Your sales automation process failure may happen due to insufficient coverage of sales needs, lack of proper integrations and bad user adoption

Some sales professionals perceive sales process automation as a key to their sales success. Others are less enthusiastic about it since they believe it’s a risky venture with large investments not paying off in full.

The truth is, the best possible outcome of sales automation requires a balanced and reasonable approach to the sales process peculiarities.

Knowing possible reasons for your automation project’s failure helps you navigate CRM waters with more confidence.

Ready to know more? Welcome aboard!

Reason 1: Improper coverage of sales needs

Perhaps the most evident explanation of sales automation’s failure is the improper identification of sales automation needs.

It’s hard to automate a complex process if not all potential pain points are taken into account.

For instance, automating prospect outreach (emails, phone calls) for sales reps with no CRM features for providing comprehensive prospect details will most probably bring little value.

The opposite situation implies thoughtless automation of manifold sales aspects (from prospect outreach to AI-powered sales guidance) in one go. It’s most likely to result in high expenses with slight benefits obtained.

When CRM functionality appears excessive, mastering it takes time and effort. Until all the features are properly accepted, human mistakes and inefficient use of the system will be in place.

What to do
The detailed mapping out of your sales process, with attention to its peculiarities (for example, the length of a sales cycle and sales stages it entails) is a good place to start.

The analysis of the pain points and their prioritization should follow.

Afterwards, there goes the choice of a CRM vendor and an exact edition. Remember that following “the more, the better” pattern in sales process automation is the right track to disappointment.

Choose the solution that addresses your sales issues, not the one described as “powerful”, “revolutionary” and “crushing-your-sales-quota” (or with similar tall promises of CRM vendors).

Another point is to compare the functionality available within different CRM editions, their pricing and decide which suits you most. If you’re still unsure whether you can make a good choice, you may resort to CRM consulting and get professional guidance tailored to your sales needs.

Reason 2: Hampered access to the documents located outside CRM

Another obstacle in your sales automation path may be the problem of document management and employee collaboration after CRM is implemented.

This happens when the integration of a CRM solution with external systems, like ERP or ECM (Enterprise Content Management) wasn’t performed.

In this case, you get disparate business processes and inconveniences in sharing corporate content (proposals, orders, etc.). And if there’re lots of projects with cross-departmental collaboration (between sales and pre-sales teams), the lack of CRM integration may bring even more troubles in addition to the mentioned above.

What to do
Before automating your sales with CRM, think about possible integrations needed.

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Connecting your CRM to ECM, ERP, an accounting system, an email server, etc. solves a range of content management issues caused by using discordant systems and ensures efficient employee collaboration.

Reason 3: Low user adoption

Even if you’ve done your best in terms of planning and integration, your sales automation efforts may still come to nothing.

The reluctance of your employees to adopt the new system in full may be another reason for the failure of CRM efforts.

For example, if using CRM is not a must in the organization, some sales reps may keep on reporting in Excel spreadsheets while others start to do that in CRM.

This leads to a complete mishmash in the sales statistics and makes it harder to get a big (and reliable) picture of the state of your sales. Managing sales reps’ performance is also much harder for a sales manager, in case not all of their employees are using CRM daily.

Without getting proper guidance and supervision, sales reps’ won’t see their productivity increase (in fact, it’s more likely to stay the same or even decrease).

What to do
To properly address these user adoption issues, it’s necessary to announce that using CRM is a must in dedicated meetings. If other ways of getting the job done won’t count (apart from those via CRM), the reps can’t but start using it.

Although such tough methods are necessary to increase user adoption, they may be insufficient.
It’s equally important that users want to work with CRM. For this, CRM should be customized with user convenience in mind. Typical pain points like long response time should also be managed.

If the system is designed to help, you’ll see the sales reps’ productivity and motivation increase pretty soon.

Another thing is to ensure comprehensive CRM training on the customized CRM solution. It will help sales reps feel more confident while working with a new system.

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Another big pro is user support provided by a CRM admin; it is especially crucial in the 1st month of CRM usage. If the admin helps end users with every CRM issue, they are more likely to adopt the system fast.

Key takeaways

Automating your sales process is a complex task. However, you can make it much easier with thorough planning of sales process automation, helpful integrations and user training to increase user adoption.

Taking such a reasonable approach helps to make your sales process automation a truly big gain.

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