How to incentivize your team to use the CRM

This article was included in the February 23rd, 2016 issue of the LACRM Newsletter.

As we always say, CRMs are inherently annoying, which is why we’ve called ourselves Less Annoying CRM instead of Not Annoying CRM. We know that entering notes after every call is tiresome, and you have better things to do than update a lead in a pipeline. But we also know that while at times painful, saving information into the system regularly will save you so much more time in the long run. That’s what a CRM is for after all! But when you are working in a team, using a CRM is not a one-man task. Everyone needs to be using the CRM for it to be as useful a tool as possible. Therefore, we are sharing a tip today from Estelle and Stephen Cockcroft, owners of Catamaran Guru, on how they motivate their team to use the CRM:

“We have a number of brokers on our team, and each of them are a user on our account. After every boat show, they enter in their own leads so that we know who is working with which contact. If two or more of our brokers enter the same lead, whoever entered that lead into the CRM first will get the account. This way, they know that they should enter a lead into the system as soon as possible to claim that lead.

We also don’t like micromanaging our team and want them to be self-starters, but we do still want to be able to keep track of what they are doing or not doing. If we notice that they have forgotten to update a customer more than once, they lose the lead to another broker. They got the message after a few times, and now regularly use the CRM.”

-Estelle & Stephen Cockcroft, Owners of Catamaran Guru

Tip to try: Enter in notes or updates immediately after a call or any other interaction instead of saving it for the end of the week or month. Motivate your team to do the same by rewarding frequent updates so that it stops becoming a chore and starts becoming a habit! You can even filter out your contacts to pull up lists of leads added or updated by certain users so that you know who you should be reminding to use the CRM. Click here for a quick tutorial on how you can pull up freshly entered contacts.

We hope this has given you an idea or two about how you can make CRM-use a little less annoying. Once you’ve jumped this hurdle, you’ll appreciate the amount of information you have right at your fingertips! As always, if you have any questions, just  contact us!

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