Getting your team to actually keep it up

One agreement, not ten

A rollout plan with rules about fields, statuses and weekly updates is too much to remember and therefore comes to nothing.

Agree one thing: after every conversation, three lines and a next step with a date. Nothing else. No mandatory fields, no statuses to update, no weekly report.

That one rule is enough to keep a CRM alive, and it's short enough to still apply six weeks later. What a note like that looks like is in the piece on what to write down after a call.

Take fields away

The temptation when setting up is to capture everything that might ever be useful. That is exactly why it doesn't get filled in.

Mandatory fields look as though they raise quality and they lower it. Someone under time pressure who has to fill in a field they don't know will type "n/a" — and then you have data that's neither right nor empty, which is worse than either.

Make the name mandatory and nothing else. Anything you later find you're missing you can add then; the feeling that the system is a lot of work is the one thing you can't take back off.

Make sure there's something in it for them

This is the only point that counts in the long run. As long as the system only gives the boss an overview, it's reporting. The moment it makes the salesperson's day easier, it's a tool.

Three things do that: a screen that tells you in the morning who to ring, a record that says what you agreed last time, and a nudge when a deal has stopped moving.

Make that visible rather than explaining it. Let someone ring a customer once with their own notes from four months ago next to them. That conversation goes differently, and they notice it themselves.

Open it at the right moment

A CRM you update at the end of the week is an admin system. A CRM you open first thing in the morning is a place of work.

That difference is almost entirely a matter of habit, and the easiest way to shift it is the opening screen. If the first thing you see is today's task list, you'll open it without thinking — not out of discipline, but because it's useful to you.

Two systems is fatal

This is the most common cause of a CRM quietly dying, and the only fix is unpleasant: one of them has to go, even if the other one was better in places.

As long as half your team puts their arrangements in Outlook and the other half in the CRM, neither is accurate. Then nobody trusts the system, and that's the end of it — because a CRM you can't rely on is worse than no CRM.

Measure the right thing

Put a slot in your diary four weeks after the start and check one thing: does every live opportunity have a next step with a date?

Not how many records have been filled in, not who updated the most. Those are numbers that can be inflated without anything improving. The question is whether the system is still alive.

If the answer is no, look at the three causes above before you look at your team. The SME Digital Adoption Taskforce found the same thing when it asked UK smaller firms why software doesn't land: it looks like too much effort, too much cost, and too much risk to switch. Those are design problems, not character problems. See also the piece on rolling out a CRM without making it a project.