New CRM? THIS is Job#1 (not that...)

Congratulations on your getting approval to buy your new CRM! Give yourself added kudos if that CRM is also HubSpot.

If we were talking about this now together, I'd be genuinely pleased for you. I've been here loads of times with so many different teams and firms and they all arrive at this moment and find a bunch of conflicting emotions.

Definitely excitement, usually relief (it's often a long arduous haul to get to this stage), some concern ("Are we really going to be able to do this properly?"), but far too often there is a sense of overwhelm at the sheer volume of work to be done to get to launch.

Fear not, for I am here to illuminate your world of possibilities for the next few minutes, and show you a clear path through the territory ahead of you.

Contrary to what almost everybody thinks at this point -

Cleaning your existing data is not the first task.

This is a pretty standard way to slow down your CRM implementation, create masses of unfulfilling and unnecessary work, set all kinds of wrong expectations for your users, bore half your team to tears, and see your internal time costs spiral out of control.

Your Job#1 for getting your new CRM system to its first success, is:

Get the users in, and get them using it.

If you want a more professional way of putting that, you can have a profound-ish formula like this:

Activation + Utilisation = Adoption

Let's explain each of those in turn (or if you prefer my 'get them in, get them using it' approach - you don't need to read on, just click straight into my CRM and book a meeting with me now and we can start from there)

Activation: Your CRM should have come with a whole load of simple tools that make your users' lives easy from day 1. Invite your users to sign-in, and make them activate their tools now. Simple things like the email inbox integration will add value within an hour. Hooking up the meetings link to the calendar will have prospects booking their own sales meetings within a week. There should easily be 3-5 tools they can be using within the hour that will excite them and help you add momentum to the project.

+ Utilisation: Check in with the users at the end of the day. What do they think? Gripes go on the action list, and the moments of joy go in the communications plan. Have a daily check-in for a few minutes per day to make sure you are capturing all of these and updating them on progress. Once they love it, and get used to using it daily, it'll be so much easier to improve as you go along, rather than trying to perfect it all before launching fully.

= Adoption: This is the number one reason that CRMs are successful (or not). High levels of user adoption are the main goal, everything else is a result of that. To give you an idea of how important this is - if I meet a new prospect who is considering moving to HubSpot CRM, and they tell me that they have a high adoption rate of their current CRM and their team is happy using it, I'll tell them they probably shouldn't change. Even if their current system is an absolute bag of nails. High adoption beats all the bells and whistles, every time. Low adoption means bad data, leading to abandonment. High adoption leads to great data and more productivity and enables your users to master their craft.

"But wait" someone cries - how are we going to use it with none of our data in it? Here's a good question to ask them: "How do you use your data now?" For the vast majority of sales and service tasks, your team are generating the data they need on-the-fly. And this is what you are buying this type of CRM for, so don't prevent them from getting started when there's little harm in letting them go ahead without it. You'll likely get a better idea of the right type of data you need to import once your first users are reporting successes to you. Also, (shameless HubSpot plug again here) your Data Management tools in Ops Hub are going to do most of the heavy lifting for you anyway.

Bonus tip: Don't wait for the right moment.

Like having a baby, there just isn't an ideal time to launch your CRM project. Instead, if you've already got the go-ahead, then you're better off getting organised now rather than trying to put it off for a better time.

Do you need a little more meat on the bones of your implementation plan before committing to start?

It doesn't take us long to help you create a great implementation plan based on rapid adoption. You'll get the project milestones, gateway criteria, risk registers, issue logs, UAT, and all of the details to demonstrate you'll have a successful adoption of your new CRM system within days, not months.

If the decision has been made, you can get ready to start now. If it's HubSpot CRM, check us out here and then get in touch with me to create your project plan now using this meeting link.