How to Implement a CRM for Sales Management Step by Step

Building meaningful customer relationships has been the cornerstone of business since time immemorial. Impactful customer relationship management is still the key to optimizing your sales processes and powering growth in today’s increasingly digital and competitive environment.

A sales CRM (customer relationship management) is a powerful tool to help simplify and optimize your sales process. However, there are many options out there, and a misstep can prove to be a costly mistake.

To help you navigate this journey, we explain why sales management CRM matters and how it can benefit you. Step by step, we guide you through choosing the best CRM for your sales team and how to implement it successfully so you can fully maximize its potential.

What Is a CRM For Sales Management?

Essentially, a CRM simplifies sales by making it easier to manage every step and customer interaction in your sales process. The sales process is a set of actions your sales team follows to turn a potential customer into an actual one. The image below is HubSpot’s infographic outlining a seven-step sales process.

Many of these steps, or parts of them, can be automated. A CRM simplifies the whole sales process by doing just that.

So, before implementing a CRM, work with your sales team to see what works and what doesn’t.

A CRM also integrates all the tools, channels, and platforms you use. It collects and stores information like customer names and contact details, communication history, spending habits, and preferences on one platform that all team members can access.

Using machine learning, the CRM analyzes this data so you can better understand your customers’ behavior and predict what they might do next.

With these essential insights, you can improve your marketing efficiency and grow your business.

Sales CRM software empowers you to make more data-driven decisions, saving you time and money so you can focus on what matters most – keeping your customers happy.

Can a CRM For Sales Management Really Make a Difference?

In a nutshell, yes, it can. Here are some case studies demonstrating how much of a difference a CRM can make for sales management.

Deezer, a music streaming app, increased customer engagement by 483%, the number of customers reached by 250%, and the number of campaigns per week by 142%. All this within weeks of using one of the top CRM software providers.

If you want to get ahead of the game, attract more customers, and keep them, you need sales management CRM software.

A Forrester economic impact study reported that Motorola increased its ROI (return on investment) by 346%, increased team productivity by $121K, and decreased its administration time by $123K in three years after using a CRM for sales management.

Why Does Sales CRM Implementation Matter?

Successfully integrating a sales CRM alleviates the limitations of a top-down approach, fostering a more collaborative, data-driven, and customer-focused environment.

However, achieving this unifying effect is difficult with the top-down approach common in sales management.

The Drawbacks of Doing Things Top-Down

In many organizations, the decision-making and process planning happens at the executive level and is dictated down, often with little input from the sales and marketing teams. This approach, though, has several drawbacks that stifle overall sales performance.

Imposing sales strategies without considering realities on the ground alienates the sales team and management, leading to frustration and demotivation. Additionally, you will likely get a much lower adoption rate if team members feel excluded from decision-making processes.

Also, without a CRM, sales data and other related information are often scattered across different tools and platforms, making it difficult to achieve a unified view of the customer journey. This lack of visibility can result in missed opportunities, duplicated efforts, and poor team coordination.

In addition, manually tracking and measuring key sales metrics is tedious and time-consuming. This slows the decision-making process, leading to strategies that no longer represent the status quo.

Part of the problem is that the data in the spreadsheets sales managers rely on is likely to contain errors because, as conscientious as your team members may be, mistakes are bound to happen when inputting vast quantities of data. Especially when they’re using several platforms and communication channels.

Benefits of a Sales CRM

How to Assess the CRM Needs of Your Sales Team

Before choosing a CRM system, you must first determine your CRM needs and what you want to achieve. Otherwise, with all the options out there, how do you know which system is the best fit for your business?

Below, we’ve described the different stages to help you assess what you want to achieve by implementing a CRM and how to choose one that best fits your needs. But first, here’s the TL;DR version:

1. Determine your goals and requirements
2. Involve the teams that will be using the CRM
3. Determine what type of CRM system you will need
4. List the CRM features that make up your ideal tool
5. Check the privacy policy and data security
6. Determine your budget and resources
7. Compare, trial, and test

Determine Your Goals and Requirements

Ideally, a CRM system should benefit not only your sales team but all teams across the business. So, while it’s important to assess your sales team’s goals and CRM needs, also consider what other departments (such as marketing and accounting) need and how to integrate the system across the whole business.

Here are some questions to help you get started:

Involve the Teams That Will be Using the CRM

At the very least, you should engage the sales, marketing, and customer support teams. Finding out what their challenges are and where they see opportunities for improvement will give you a comprehensive idea of the features that will benefit the whole business.

Engaging the teams from the outset makes them feel part of the process and goes a long way to ensuring their buy-in and adoption.

