How to encourage your reps to use the CRM and make sure they really do

CRMs are an inherently annoying, but very important, part of tracking your business. Saving data into the system regularly gives you a shared database with all of the information you could possibly need, and saves you time in the long run. If you’re a manager onboarding your team to a CRM, you can check to see who is entering new leads daily and who needs a reminder to enter leads as they get them. You can even encourage your team to enter data immediately by offering an incentive to reps, making commission dependent on using the CRM, or rewarding the reps that do use the CRM!

This article will explain how to pull up the most recently entered contacts so you can see who is and isn’t actively using Less Annoying CRM. The CRM is a central database that includes details for all of your contacts, but if it’s not in the CRM how can anyone else find it? We all know new habits are hard to build and you can use these instructions to check up on your reps and make sure they’re building a habit of entering data in the CRM.

Finding freshly entered contacts

The Contact page is accessible through the navigation bar on the left. This page lists all of the contacts that you have access to, whether or not they currently have a lead attached. On the left side of the page under “Sort and filter” you’ll see a few options for narrowing your list. There are two different filters that come in handy for finding contacts that have been recently entered and which users have been entering new contacts.

• Assigned user -- this filter allows you to view the contacts assigned to a particular user (or users). By default this report shows the contacts for every user you have permission to see, but you can use this filter to see a specific user’s contacts. If you’re a manager checking up on your sales reps, you can use this filter to see only one rep’s contacts, or a team of users’ contacts.
• Add a filter -- this filter allows you to narrow the data to a particular time range, among other things. If you’re a manager checking to be sure your sales team is entering new contacts, you can select “Date contact was created” in the dropdown. From there, select “is exactly” and enter today’s date. Hit “Apply Filter” and take a look at the list of contacts entered today.

These two filters can be added on top of each other, which allows you to find new contacts as well as the reps that need a reminder to enter new data in the CRM as they get it. The CRM is updated in real time, so you can check to see not only who is entering data but whether they enter data throughout the day or wait until the end of the day.

You can encourage your team to use the CRM by rewarding reps who enter data quickly or by withholding commission until you can see the data in the CRM. If a rep needs some extra help using the CRM contact us and we’re happy to give them a one-on-one tutorial! If you still have a CRM hold-out, you can even reassign their leads to another rep who is using the CRM to make it clear that everything needs to be in the shared CRM database. The best CRM practice is to enter data as you gather it -- if you wait until the end of the day it’s too easy to forget or push it off another day, and the data may never be input! There is another article here about creating a habit of immediately entering data in the CRM.