We don’t have to tell you that your CRM software is a mission-critical solution for your sales team. But just having a CRM isn’t enough: You’ve got to empower your team to use it to its fullest potential. And that needs to include more than just deploying the software and emailing a manual.

Let’s get real: Initial CRM training can feel like drinking from a firehose. There’s too much information, too little hands-on practical experience, and little to no real-world selling guidance.

What happens then? You guessed it. Sales teams go right back to their old habits (spreadsheets of personal information, anyone?) or use the CRM only sparingly. And if that’s what’s happening, not only is your investment not going to get the ROI you want, but you run all manner of risks regarding data privacy and information silos.

What’s Behind the Failure to Adopt

The failure to achieve CRM user adoption occurs for several core reasons:

• Resistance to Change: Employees who have had success using their own methods of customer relationship management are often loath to change their habits. Resistance to change is inevitable.
• Accountability: CRMs can be perceived as “Big Brother,” tracking every move and bogging down users with busy administrative work. Salesforce estimates that sales reps spend two-thirds of their time on administrative tasks not directly tied to the sales process.
• Lack of Contextual Training: A one-size-fits-all approach will garner a failure to adopt. Driving CRM user adoption requires training that is contextual to each employee group’s use of the system.

All of the above can contribute to a loss of confidence in the CRM and ultimately a strong resistance to CRM adoption. Beefing up your training is perhaps one of the biggest ways you can ensure the CRM is not only used, but used correctly.

The Value Proposition of Effective CRM Training

Why invest in deep CRM training? Beyond the basics, a comprehensive plan gives your users the foundation needed to maximize their productivity and the organization’s ROI.

• Reduce “Time to Proficiency” for New Sellers: Get your new team members productive faster by easily providing contextual sales process information.
• Drive Business Outcomes: Proper training ensures teams input quality data, allowing the business as a whole to make better decisions and improve processes.
• Accurate and Consistent CRM Data: Better CRM data quality—driven by proper training—leads to better organizational outcomes.
• Drive Productivity: A well-trained CRM user is a productive CRM user. They spend less time on data entry or looking for documentation, and more time on customer relationships and closing deals.
• Continual Adoption: The better trained your teams are on the CRM, the more adaptive they are to platform updates and internal process changes.

Building an Effective CRM Training Plan

Your effective CRM training plan will be, to some extent, as unique as your business. Yet there are still some core steps to consider:

1. Identify End-User Needs and Roles: Not all CRM users are created equal. BDRs have different needs from sales managers. Tailor the training to the specific role and the features they will use most often.
2. Play in the Sandbox: About 70% of knowledge is gained from hands-on experience, so let your teams practice in a sandbox environment without fear of “breaking” anything.
3. Keep Instructions Digestible and Contextual: Don’t overwhelm your teams. Consider in-app guidance that will walk users through specific processes as they go.
4. Use Real-World Examples: Train for the exact scenarios your users will actually experience (e.g., updating a customer record after a sales call).
5. Try Different Learning Formats: Offer several options for learning—from video to classroom to hands-on—to speak to how various individuals learn best.
6. Continually Reinforce Training: Create an ongoing program that refreshes memories, addresses new features, and reinforces best practices, as users can forget training quickly.
7. Get Feedback! Ask your teams what’s working, where they’re still struggling, and what else they want to learn via short surveys or meetings.

Better Training, Better Success

Since your sales productivity can be won—or lost—based on the day-to-day experience of using your CRM, it’s critical to ensure that users fully embrace the system and learn how to use it well. With more than 70% of organizations admitting to struggling with their CRMs, most of the issues they face come down to training issues. The more you train your users, the better your success will be.

This is a core tenet behind why we offer an exclusive CloudExtend track on Celigo University, our proprietary learning center for all things Celigo and CloudExtend. Here you’ll find everything you need to get ramped up on our integration apps—which, by the way, work very well with CRM for user adoption and automation!

Or maybe you’re still starting out on your CRM journey and struggling to get your team to adopt the new system. Read our FREE ebook, Understanding and Overcoming the Barriers to CRM Adoption, for tips on identifying and understanding how different users react to a change in technology.