Everyone in your organization is listening to station WIIFM: What’s In It For Me. Are you listening? You should be. If you’re not tuned in, end user adoption of your CRM is likely to falter, or worse yet, fail.
Successful CRM adoption requires users to want to use the system. If they don’t see the value for their own purposes, they are not likely to adopt it. As a recent law firm survey found, the biggest barrier to CRM success was lack of employee buy-in. In other words, lack of understanding what’s in it for me.
So how do you tune to WIIFM? Focus on the benefits of your CRM. I’m not talking about features or how it works. I’m talking about the true value it will bring to your professionals. Your CRM provides a lot of benefits, but that doesn’t mean you should talk about all of them.
Focus on benefits that speak directly to your end users and how they work so you can get their attention: Does it save me time? Can I get quick access to information? Will it help me track my activities? Will it help me cross sell? If they don’t see the relevancy to how they work, they may avoid using it. Keep asking yourself, from their frame of reference, ‘why should I care?’
But beware, tuning in to WIIFM is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It requires a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of your end users. How do they work? What are their current business processes? Are they experiencing any pain points that your CRM will alleviate? Answers to these questions will guide you to the benefits that are most relevant for each work group.
Adoption of your CRM does not happen overnight. It requires an ongoing effort to ensure that organization, department and individual goals are aligned in such a way that everyone sees the value. And, while there are many factors that go into ensuring successful user adoption, focusing on benefits to your users may reduce future static.