The Best CRM Online Training Courses & Certificates in 2024
- December 22, 2022
Customer expectations constantly are evolving, and modern concepts such as digital sales are essential for business survival. Organizations leverage sophisticated cloud-CRM solutions such as Salesforce to understand the customer journey, decrease workload, boost sales, and increase efficiency through sales process automation.
The CRM market grew globally at 10% last year and is likely to demonstrate another significant growth of over 12%, skyrocketing the market value from $58.04 billion in 2021 to $128.97 billion in 2028.
However, the complex interfaces of CRM systems combined with company-level customizations make it harder for your sales team to maintain high levels of productivity. One of the primary ways to ensure your sales organization’s productivity and improve your CRM’s digital adoption is to invest in CRM training and certification programs.
What Is the Importance of CRM Training?
59% of L&D leaders said that upskilling & reskilling is their highest priority and biggest challenge, according to LinkedIn’s 2021 Workplace Learning Report. Considering the increased reliance on CRM systems in everyday sales processes, as well as the frequency of regular product updates and new feature launches, CRM training is essential. CRM training programs will support sales professionals’ career growth and drive productivity and performance for the entire sales team.
It’s no doubt CRM makes customer data easily accessible and usable, helping its growth strategy. For example, Activision uses a cloud-based CRM solution to resolve 82% of its customer-related issues, reduce its overhead, and communicate effectively with its gaming community.
However, if your organization has a low CRM adoption rate, and employees spend most of their time figuring out how to use their CRM effectively, your CRM investment will have minimal ROI.
It’s important to continuously support your team members with CRM training at all times, but the most critical times include during your employee onboarding process, a new CRM implementation, and when systems roll out new features or updates.
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Which Roles Needs CRM Training?
Here are a few of the different roles in your organization that should complete a CRM training program:
- The Sales Team: Research conducted by Google and CEB suggests that customers emotionally connected to a brand are twice as likely to purchase a product or service, and are four times as likely to defend their purchase decisions. The sales team depends on a CRM solution to understand the buyer’s journey, track and follow up on existing leads, and maintain high-performance levels. Sales employees disseminate the data from the CRM reports to identify new opportunities, shorten the sales cycle and launch targeted marketing campaigns to attract prospects. In short, a CRM is the core tool a sales professional uses in their day-to-day. Without proper CRM onboarding and training, a sales professional is bound to meet the expectations of their role.
- IT Professionals: CRM systems have become functionally advanced to cater to other sales, service, and marketing needs. IT professionals such as system administrators, architects, developers, and consultants can take up more than just maintenance and support roles, and it is critical for your IT professionals to undergo CRM training and certification courses.
- Marketing Function: A CRM is central to all marketing decisions by empowering marketing professionals to understand customers, as well as their business’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps build customer relationships with data-first digital marketing. It provides automation capabilities for email marketing and social media marketing via tools such as Pardot, Journey Builder, Email Studio, and more.
Types of CRM Training Methods
Due to remote work environments, CRM training techniques have evolved post-pandemic. Organizations are exploring various types of employee training methods, approaches such as microlearning and adaptive learning, to increase training effectiveness and knowledge retention. Here are the four of the most effective training approaches to consider:
1. On-Demand Videos & Webinars
Instructor-led classroom training has a fixed agenda and is meant to teach many professionals at once. However, on-demand video lectures and webinars allow users to gain expertise in a given topic and refer to the content based on their individual requirements, at the moment of need. This makes on-demand videos and webinars much more interactive and personalized for individual sales professionals learning how to use a CRM solution.
2. Digital Adoption Platforms
Digital adoption platforms (DAPs) such as Whatfix improve your CRM user adoption by providing your sales teams with contextual in-app guidance to influence higher win rates, shorten resolution times, and enhance the quality of service.
With Whatfix, you create on-demand sales training and support content, empowering your team to learn in the flow of work. Support your sales org by creating various in-app widgets such as smart tips, product tours, hotspots, and task lists. Whatfix fosters a self-support culture by placing relevant CRM training content in-app with a self-help widget.