How To Choose the CRM System That Best Fits Your Needs

Now that you have a better idea of the general business requirements and front-line realities, you’re better equipped to start your research and identify the CRM system that best fits your needs.

Determine What Type of CRM System You Will Need

Broadly, CRM solutions are grouped into three main categories: analytical, collaborative, and operational. Evaluate each type against the challenges you’re trying to address.

The function of analytical CRMs is to analyze your data so you can identify trends. For example, they’ll help you determine the most common customer complaints, which marketing campaigns are the most successful, and what the best-selling products or services are.

Collaborative CRMs unite disconnected teams and departments and focus on keeping and satisfying customers rather than increasing sales. They do this by ensuring all teams, such as the sales, marketing, and call center teams, can access the same information on all customer interactions.

This vastly improves the customer experience and solves their unfailing complaint of having to repeat themselves whenever they talk to someone new.

Operational CRMs focus on streamlining and automating repetitive sales, marketing, and service processes, such as email creation, lead tracking, and distributing customer satisfaction surveys. It makes it easier for companies to provide a consistent service as they scale.

You may decide that you need more than one of these systems. However, some functionalities overlap in today’s CRM offerings, so you may not have to sacrifice one feature for another.

List the CRM Features That Make Up Your Ideal Tool

The exact configuration of features required will differ from business to business. However, there are some key functionalities all CRM tools should have. Here’s our checklist to help you target your research:

When compiling your list of features, consider making two: a list of must-haves (the essential features you can’t do without) and a list of nice-to-haves (features that would smooth your processes a little more but aren’t crucial).

You may not need all these features in the list or may require more, but we hope it helps you in your search.

Check the Privacy Policy and Data Security

Ever stricter data privacy laws make it crucial you ensure that the CRM complies with all relevant regulations (such as the GDPR and CCPA) to protect yourself from legal ramifications. Make sure you read the provider’s privacy policy to understand how it protects users’ data.

Some things to question:

Determine Your Budget and Resources

As well as the initial investment, you’ll also need to consider things such as maintenance costs, technical support, training, and future customization and expansion costs when compiling your budget.

Consider the number of current and potential future users when comparing various CRM pricing plans. Always check the minimum and maximum number of users permitted for each tier and the cost implications of upgrading to a higher one.

When compiling our top 10 best CRM software, we found Zoho CRM to be the best for small businesses and Oracle Netsuite a great choice for large enterprises.

If you’re on a tight budget, some CRM providers offer free plans, and we’ll talk more about these later in the ‘Are There Any Good Free Sales CRM Software Solutions?’ section.

Compare, Trial, and Test

Once you’ve compiled your shortlist of CRMs that meet your must-haves list, check other users’ experiences with the software.

Word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool. Online user recommendations and reviews are extremely valuable resources. They give you real-world insight into how the system works in practice.

Before making your final decision, take advantage of the free trials or demonstrations many CRM suppliers provide. This allows you to assess how well the system integrates with your processes and whether it meets your team’s needs.

Also, use these trials to assess how user-friendly the CRM system is. Intuitive interfaces shorten the learning curve and increase the likelihood of its adoption.

It would be helpful to get an idea of the provider’s customer service, as your team needs to be able to get the help they need when they need it. Assess how quickly they respond, how helpful they are, and the technical knowledge the support team has.

How to Properly Implement a CRM For Sales Management, Step by Step

Originally, CRMs were designed to help sales teams organize customer data and identify and pursue leads. However, with proper planning, a CRM system can benefit almost every department in your business.

Here, we take you through how to implement your sales CRM implementation successfully so that you can apply it to all departments across your company.

Build your CRM Task Force

Assemble a group of CRM ‘project champions’ to support the various teams during the CRM implementation process. Include representatives from sales, marketing, IT, and other relevant departments.

Here are some of the roles you may want to include in your task force:

Get Your Sales Team Onboard

For your CRM implementation to be successful, you’ll need buy-in from your teams. We’ll expand on how to do this later in our section on ‘What It Takes to Sell Your Sales Team on a CRM’.

Prepare and Import Your Data to the CRM Platform

Importing your data from all your systems to the centralized CRM platform is a crucial step in the implementation process. If you don’t have the necessary technical experience in-house, consider consulting a CRM data migration specialist.

Before transferring your data, assess its quality and accuracy and back it up. Make sure nothing is missing, and either delete or merge any duplications. It’s also worth making copies. If you can, consider doing a practice run with a small number of several data types. That way, you can see where potential problems may arise.

After the migration is complete, check your data again. For example, ensure all duplicates are merged, no data is missing, and the fields are formatted correctly.

Set Up the New CRM System and Decide User Permissions

Once you’ve imported all your data, work with your CRM task force to set up your CRM system and integrations.

