CRM Implementation Best Practices Guide

When you are new to using a CRM platform (such as Zoho, Keap, Hubspot, or Salesforce), the idea seems simple enough - get all of this information from my spreadsheet of contacts into one place.  Then you begin learning about all of the exciting features, such as email templates, workflows, and integrations with other applications that you use. Shiny object syndrome may hit. We've all been victims to it before, so you're not alone. 

If you focus on the exciting features too much and neglect proper setup of the basics, then your powerful CRM platform becomes... well, a mess. Usage slowly shifts into the category of "tools I should use, but generally avoid." This is especially true for sales teams. Give them the wrong things to focus on, and they are not likely to use your CRM.

If your team hits this point, then it's time to step back and evaluate. Either assign someone in the company to take on this task or hire a third-party CRM consulting firm.  As the primary user or admin, it can be difficult to objectively evaluate your CRM. 

1. Goals: What do you need from your CRM? 

Write a list of your goals for the information that is needed from your CRM. A few examples may include: identifying hottest leads quickly, reports on open deals, activity tracking for customer retention, and tracking referrals. 

2. Customer Data and Details: What do you know about your customers?

One of the key features of a CRM software is the fact that it is more than a robust spreadsheet. This is a fully-featured database system. [More about Database Basics]

When you initially set up your CRM, did you take into account all of the important information you want to have reports on? These are likely to be custom fields, such as birthday, industry, buying behaviors, location details, and the health of the working relationship.

Entering this information into notes means you cannot necessarily pull reports on it, which reduces the quality of your database. When you want to better understand patterns in your customers, reports will help you to better define customer personas. 

3. Customer Journey: What are the most common steps for leads / prospects to take?

Your CRM strategy depends on what you need your CRM to provide the business. It also depends on how your business attains customers. 

Once you understand how to find and sell to customers, then you’ll naturally know what you need from a CRM strategy and software. Here are a few questions to help you:

• How do people discover your business?
• When are they ready to buy? And how do you know it?
• What does it take to close deals and sell?

4. Process: Have you documented or diagrammed your workflow processes?

Beyond goals and customer information, one of the most crucial components of a successful CRM setup is understanding your workflow processes. Sketch out your workflows related to the CRM by starting with your top priorities in each workflow. 

You must be able to communicate these essential processes to your team members who use the CRM. Consistent use of your CRM is vital to your success. Something great that can come from this step of evaluation are new ideas for your content marketing and customer nurturing. 

When we evaluate your CRM, we are looking for bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and redundancies in your CRM strategy and platform usage. We identify the places where processes can be streamlined. Are there holes in your workflow? Are things falling between the cracks or not being addressed? Perhaps one workflow is overwriting another one.

The second part is to consider how you can make the CRM user-friend to different team members based on their role. 

5 CRM User Best Practices for success

1. Permissions Impact Your Data Security

 It may not be the most exciting thing to consider, but the proper setup of user roles and permissions is vital to security and business success. Even in a business with a small team, consider limiting the access to different modules or actions within your CRM for certain users. It will simplify their user experience so they are not distracted by things that do not pertain to their role.  Put the right responsibility into the right hands https://www.zoho.com/crm/role-based-security.html  

2. User Adoption and Processes 

 As the leader in your organization, you must model the CRM adoption and enforce among team members that it is required to get the job done.  Getting buy-in from the entire team is vital for the successful use of a CRM or any other business software. As a leader, you have the responsibility of cultivating good habits with your team of users.

The fastest way to make a mess of your CRM data is with inconsistent and incorrect processes. Use the document with your processes and workflows (or create one if you haven't already). It is easy to overwhelm the team by asking them to change everything all at once, so the best way to approach this is by rolling out one to two processes at a time. Start with your top priorities. Perhaps this is simply the updated procedure of making phone calls through the CRM for automatic tracking or adding new opportunities into the CRM instead of the old spreadsheet.

3. Automate the Mundane

According to Hubspot's 2024 State of Sales Report, only 39% of a sales rep’s time is spent selling or interacting with prospects and customers. The rest of their time is spent on administrative tasks or research. 

Working with your sales person(s), identify the most mundane and tedious tasks that are repeated the same exact way every time (i.e. Create a follow-up task when I log a voicemail). If it does not require human decision-making, then you can automate it. 

You will minimize costs, increase productivity, and improve data quality when you properly use workflow automations.  Automations enables your team to spend more time on the important tasks, and it can improve prospect & customer engagement.

One common automation to use is to label leads who do not wish to receive emails. You can automatically update those leads to remove wasted time by sending emails to unverified recipients who are not qualified.  This also avoids the negative result of potentially being reported as “Spam,” which damages email deliverability and open rates. 

4. CRM Reporting and Using Your Data

Among the greatest benefits we get from a CRM is data collection and reporting. Why? Because there is so much we can learn about our customers, leads, and even our operations from reporting. 

Before getting excited about reports, there is important preliminary work to do. First, identify your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). What do you want to measure, why, and how often?  One common sales KPI may be number of leads contacted each week. A common marketing KPI may be about email click rates per campaign. These are important benchmarks that serve the larger business goals of generating revenue for growth. 

Using your KPIs, prepare reports ahead of time for your team to use and reference on a regular basis – add them to the CRM homepage. You may want to email KPI reports every Friday with the latest statistics so the team knows where they stand before the weekend. More important than getting the reports is using the data. Have a plan or strategy for how that data is applied to daily business practices and decision-making. 

5. Gamification

If you can make work more fun, then why not? A great way to lift a team’s competitive spirit is by gamifying your systems, especially your CRM software.  This can include offering prizes to your team for best user adoption or increased sales opportunities.  On the simpler side, many systems, such as Zoho CRM, include digital gamification through online badges.

This is a successful approach to reinforce any CRM training previously done. Delivering positive reinforcement like rewards or prizes can increase motivation and engagement among team members. 

BONUS: Continual Training

     While everyone has different motivators, professional development is a highly reported benefit that companies can offer – recurring training. In the case of Zoho CRM, this may be an annual training to refresh knowledge, highlight new features, and ask for new ideas about what will make their working day smoother. 

If your company is conducting CRM training, then be sure that all training reflects your agreed-upon processes. Thinking back to the best practices of User Adoption in this list, consistency is vital for success. Software is one of those things that requires continual training and learning with the team. Each time you host a CRM training, it creates a new opportunity for feedback, improvements in process, and learning from each other. 

CRM implementation requires, above everything else, a strong plan and following user best practices. You might face challenges such as data integrity, automation decisions, manual data entry, user adoption, and more. Following CRM user best practices can significantly improve the usefulness of your CRM system.