull the win rates, sales performance KPIs, and additional sales metrics of your team members who have fully adopted your new CRM. Now compare those metrics to the team members who are rejecting your new CRM tool and processes.
Don’t withhold this information. Make it publicly available to your sales reps and other CRM users. When these team members see that those who have properly adopted the new CRM are closing more deals and crushing their goals, their tone will shift.
9. Offer incentives to increase engagement
By offering rewards or recognition to employees who use the CRM system effectively, organizations can encourage greater usage and effectiveness.
Incentives not only create a sense of ownership and accountability among employees, but they also boost morale and motivation, leading to increased engagement with the system. When employees feel recognized and rewarded for their efforts, they are more likely to continue using the CRM system and providing valuable input.
Ultimately, incentivizing employees is a powerful way to improve CRM adoption and drive success for your organization.
10. Provide your sellers with in-app alerts for CRM process, task, or workflow changes
Your organization’s CRM will experience changes over its lifetime. For example, your organization may invest in a new sales tool that integrates into your CRM to give sellers more data, your team may introduce a more streamlined approach to account management, or your CRM vendor may introduce new features.
Keeping users updated on new features and process changes is important, but difficult. DAPs meet this need. All without disrupting workflows. Whatfix in-app pop-ups can alert employees about new CRM features, process updates, and other sales-related changes.
11. Collect feedback from CRM users
Deploy in-app surveys through Whatfix to continuously gather voice-of-the-user feedback on process pain points and stakeholder needs. Methods for gathering user feedback help pinpoint friction points that impact engagement. These insights allow employees to build confidence with your CRM and get more value from modernization efforts.
Examples of Sales Teams Driving CRM Adoption With Whatfix
CRM ROI is the goal, but what is the real impact of achieving high-rates of CRM adoption? Here are three examples of sales organizations driving CRM adoption with Whatfix.
1. Sophos enables sellers through routine Salesforce updates
Sophos went live with Salesforce to increase win rates by streamlining the sales process and effectively managing its business and client relationships. While this has been a crucial investment, the rate of change in Salesforce posed a new challenge. Salesforce released new features and updates every quarter.
Sophos decided to implement Whatfix’s DAP to provide interactive, on-demand training that helps users in the flow of work. With Whatfix, updates, communication, and training happen in real time. With new information directly within the Salesforce app, employees learn in the flow of work and receive interactive guidance when it is most needed.
2. Experian drives Salesforce adoption with contextual in-app training
Experian invested significantly in Salesforce CRM, empowering its salespeople to identify prospects, close deals, and effectively manage client relationships. However, the Salesforce experience was complicated and hard to navigate due to substantial customizations.
Experian turned to Whatfix to provide interactive, on-demand training to help users in the flow of work and to drive agility and greater Salesforce engagement. Whatfix also provided real-time training and onboarding assistance personalized to each user’s role. Sales reps now feel more empowered with the significantly improved Salesforce user experience.
3. REG reduces CRM time-to-proficiency for its sellers by 50%
REG’s challenge has been ensuring its employees – especially new hires – are aligned with this growth. REG needs people joining the company to be productive in the shortest possible time on critical operational applications like JD Edwards and Salesforce.
With Whatfix, REG has standardized one enterprise-wide approach to application training, learning, and support content. As a result, the time to proficiency on JD Edwards, Salesforce, or other applications has been cut by about 50%.
Drive engagement and improve your CRM adoption rate with Whatfix
Accelerate your digital transformation by enabling your employees with contextual in-app guidance and constant real-time support with Whatfix’s digital adoption platform (DAP). Whatfix empowers IT teams with its no-code Visual Editor to create in-app, moment-of-need support and contextual guidance.
This reduces time-to-proficiency and achieves new levels of productivity and proficiency through better technology adoption. It also provides abilities for self-service, personalization, and guided user experiences for any application end-user – enabling end-users to use technology, improving end-user productivity, and automating operations.
Whatfix empowers a data-driven approach by analyzing tech experiences with end-user behavioral analytics and event tracking. This identifies areas of friction in your digital processes and tech experiences, allowing you to create optimal, contextual user journeys across various end-user segments.
With Whatfix, IT teams can identify areas of friction causing issues and launch new in-app guided Flows, Smart Tips, and Self Help elements to guide and assist them with localized content that guides them through processes, driving workflow adoption and achieving business outcomes.
How does it work? Whatfix empowers enterprise organizations to:
- Create in-app Flows and Task Lists that guide end-users step-by-step through digital processes and applications.
- Enable all end-users with Self Help, providing a searchable help wiki that connects to all your help and support documentation, FAQs, help desk articles, and more – that overlays on your applications’ digital UI.
- Notify end-users of process updates, compliance changes, team updates, deadlines, and more with Pop-Ups and Beacons.
- Provide contextual Smart Tips that give end-users timely information that nudges them to take the correct in-app action.
- Use Field Validation to ensure data is entered in full, in the correct format.
- Collect end-user feedback from end-users such as NPS, customer satisfaction surveys, staff training and onboarding feedback, and bug identification with In-App Surveys.
- Analyze end-user behavior with User Actions and Enterprise Insights by tracking custom in-app events to optimize user journeys, segment users into cohorts, identify areas of friction, and more.
With Whatfix, you can understand how your technology is used and under-adopted by your employees and customers. This makes it easier to adjust software onboarding, training, support, and overall end-user adoption strategies—all to provide a seamless experience for every end-user that enables them with the right context and support to utilize new technologies and systems fully.
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