Whatfix, the leader in Digital Adoption Solutions (“DAS”), revealed new data based on a survey of 500 US-based enterprises, that evaluated the current state of adoption of CRM systems. The survey found that 70 percent of enterprises believe that implementing a Digital Adoption Platform is the key to increased sales productivity and successful CRM adoption. On average, an enterprise reported a median savings of $8.66 million for digital adoption of their CRM system.
Enterprises are increasingly investing in various enterprise applications as part of their digital transformation initiative, with SalesTech tools amongst them. While CRM systems such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, HubSpot, Oracle, SAP, and more are the most prevalent or deployed, enterprises are challenged with user adoption of these tools due to the complexity of constant customizations and updates that are rolled out for particular business environments. As such, these constant changes impact the employee experience and their adoption of CRM systems – preventing enterprises as a whole from a successful digital adoption while simultaneously affecting their bottom line.
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Whatfix’s study found that more than half of enterprise sales representatives love their CRM system and use it often, but they face numerous barriers to fully adopting these tools such as lack of training and time-consuming data entry. As more companies move to the cloud with their CRM systems, using a DAS provides employees seamless onboarding, as well as ongoing learning and development throughout their entire workflow.
Additional key findings from the study include:
- 200 out of the 500 enterprises (nearly 40%) who do not regularly use their CRM systems claim that data entry in their CRM system is time-consuming
- 179 out of 500 enterprises (35%) don’t feel equipped to use their CRM system and need more training
- 90 percent believe that improved CRM adoption will lead to higher sales rep productivity and reduce sales cycle time
- Over 50% of those surveyed reported achieving and expecting to achieve productivity gains of 11-30% with complete adoption of their CRM system by their sales reps
- 71% of enterprises plan (37%) or are considering (34%) to adopt Digital Adoption Solutions
- 500 enterprises together reported a total savings of $4.35 billion for digital adoption on just driving adoption of their CRM system
- On average, an enterprise reported a median savings of $8.66 million for digital adoption of their CRM system
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“While a majority of enterprises have deployed CRM systems, industry research shows that less than 46% of sales reps use their company’s CRM and that 70% of CRM implementations fail to achieve their expected outcome. Our CRM Survey confirmed that enabling sales rep adoption of CRM via a digital adoption platform delivers 11-30% higher sales rep productivity and tangible savings of $8.66M annually for a typical enterprise,” said Khadim Batti, CEO and co-founder of Whatfix.
“Since we’ve implemented Whatfix’s digital adoption platform, we’ve been able to empower our workforce to get the right training they need at the right time. Using a digital adoption platform has given us the ability to customize our CRM systems, ultimately increasing sales productivity, adoption, and provide seamless onboarding and training for our employees across different roles,” said Lee Glenn, senior specialist, Global CRM Training at Experian.
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According to the Hype Cycle for CRM Sales Technology 2019, it says about Digital Adoption Solutions: “Gartner’s inquiry volume on digital adoption solutions has increased 66% this past year. They should be used to increase the overall adoption and ROI of other purchased point solutions. These solutions increase the usage of multiple point solutions, helping sellers gain efficiency and provide a faster time to full performance for new hires. The primary use case is for sales onboarding to get them up to full productivity faster utilizing multiple point solutions. The second use case helps with process change management. The technology requires little technical requirements and deploys quickly. It is deployed mainly on top of cloud solutions showing little if any degradation in the performance of the original software. The products are beginning to use machine learning and analytics on usage to help organizations overcome obstacles. The main obstacle to large adoption will be quantifiable evidence that can be attributed to improved performance and justification for the expense of another training solution. Digital adoption solutions do not replace formal training or sales training solutions.”
