TRAINING & ADOPTION

We very often come to hear how CRM projects tend to fail. A study by the Merkel Group Inc estimated that 63% of project in large organisations fail. At the face of it this is a very high number and one might think, is it worth the investment in CRM in your organization. The sweet news is that the same survey also showed that the organisations who had successfully implemented CRM also saw very clear benefits and real business value.

So how do we make sure that you also get to reap the benefits and avoid your CRM project failure?

Here are a few statistics that may inspire you to push your CRM adoption project further: (Source Linkedin state of sales & Nucleus Research paper etc)

  • For every Dollar spent the average ROI for CRM is $8.71
  • 82% of top salespeople cite CRM tools as “critical” to their ability to close deals.
  • 47% of CRM users said that their CRM had a significant impact on customer retention and customer satisfaction.
  • 74% of businesses improve customer relationships with CRM.

Having said that, before you plan to implement CRM you must have done a lot of research and in the process addressed all critical concerns and chosen the right CRM and a right partner to implement CRM at your organization. At USSG we can help you in the process of choosing the right CRM apt for your organization and be your partner of choice to implement it too No project, particularly a CRM is complete unless the last mile issues like training & adoption are properly taken care of.

Why do most CRM projects fail? Research has shown the following key reasons…

  • Very low rate of adoption among users
  • Lack of clear ownership of project and customer insights
  • Lack of management bandwidth and executive sponsorship
  • CRM not being an IT priority compared to other areas

According to a large survey conducted by Forrester Research, “people” issues are the biggest challenge to a successful CRM implementation. These “people” issues fall into three distinct categories, where slow CRM end-user adoption is by far the most distinct challenge, as shown in the chart below):

Let’s face it. No one likes change. And we at USSG are Change Management specialists. We can help your resources go through the process of change, understand the benefits they shall reap by the change and ensure that they are a part of the change. You can leave it to our experts who shall engage with your CRM users right from the beginning of the project sign off and by the time the project is moved to production USSG shall ensure that the CRM adoption champions-who are different from the program managers who lead your CRM system implementation, are identified and they in-turn would drive the adoption internally.

TRAINING

At USSG we give the highest priority to this very important aspect of your Salesforce CRM implementation and adoption strategy. To ensure that your ROI in your SFDC CRM is quickly accrued, we emphasize on different training methodologies to different clients based on the domain and size. Some of our commonly used training methodologies are:

TRAINING TO ALL END USERS

As a standard offering we train all end users of the Salesforce CRM on all the standard features and work-flows. This is done module wise and on the system in sandbox environment. Once the system is moved to production our trainers will handhold the users and help them overcome any hurdles.

ADMIN TRAINING

A few identified resources are trained as Admins of the system who are trained to do the first level of tweaking, creating users, creating basic dashboards and MIS, access controls etc. We encourage them to undertake Admin certification from Salesforce.

POWER USER TRAINING

We identify the Champions during the implementation stage and convert them into Power users, these are a mix of tech Savvy executives picked from different business groups from within the organization and are trained to make the minor changes in the system without any external support. They are kind of mini trainers within the organization

TRAIN THE TRAINER

This method is used in certain large organisations where it becomes difficult to train all the end users. So USSG creates a group of Trainers from within the user group and train them in the usage of the Salesforce CRM from end to end. They in turn travel across locations and train the teams in smaller groups and ensure that all the users are trained to increase adoption.