Motivating and incentivizing your team to use LACRM

While getting started with LACRM, you're probably thinking about customizations, setup time, and training yourself in your new program -- but have you planned how you'll onboard your team too? Implementing a new program can mean confronting issues with slow user adoption, inadequate training, and difficulty adopting to a new way of working.

If you want to ensure success for your team, you should focus on motivating your team so that they are excited for the new software, and incentivizing your team to use the CRM so that your new database can actually help your company grow. In this post, we'll go over tips from real LACRM customers on how to get your team pumped for the CRM and make sure that everyone feels encouraged to use the software as much as possible from the first day of training.

Motivating: Get your team excited about the CRM

Before your team even looks at the CRM, you need to make everyone excited for the new system and the ways it will make their work easier and better. If your employees are internally motivated to get started with the CRM, training will feel more like an important process rather than a chore.

• Explain how the CRM will help them. Your employees already know that the CRM will benefit the company as a whole, but it's important to remind them that the CRM will help them, too. After all, a CRM can keep you more organized, prevent leads from slipping through the cracks, and improve your recall with clients. For more ideas, check out this list to help explain how a CRM will improve the user's life and job performance.
• Make your team a part of the CRM selection process. Once you’ve narrowed down your CRM to your top few choices, get your office involved in picking the final product. If there are a few folks who will really be using the CRM, make sure they like the product and find it easy to use before committing them to software they aren’t crazy about.
• Cultivate buy-in with a practice CRM account. Tom took it slow when setting up and onboarding his team with the CRM; first, he had a user set up a practice account, learn the ins and outs of the system, and become the office’s resident CRM expert. Only then did Tom open up a real CRM account and start onboarding his users one by one. Having a CRM evangelist can help with onboarding your team and convincing everyone that using the CRM will create real results.
• Setup an account and show your team a system that works. Since her team was initially hesitant to use the CRM, Judi created and set up an account on her own. She entered all the data, got everything organized, and became a CRM expert before even showing her team the CRM. By the time Judi revealed the CRM to her team, she could show them a system that really worked and gave them the “Wow” factor they needed to get excited about using the CRM.
• Acknowledge the learning curve. No matter how awesome a new system seems, there will always be struggles with learning something new. Before using the CRM, Mario explained this learning curve to his team and told them to hang in there. Showing your team a light at the end of the tunnel will help them see through the struggle of the initial onboarding process.
• Show them that the CRM is for more than just sales. Do your employees wear multiple hats? Want to bring your marketing and customer service teams into the CRM, too? Be sure to show your new users how the CRM can help them with marketing, customer service, recruiting, and more. Not sure which features to highlight? Contact our support to schedule a team demo or ask for helpful resources!
• Encourage your team to customize their calendars. Subcalendars are a great way to track your entire day in the CRM. An individual user can create as many different subcalendars as they want, and they can color-code and designate sharing permissions for each one. For example, you can have a public work calendar, a 'busy' subcalendar for your admin tasks, and another private subcalendar for all of your personal events and to-dos. A customized setup can make the software seem more personalized and user-friendly. Plus, if employees keep more of their day in the CRM, they'll be logging in more often and be more likely to enter data regularly.

Incentivizing: Make sure your team is actually using the CRM

Your team is using the CRM, and you’re pulling regular reports to check in on everyone — but you noticed that there are still a few stragglers who are logging in irregularly, forgetting to leave notes, and waiting weeks to enter new contacts or leads. There will always be a few folks who just don’t take to the CRM, so it's important to give them strong incentives to learn the new program and actually use it on a daily basis.

• Make CRM use a part of the job. For Mario’s team, CRM use is a part of the job description. It’s not optional; if someone isn’t using the CRM, they are not a good fit for his team.
• Institutionalize the CRM with by creating strict rules. Every job has policies surrounding import procedures or parts of the job; the CRM should be no different. If you want your team to take the CRM seriously, make sure they know exactly how you want them to use the CRM with some pre-planned rules.
• Establish a “Use it or lose it” policy. Estelle and Stephen Cockcroft didn’t want to micromanage their sales team, so they created rules to keep everyone incentivized to use the CRM. On the Cockcroft’s sales team, whoever enters a new lead into the CRM first claims the lead. If that salesperson fails to follow up with their new lead, then the Cockcrofts reassign the lead to someone else. With these rules, salespeople are motivated to enter leads right away and schedule consistent follow ups to ensure they keep their leads too.
• Review activity with your reps. No matter what policies or CRM rules you choose to instate, you’ll need to use CRM data to hold your users accountable. LACRM has three main reports, an activity report, a task report, and pipeline reports, that will help you track your users’ activity and success with clients. If your users know that reports will be pulled from the CRM to assess their progress, they’ll be more likely to diligently enter data so they can accept credit for their work.
• Let your users know that you can see when they log in. From the Users Settings page, account admins can see the date a user was last active. Let your users know that you will check their last log in date, in addition to pulling reports from the CRM, for sales meetings.