How to onboard a new hire with the CRM

Hiring a great person is hard enough, but how do you train and onboard a new hire efficiently? With a CRM, you can use your software to not only help new employees build good record keeping habits, but also monitor their progress, make sure they are accomplishing their daily tasks, and hitting their targets as they go.

1. Set up their account

You can create a user account for your new employee by going to your Users settings page in the CRM. You’ll need to decide your new employee’s permissions and status. Your new hire can have edit, read only, or no access to other users’ contacts and calendars; they can also have administrative status, which would allow them to customize the CRM and check in on other users. Finally, you can determine whether or not a new employee can export data.

You can always decide to give an employee limited permissions during their training period so that they can concentrate on their own contacts and calendar while they are learning the ropes of the CRM. Then, you can give the employee more permissions or administrative access as needed.

Need more assistance? Check out this tutorial or contact us!

2. Schedule a demo

Have the Less Annoying team walk your new employee through their daily workflow in the CRM! A CRM coach can show your new hire how all of the features work, what pipelines are, as well as answer any questions. If the CRM is a part of your business’ everyday functioning, your employee will learn a huge part of their job description by understanding the ins and outs of the CRM.

By going through the CRM, your new employee will learn how to create tasks and events in the Calendar, which will keep them accountable for their schedule. They will learn how to leave notes about client interactions so that you can monitor their calls and productivity. Plus, they’ll understand how pipelines work from a pro so they can track and report their sales.

Click this link to schedule a demo with Less Annoying CRM. Want to have more than one new hire on the call? Just let us know! We can also record a demo with you so that you can show it to employees for future training.

3. Follow CRM Best Practices

Make sure your new employee understands CRM best practices with the following first week tips:

• Schedule CRM time into their Calendar: make sure your employee receives an Agenda email every morning by scheduling tasks and events on your new hire’s Calendar in the CRM. If they make their CRM a daily habit, they are more likely to accurately and consistently enter data. For their first week, give them a reminder task to check their Calendar first thing in the morning. Then, set an event for their last few minutes in the office to make sure they review their Workspace and Activity Report. Every call or meeting should have a corresponding note, all follow up emails should be sent, and all of their tasks should be checked off.
• Prevent double entry: make sure that your new hire knows to enter everything into the CRM first. This will prevent them from keeping post-its or saving information in other systems and then having to double-enter that information into the CRM. For example, when you’re on the phone, don’t write a note down— instead, open up the CRM and type your thoughts there. When you receive a new document from a client, immediately upload it into the CRM. This will help your new hire get into the habit of using the CRM regularly and prevent data from being lost.
• Make CRM rules: no one likes to micromanage their team, so set up a policy around your CRM that you can enforce. For example, make sure that your new hire always has a follow up scheduled after their last touch with a contact. This will make sure that their Calendar stays full and they are always working towards building relationships. You might also want to have a no-deleting rule in the CRM; you never know when a contact will become important, and you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater when trying to “clean up” data. Instead, tell your reps to put contacts into an “Inactive” group in the CRM, or used closed pipeline statuses to determine uninterested contacts. Finally, let your new hire know that if they don’t use the CRM, they will lose clients or leads to other team members. Explain that if they forget to enter or update a contact, you’ll assign the record to someone else.
• Monitor your employee’s progress: pull weekly reports from the CRM to make sure that your new hire is entering data and staying on top of their to do list. You can pull up their Activity Report to see if they’ve been entering contacts, logging emails, completing tasks, and leaving notes after calls and meetings. Use the Lead report to see if they are hitting their sales goals and making follow ups.

4. Schedule a 1:1 meeting

Having frequent meetings with employees (old and new) can help you stay on top of your business and keep your team focused. Add the meeting to your employee’s Calendar and leave yourself a task to pull up and glance at any reports before you sit down together. During your meeting, go over any wins and losses from the previous week, discuss current projects, and brainstorm strategies for the future. You might be able to help your new hire close a sale, and you can correct any bad CRM habits early on.

After training

Now that your new employee is caught up and using the CRM, you can keep using the software to periodically check in on your team. Here are a few ideas:

• Pull lists of contacts that haven’t been updated in awhile, and give the assigned user a nudge that it’s time to follow up.
• Find the average number of touches it takes to make a sale for each of your reps. Evaluate reps that take longer to close deals and see if you can come up with new strategies for improvement.
• Find bottlenecks in your sales process to see how you can grow your business faster. If you realize you have a lot of leads but aren’t closing them, you may need to update your sales process. If you’re closing deals left and right but don’t seem to have enough of them, it’s time to work on marketing.
• Test your team with a CRM fire drill to make sure everyone has good data entry habits. You’ll prepare your system for growth, refresh people's memories of CRM training, and re-energize everyone’s CRM use.