You can also alert users to new features via customized pop-ups and beacons. For example, Experian leverages Whatfix to drive Salesforce adoption across its global user base and sees a 48% reduction in content creation costs, a 55% reduction in support queries, and a 72% increase in employee productivity.
3. Apps & CRM Communities
A disengaged sales employee will not become a CRM power user. Salesforce AppExchange will help your team make up for the missing default CRM functionalities and introduce integration with familiar apps, allowing for you to drive CRM engagement with automation and integrations. Applications such as Salesforce Chatter and Salesforce Trailhead will empower your employees to achieve their self-learning goals and interact with fellow users.
4. Online Certifications
Online certifications offer a blended learning experience by incorporating different training techniques, such as online video courses and instructor-led classes. They guarantee a certain level of competency upon course completion, so both employees and employers feel they’ve accomplished a certain level of competency in their CRM upon completion. Organizations should consider investing in CRM certifications for their sales professionals as a default training task upon hiring new members of the sales team – and to reskill existing ones
Is your sales organization implementing a new CRM system? Check out these CRM implementation guides to help your team drive user adoption and ROI of your new CRM:
Best CRM Online Training Courses & Certificates
Every CRM solution has unique training requirements. Here’s a list of the top online certifications for different CRM solutions to consider:
Salesforce CRM Training & Certificates
Salesforce is the most popular CRM platform that is used across various industries, and it offers 30 official certifications and over 100 Salesforce training resources via its Trailhead Academy. Interested professionals can opt for both instructor-led training sessions and self-paced online classes. Salesforce offers straight-forward certification courses for different roles and user types such as:
- Salesforce Administrators
- Salesforce Consultants
- Salesforce Architects
- System Architects
- Application Architect
- Technical Architect
- Sales Cloud Consultant
- Service Cloud Consultant
- Community Cloud Consultant
- Salesforce Developers
- Salesforce Marketers
- Marketing Cloud Consultant
The certification exams vary according to each courses’ length and format and are organized under a proctored environment. To help users with the certification exams, Trailhead Academy also provides exam guides, practice tests, and other relevant resources. These courses are an effective Salesforce adoption strategy for organizations, and sales teams should look to require their team members to complete the courses that are contextual for their roles to ensure successful Salesforce implementation.
There are also non-Salesforce certifications available, including:
| Course | Provider | Skills Level | Cost | CTA |
| Salesforce User Guides | Salesforce | Beginner-Advanced | – | Learn More |
| Complete Salesforce Certified Platform Developer Course | Udemy | Intermediate | $10 9.99 | Learn More |
| Salesforce Sales Development Representative Professional Certificate | Cousera | Beginner | $49 per month after free trial | Learn More |
| Salesforce Administrator Cert Prep: The Basics | LinkedIn Learning | Intermediate | $19.99-$29.99 after free trial | Learn More |
| Salesforce Administrator Cert Prep: 1 Introduction to Administrator Certification & Setup | LinkedIn Learning | Intermediate | $19.99-$29.99 after free trial | Learn More |
| Salesforce Certified Administrator: Advanced | LinkedIn Learning | Advanced | $19.99-$29.99 after free trial | Learn More |
| The Complete Salesforce Classic Administrator Certification Course | Skillshare | Beginner | $8.25-$19 per month after free trial | Learn More |
| Salesforce Certified Advanced Administrator: Online Learning | Skillshare | Advanced | $8.25-$19 per month after free trial | Learn More |
Hubspot Sales Hub Training & Certificates
Hubspot provides various beginner-level free online certifications to help its CRM customers use its CRM solution efficiently. Hubspot Sales Software certification teaches participants how to use the HubSpot CRM and Sales Hub to create and execute an inbound marketing strategy to attract prospects. There is a series of interactive videos and quizzes to help you learn faster, post which you need to complete the suggested practical exercises and appear for the certification exam.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Training & Certificates
Microsoft offers several certifications with its Dynamics 365 CRM software to guide your sales team. Organizations implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 should have all team members complete the beginner-level Dynamics 365 Fundamentals certification before pursuing more in-depth certifications specific to each team member’s role.
