Navigating CRM challenges to maximizing success

5 common CRM challenges and how to overcome them

The B2B sales funnel can be long and complex. Utilizing a B2B sales CRM can help manage this complexity by tracking interactions, automating processes, and providing insights to move leads through the funnel more efficiently. There are multiple stakeholders to engage and several decision-makers to impress, which can prove difficult to keep up with if you aren’t super organized. 

You can solve issues within a complex and lengthy funnel cycle with a modern customer relationship management tool (CRM). It can help you identify the right leads to target based on past interactions and demographics. A CRM can also help schedule follow-ups and reminders–ensuring you never miss a meeting or deadline. No more juggling notes or missing opportunities. With a CRM, you can focus on closing deals.

However,  you need the right CRM to meet your business needs. Choose the wrong CRM, and you might find yourself with a tool that’s hard to integrate into your existing tech stack, has a steep learning curve, or makes your job more difficult.

Top 5 CRM challenges

As deal volumes increase, sales leaders are under pressure to manage the workload and effectively allocate resources while ensuring consistent sales performance. Factoring in longer deal cycles, it becomes even more vital to use the right CRM, for sales teams to log, track, and monitor deals till closure.

Here are some common challenges B2B companies face with CRMs.

1. Lack of alignment with business goals 

CRMs become a core part of a business’s existing sales cycle, but without clear-cut goals, businesses can find themselves floundering. If there are no defined goals, teams struggle to know what they need to achieve with a CRM. This leads to high expectations and, ultimately, disappointment when the CRM doesn’t align with an existing sales process. 

2. User adoption challenges

About 17% of CRM users cite poor user adoption as a key challenge. Adding new tools to your existing stack is always a risk and requires commitment from teams to get up to speed on how they can use it for their core tasks. 

The onboarding process is critical for increasing user adoption, but insufficient training can lead to resistance to change. In fact, 19% of CRM users have difficulty training users on the system. Without ample training for all teams, adoption rates can dwindle quickly.

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3. Data quality issues

CRMs rely on clean, accurate data. However, if you have various teams adding customer data in different formats or through different tools, it can lead to inaccurate or incomplete data entry. 

4. Too complex with a steep learning curve

Many CRMs are full of rich features but, while this creates endless possibilities, it can discourage users who feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options. Often, understanding the range of features requires a high amount of learning and development, which can be time-consuming—keeping sales teams away from their daily task list. 

5. Poor planning 

Pain points vary from company to company, and no two companies have the exact same business needs from CRM software. While trying to cover all bases, many CRMs fail to truly understand what features end-users actually need or how much budget they have to play with. This can be remedied by interviewing salespeople to find out what issues they face and what features would be helpful. 

You also need to get buy-in from executives to approve the budget and implementation process. Build a business case that outlines how a CRM will help the business, use data to back up your key points, and use examples from other companies that have seen success with a CRM. 

How to get the most out of your CRM software

Understanding the common challenges of CRM software can help you get ahead and ensure you and your team get the most out of your CRM. 

Here’s how you can do that.

1. Pre-implementation 

Before you implement your new CRM system, lay the foundations. 

Here are five questions to ask before implementing a CRM: 

• What tasks will reps automate?

• How will customer conversations happen through CRM?

• What data do salespeople need to input at each stage of the pipeline?

• How will the CRM work side by side with the existing tools?

• How can Sales and Marketing collaborate through the CRM to ensure customers have a seamless buying experience? 

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can set your goals and strategically choose the best tool for your business needs. 

Define clear goals and objectives

Start by defining clear goals and objectives—what role will the CRM play in the sales cycle? What metrics matter most? What are your sales goals this month or quarter and how will a CRM tie into these goals? The first step in CRM success is knowing what you want it to do. For example, a “20% reduction in customer churn over four quarters”, or “boost revenue by 10% over three quarters”. 

Select the right CRM for your business

Once you know what you need your CRM to do and how it aligns with your goals, you can whittle down your options to the best CRM solutions for you and your business. Take your time to explore what each CRM has to offer, read reviews, and compare the features against other available tools on the market. To ensure smooth CRM adoption and maximize its impact, prioritize user-friendliness. Choose a system with an intuitive interface and invest in comprehensive training programs. 

Ultimately, you should choose a CRM that easily adapts to your existing sales process, is quick to configure, and seamlessly migrates data in multiple formats.

