Getting the Sales Force to use the CRM System: Compliance

It’s one thing to get decision-makers in a company to buy and install a SFA (Sales Force Automation) system.  A good article about the many benefits of installing SFA is here:
http://www.insidecrm.com/features/selling-sfa-092707/

But then you need to get the sales force to actually use the system the way it was designed.  If you have a new sales force automation system, or a major change to an existing one, getting the sales force to enter the data you want, in a timely manner, is always difficult.  Sales reps say things like:

• “Why do you want me to enter all this information into your dumb system?  It takes forever.”
  
• “I’m good at my job, I beat quota every year.  I don’t need this system, go away.”
• “You only want me to enter all this info about my clients so you can replace me!”

There are no easy answers here.  Some companies have tied system use to bonus structure, but this tends to produce volumes of bad data as sales reps do the minimum needed to meet the standard (sometimes with fictional data).  Some simply say “do it, or else!” and some of their top reps leave.

The best approaches I’ve seen have a “carrot and stick” approach, where there are some positive incentives for using the system are added.  A simple “carrot” might be a semi-random prize (a small prize but with great recognition) for particularly well-entered customer data (for entering quality, not quantity). 

The best single method I’ve ever seen (and it probably wouldn’t work everywhere) involved a carefully selected pilot group, and a longer-than-normal time the system was in pilot (over three months).  A few pilot users found that being able to enter customer interactions the same day they occurred helped later sales calls, and that ranking the people they talked to by influence and decision-making power helped their sales closing - and that the mere fact of entering this data made them think more critically about where to spend their efforts. 

These users were persuaded to talk to the rest of the sales force at the national sales meeting - the combination of “stick” (management says: do it!) and “carrot” (my fellow rep made more money this way!) led to about 80% compliance the first two months.  (Typical compliance is under 50% to start.)

Compliance for the rest of the reps was a matter of management attention backed up by custom reporting.  I designed a report that only showed date and time of day of data entry; it was an eye-opener as it showed who was entering a bunch of data late Sunday night, instead of all week as they were supposed to.