Microsoft also provides free training material but charges $99 for the Dynamics 365 Fundamentals certification exam and $165 for all other certification exams. Exams are usually available at a Pearson VUE testing site, but due to COVID-19, online at-home test conducting is available instead.
A few other sources of Dynamics 365 certifications & training from non-Microsoft vendors include:
| Course | Provider | Skills Level | Cost | CTA |
| Dynamics 365: The basics | LinkedIn Learning | Beginner | $44.99 | Learn More |
| Microsoft Dynamics CRM Essential Training | LinkedIn Learning | Beginner | $44.99 per month after free trial | Learn More |
| Microsoft Certification Training: Dynamics 365 Certification | The CRM Team | – | – | Learn More |
| Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Back to Basics – The Fundamentals of CRM | Youtube | Beginner | Free | Learn More |
Zoho CRM Training & Certificates
With its comprehensive training platform Spark, Zoho caters to all the training requirements needed across its various users. The courses are designed to assist users with all the possible use cases in both online and instructor-led training sessions.
| Course | Provider | Skills Level | Cost | CTA |
| Zoho CRM Training | NobleProg | Intermediate | $9000 per team | Learn More |
| Zoho CRM Setup Documentation | Zoho | Beginner | $44.99 per month after free trial | Learn More |
| Learning Zoho CRM | LinkedIn Learning | Beginner | $15.21 | Learn More |
| Zoho CRM: Complete User Training For Small Business | Udemy | Intermediate | $67.73 | Learn More |
| Becoming a Zoho CRM Admin | Udemy | Beginner | $16.93 | Learn More |
Freshsales CRM Training & Certificate
Freshworks offers several training courses through its Freshworks Academy to provide a walkthrough of all its functionalities and prepare the users well to achieve their learning goals. The most popular certification is Freshsales CRM Admin Fundamentals, designed to build a strong foundation for its users.
Zendesk Sell Training & Certificates
Zendesk offers online and instructor-led training to its users, along with exam guides and practice questions to prepare for its certification exams. Here are the most popular certifications offered by Zendesk:
| Course | Provider | Skills Level | Cost | CTA |
| Zendesk Support Administrator | Zendesk | Intermediate | $350 | Learn More |
| Zendesk App Developer I | Zendesk | Advanced | $350 | Learn More |
| Zendesk Guide Specialist | Zendesk | Intermediate | $199 | Learn More |
| Zendesk Explore CX Analyst | Zendesk | Advanced | $350 | Learn More |
SAP CRM Training & Certificates
SAP offers 150 training courses in 9 languages to provide cutting-edge skills in high-focused areas. With the SAP Certification programs, users can learn continuously, keep their skills up-to-date, and stay current with new cloud product releases.
| Course | Provider | Skills Level | Cost | CTA |
| SAP CRM Training | Intellipat | Beginner-Advanced | $299 | Learn More |
| SAP ERP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) | Matrix College | Beginner | – | Learn More |
| SAP CRM Certification | ERP Prep | Intermediate | $550 | Learn More |
| SAP CRM | Udemy | Beginner | $21.15 | Learn More |
Oracle CRM Training & Certificates
Oracle offers two CRM solutions- Oracle Netsuite & Oracle EBS CRM. Oracle provides its end users with a various range of corporate training programs for administrators, consultants, and developers, with entry-level training programs free of cost. However, to keep learning continuously and use the CRM software efficiently, it offers an option of cloud learning subscriptions and instructor-led training.
With Whatfix, provide on-demand training and support on your CRM
Create in-app training content such as guided walkthroughs and embedded self-help widgets to support your sales teams perform routine and advanced CRM processes, and much more, with Whatfix’s digital adoption platform.
Get started by learning more about how Whatfix supercharges your CRM adoption and training strategies.
Priyanka Malik
Priyanka is a Marketing Professional with over four years of experience in different facets of Marketing. She is passionate about content creation and spends her time writing and strategizing content at Whatfix. With her curiosity-driven nature about customer behavior and technology, she is keen on helping Enterprises accelerate Digital adoption with Whatfix. Drop-in your comments below or reach out to her at [email protected].
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