Odds are, your firm spent significant time, energy, and capital investing your CRM solution. As a way for your sales and business development teams to become hyper aware of client accounts and manage their relationships, the CRM is necessary for growing your business. But is that CRM system giving you a return on your investment? Is your CRM’s ROI maxed out?

With only 40% of firms having an end user adoption rate over 90%, it isn’t likely that you’re getting the most out of your system. Instead, it’s a tool that is collecting dust and isn’t being used to its full potential. And just like all things that don’t get utilized, there’s almost always a reason why and way to fix it.

Here are five reasons why your team isn’t using your CRM system and how you can fix it to get the maximum ROI from your firm’s CRM.

1. Takes Up Too Much Time

It’s no secret that CRMs need a lot of data in order to be useful for business development teams. And it’s how that data gets entered into the CRM that often causes the most headaches for your team, as most CRM systems require some level of manual data entry. Whether it’s uploading a spreadsheet or physically entering client information on their own, business development professionals can get bogged down in a mindless day of data entry. Data entry doesn’t have to be a big turn-off for anyone at your firm, though.

The fix? Through CRM data automation, you can eliminate any mundane manual tasks by automating the data collection and recording process. This can save your business development team hours a day allowing them to spend more time building their client relationships and focusing on closing more deals. Automation also means that client information is updated automatically in the system, freeing your team up from needing to maintain all that data.

2. It’s Hard to Use

New systems, no matter how easy they claim to be, will always have a learning curve. And depending on your team’s experience with similar software or interfaces, that curve can become long and steep. CRM systems are complex machines that require a fair amount of user knowledge to find helpful insights and nuggets of information. But too often this complexity results in hard to find features and long processes that irritate and annoy your CRM users.

The fix? The best way to master any learning curve is through in-depth training for your team. If your CRM provider has training courses, product demos, or helpful webinars, encourage your team to attend. If attendance remains low, have one of your team members complete all available training sessions so they can use their knowledge to teach the rest of the team. This ensures you have a CRM master onsite that is able to train current employees and onboard any new ones.

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3. Stored Data Isn’t Helpful

Data relevance is key when using a CRM system. If your system only tracks client contact information, odds are your business development team won’t find it very useful. After all, they know their clients well enough to know their name and email address. Because there isn’t new or relevant information for them within the CRM, they are more likely to go somewhere else for insights or new client data.

In addition, the data housed in a CRM isn’t always helpful to your business development team when and where that they need them. If they’re on the road for a client meeting, can they even access your CRM’s client information? Even if they can, they likely have to dig through several layers or other sources to find what they’re looking for – something that takes up valuable time right before a crucial meeting.

The fix? To give your business development team relevant data insights when and where they need them the most, you need a solution that proactively pushes vital information to them using your CRM, email, and other key sources. This ensures that your business development or sales team has everything they need to know about a client automatically delivered to them before they walk into a meeting. For example, a CRM enabled with relationship intelligence automation tracks, analyzes, and delivers relevant and hard to find client data automatically, no matter where your reps are or what meeting they might walk into. Plus, through advanced relationship mapping, your business development team can immediately identify unique cross-selling or upselling opportunities, leading to increased collaboration and warm introductions that accelerate sales.

4. Integrations Are Dated

On average, sales and business development teams access six systems or tools to execute their jobs. With so many systems to access each and every day, integrations become an important function that makes these systems easier to use. Without up-to-date integrations, your team is left using each system or tool individually, creating potential for missed insights and information. This misinformation could jeopardize open deals and client relationships.

The fix? Keep your integrations up to date and double check that all of your sales and business development softwares have the ability to work together. If they don’t all work together, prioritize the most used systems at your firm. For example, if your business development team uses Microsoft Outlook to communicate with clients, it will be one of the most important CRM integrations that will make your team’s life a lot easier.

5. Reporting Is a Chore

Compiling reports is often a lengthy and extensive process, requiring many steps to export, organize, and analyze data. If you’re firm relies on spreadsheets for sales reporting, applying advanced filters and functions only add to the workload. While your CRM might have built-in reporting and exportable data that cuts out a few of those tasks, there’s still the intricate task of analyzing the data for insights and patterns — something that could take a considerable amount of time.

The fix? Instead of relying on manual work and processes to create reports within your CRM, make your CRM work for you through relationship analytics. Built-in relationship analytics in your CRM allows your business development team to see accurate insights in real time, without a lengthy time commitment. Through relationship scoring, these analytics let you know exactly where you stand in your relationships so your business development team can proactively support key client accounts.

Is Your CRM Actually Helpful?

Without a helpful CRM system, you’ll never increase CRM adoption at your firm. Evaluate your CRM’s helpfulness by taking this two minute CRM automation quiz.