Why Your Sales Team Doesn’t Like Salesforce (Stop Blaming Salesforce)

One of the most persistent challenges across all Salesforce implementations, or at least the most talked about, is user adoption. Account executives “hate” Salesforce because it makes their job harder and more onerous – to such an extent that they continue to bolt on their own solutions than use a business solution. 

Blame goes to Salesforce for being incompetent, overly complicated. Instead of user-friendly, it is user-defiant. If you have to open five different windows for every step, how does that make anyone more effective?

But however it might look, the problem is most likely not the software. According to Gartner, an organization with 24 CRM analysts alone, CRM vendor has little correlation with success. It does not matter whether you use Salesforce, or Oracle, or IBM, Adobe, or SugarCRM, the vendor is probably adequate; the likelihood of success is far more dependent on how the CRM is implemented. The largest obstacles to success were (in order):

1. Lack of clearly defined CRM strategy

2. Politics

3. Lack of CRM vision

4. Cultural resistance to change

5. Lack of a single view of the customer

6. …

Appropriate technology deployment is number nine on the list, in the third-to-fourth tier, and our own experience has also shown more opportunities for our clients to improve on the big-picture first and then watch as those strategic choices trickle down into the software.

The problem is not the end result, the real problems occur in the planning stage.

By taking a more methodical approach to CRM, understanding on an organizational level why CRM is needed and what it can help accomplish, by envisioning business 2.0, by creating a shared understanding of the stakeholders involved, your business can and will execute a CRM successfully.