Configure the system to reflect your business’s unique processes and structures. For example, you should be able to customize the sales stages, deal pipelines, contact fields, email templates, and reporting or dashboard views.

Once the system is set up, you can integrate the other tools your teams use. These may include documentation, project management, internal messaging, and analytical tools.

The next step is to onboard the teams so each department only has access to the tools and data they need. Access to too much information can jeopardize data security. However, not being able to access enough information can slow down productivity.

You don’t want people to have to ask permission every time they want to use a tool or access data. It’s just not practical. Your CRM will help you manage who can access what data.

Thoroughly Train Your Teams

While implementing your CRM, you can start workshops to familiarize your teams with CRM basics and how to use it to help them work more efficiently. Tailor each workshop to the individual needs of each department.

For example, your customer support team will need to know how to automate email responses to queries and complaints, the sales team to configure lead generation, project managers to generate task reports, and the marketing team to compare advertising costs with sales revenue.

Create training manuals that explain how the main CRM features that your team will use work. Each feature should have its own chapter that includes troubleshooting advice. Also, take advantage of the online resources that your CRM provides.

Continually Review and Refine

Once you’ve got your CRM system up and running, the work doesn’t stop there. Business processes are constantly changing, so it’s important to regularly get feedback from each department. If you know your teams’ specific challenges, it’s easier to resolve them and make using the CRM easier and more efficient.

Determine Whether Your CRM Implementation Has Been Successful

A large part of reviewing your CRM implementation is to measure how successful it’s been. Comparing the before and after figures of these key metrics can help you do that:

You can customize your CRM dashboard to immediately show you all the metrics you’re interested in.

How Long Does It Take to Implement a Good Sales Management CRM?

The time it takes to implement your sales CRM chiefly depends on the system’s complexity, the size of your business, how much customization you need, and how well you train your teams.

To help you in your implementation process, we’ve created this roadmap to help you check your progress. Remember that you can do some of these tasks at the same time.

These timelines are simply rough guides. Implementing a simple CRM in a small company is a much shorter process than implementing a far more complex tool in a large organization with multiple and complex interlinked processes. If the latter applies to you, you may need to double or even triple these timelines.

Are There Any Good Free Sales CRM Software Solutions?

No matter the size of your organization, keeping track of your customer data can be challenging, so implementing the best CRM for your sales reps is essential to developing and maintaining your customer relationships.

Some premium paid plans can be a little pricey if you’re on a tight budget. However, some reasonably priced ones and even some free options are out there.

The Best Free CRM Software

Whether you’re an individual, small business, or startup, a free CRM solution can be invaluable for managing your sales processes. There are a few robust options out there, and here’s a brief overview of our top picks. Read our article on the best free CRM software to streamline your business if you’d like to know more about each solution.

That said, it’s worth keeping in mind that free CRMs have some limitations. You may not get as many customization options, reporting and analytics capabilities, or integrations. You may also not get the same quality of customer support.

Try It Before You Buy It

If you need more functionality than the free plans offer, trying some CRM solutions before you commit to one is a good idea.

To help you compare your options, we’ve researched some of the best CRM tools and compiled this table showing the length of their free trials and the starting price of their paid plans.

What It Takes to Sell Your Sales Team on a CRM

CRM implementation is not just about the technology; it’s also about the people driving the technology. No matter how many bells and whistles your CRM solution might have, if your teams can’t see how it helps them do their jobs, they won’t use it. Especially if it involves significant process changes.

If you’ve been following the steps in this guide, you’ve already done the following:

Congratulations! You’re most of the way to maximizing adoption. Here are a few more steps that can help.

Use Rewards and a Little Friendly Competition

Injecting a little fun into the workday can help boost your team’s CRM adoption. For example, you could begin by offering weekly or monthly rewards to those who generate the most leads or close the most deals.

Regularly Discuss Challenges and Encourage Feedback

It’s important that your teams feel comfortable reporting their challenges using the CRM system. They need to be confident that helpful feedback, constructively delivered, will be taken seriously.

Regular meetings where everyone can discuss any issues they’re facing will help teams feel more valued and motivated.

Turn Team Leaders into CRM Champions

Get your team leaders to lead by example. By ‘going first’, they can demonstrate the benefits of the software and that they’re willing to work with the team to resolve any snags. It shows they’re part of the team and fully invested in the change. Involving themselves in the team’s work builds trust, increases morale, and helps create a positive work environment.

The key takeaway from this guide is that implementing a CRM may seem overwhelming, expensive, and time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be.

Understanding the steps involved empowers you to confidently choose and successfully implement a CRM that suits your unique needs. With this guide, we hope we’ve helped you do that.

FAQs