The CRM adoption challenge is tough to tackle as it’s not just a single problem;
it’s a series of issues that continuously feed into each other and create a never-ending vicious cycle.
Inefficiency in CRM can lead to customer relationships mismanagement, failing to capture
valuable insights and data, or even leading to a loss of potential customers leaving unfavorable consequences/impacts on the business.
The top four reasons for CRM failures are:
1] Lack of efforts towards useful data collection
2] User misses out on seeing the value of the data
3] Inadequate or inefficient insights generated
4] Very minimum manual efforts
Data remains the lifeblood of every business, but for it to add any value to the company, it is critical for the sales department to store, input and update accurate data as well as to assure data quality and integrity.
Analytics – Most B2B Enterprises Observed Marketing Advances with Quality Data
Logging emails, recording, phone calls, and meeting details become a significant part of a sales team’s daily routine. This adds a lot of manual data entry tasks to their work, which might complicate their jobs and discourage them from adopting the software.
This is precisely where the vicious cycle commences – sales departments fail to see the value of the CRM right off the bat, making them put in minimal effort in the data entry stage. Entering and adding the data manually into the CRM is a workplace drudgery for them. As confirmed by HubSpot, manual data entry leads the list of CRM adoption challenges, with about 32% of sales representatives spending over an hour on data entry each day which, is not a very good use of their time.
With an ever-decreasing effort, the sales and marketing teams might put in low-quality data or leave out the essential data points, causing the CRM to be filled with inaccurate, sparse data. Poor data quality can become a vast overhead for companies in the long run. Businesses believe that poor data quality has resulted in creating an average of $15 million loss each year.
Poor Data Cause of Almost Thirty-Eight Percent of Marketing Spend Wasted
Inadequate data weakens the CRM systems of companies, leading to a loss of faith and
decreasing its use amongst the employees. The weak data might also lead to poor insights that provide very limited value to the business development teams. This is a massive problem for the management as well, since, without the relevant data, a manager can’t run any accurate report or conduct analytics on any report. And without the analytics, they might even fail to answer the most critical business questions. So the whole point of having a CRM in the first place is ultimately lost.
With little insight being gained from the inadequate data, the CRM will underpin the sales team to believe that there’s nothing in it for them. The cycle continues to repeat, leaving them to grow more and more disconnected and least interested in the tool. It’s not at all hard to see how such a cycle can affect CRM adoption rates. Most companies fail to consider user adoption issues while planning their CRM projects thoroughly. They should actually build a robust adoption strategy from the very beginning and keep it as the focal point intact throughout the CRM lifetime.