Establish clear policies and procedures 

One of the most common CRM challenges happens when businesses dive straight in without setting up systems. This can lead to inconsistent data formats, duplicate content, and rushed campaigns. Instead, take the time to lay out exactly how you want teams to enter CRM data, what they can use the CRM for, and any company-wide policies you want to put in place. 

2. Implementation

The CRM implementation stage is crucial for ensuring team members are comfortable using the tool so that you can streamline business operations. 

User-centric training 

Start by providing in-depth training for everyone who’ll be using the CRM during the implementation process. Create demos that speak to each specific use case and set aside time to answer questions, explore roadblocks, and help teams get up to speed on procedures. 

Phased approach 

Ease into your new CRM by strategically swapping out existing tools and creating a phased approach to each use case. Maybe you can start with one team at a time or start with one specific use to give teams the chance to familiarize themselves with the CRM and get comfortable using it. 

Data migration and cleansing 

Move your existing data across from other platforms so it’s all in one place. This is the perfect opportunity to clean up your data to ensure you’re only adding accurate and up-to-date details of your customers. Delete duplicate entries, create systemized formats, and refresh any old data. 

3. Post-implementation 

A successful strategy doesn’t stop after you’ve implemented your CRM. You should iteratively get feedback from users, identify issues, and incorporate fixes to maximize and optimize your strategy. 

Data maintenance 

Once you’ve implemented your CRM, it’s important to maintain your data. Having strict policies and procedures around data formats is a huge help. Still, you should also schedule regular maintenance sessions where you can delete outdated data, remove duplicate content, address any formatting issues, and stay on top of data security. 

User adoption and feedback 

Continue to provide support to CRM users beyond the onboarding phase. You can schedule regular training to keep salespeople up-to-date with the latest CRM features as well as request feedback to see how team members are using the tool for specific use cases. 

While you want to choose a CRM that’s easy to set up, training is a continuous process and it’ll take time for teams to get to grips with all the features, updates, and bug fixes. You can improve CRM adoption rates with cheatsheets, demos, and documentation that act as refreshers. 

The more you use a CRM, the easier it is to spot areas for improvement. Regularly assess and analyze how your team is using the CRM, what they use it for, and how it’s helping important parts of the business. This should inform how you optimize your usage of the tool moving forward so your team can focus on what they do best: selling. This will have a knock-on effect on customer satisfaction levels, too, as you smooth out your business processes. 

Utilization and reporting 

Your sales process and business requirements may change over time. The addition of new technology and changing consumer habits might mean you need to switch up your processes now and again. Regularly check in to see how salespeople are using the CRM and create reports to determine how it’s improving each area of the sales cycle. This will help you identify any friction points and ensure you get the most out of your CRM. 

Integrations and automation

The main functionality of a CRM system is to eliminate the tedious manual tasks that take up salespeople’s precious time. Set up integrations with your existing project management apps and communication tools to create a seamless workflow and automate tasks that would otherwise take hours of your team’s time. 

CRM features to look out for

Your CRM strategy hinges on you choosing the right CRM; one that makes data management and lead management a breeze, but that can also become a core part of your sales process. 

Now you know what CRM challenges to expect and how you can overcome them, here’s what to look for in your new solution.

• Contact management: Your chosen CRM should make it easy to store, organize, and search contacts based on varying search criteria. 

• Multichannel engagement: Choose a tool that enables customer interaction across channels. 

• 360-degree view of customers: The best CRMs provide a comprehensive insight into each customer, including all previous conversations, touchpoints, and purchases. 

• Deal management: Your CRM should oversee and coordinate all aspects of a deal, including identifying opportunities, negotiating terms, and closing deals. 

• Workflow automation: Choose a CRM that lets you “set and forget” repetitive processes so you can free up your team’s time. 

• Adding and managing different stages of the sales cycle: Your CRM should make it easy to manage leads wherever they are in the sales cycle with relevant campaigns and personalized touchpoints. 

• Configure, Price, Quote: The CRM you choose should help you provide accurate pricing so your sales team can generate a quote quickly. 

• Mobile CRM: With the Freshsales mobile app, you can access details about every contact, deal, and contact on the go. Record notes, add contacts, send emails, and collaborate with your team.

While CRMs offer the potential to streamline sales and boost success, challenges like poor data quality or complex interfaces can hinder their effectiveness. However, by choosing the right CRM and implementing it correctly, you can unlock a powerful tool that drives sales success and fuels long-term business growth.