Right, pull up a chair. We are going to talk about something that comes up in almost every CRM engagement we work on, and that nobody wants to say out loud.
You have a CRM. Your team is, technically, using it. Deals are being logged, contacts are being added and the pipeline report more or less makes sense… as long as you don’t look too closely or ask too many follow-up questions.
And yet somehow it never quite feels like the CRM is actually running the business. It feels more like a very expensive place to store information that everyone already knows.
So what happened? The implementation went fine and the training was delivered. Everyone nodded along. There were good intentions all round.
But here’s the tricky thing. The problem almost never starts with the team. It starts, and we say this with enormous warmth and zero judgement, with the person who’s probably reading this.
The question you probably haven't asked
We have one question we like to drop into conversations early on, and it has a habit of making people go a bit quiet. Ready? Here it is: would your team use the CRM if you were not watching?
Not ‘are they using it’. That is a compliance question, and you probably already know the answer is ‘sort of’. This is asking something different. It is asking whether the system has earned genuine loyalty, whether your team would reach for it because it helps them, or whether it is running entirely on obligation and the fear of someone noticing empty fields or forgotten check boxes.
If the honest answer is the latter, do not panic, you’re in very good company. But it is worth understanding why it’s happening, because the reason is almost certainly not what you have been told it is.
It is rarely a training problem. It is almost always a signalling problem. And the signal is coming from the top.
The thing you are doing without realising it
Nobody sets out to undermine a CRM, it just sort of... happens. For example, you tell your team the CRM matters - completely sincerely! You absolutely mean it and you can see all the pros and benefits of doing it properly and getting everyone onboad.
But then on Monday morning you fire off a message asking for a pipeline update by email, because you feel it’s quicker. Plus, it’s what you’ve always done, right?
And in the Wednesday meeting, rather than pulling up the deal record, you ask the sales person to just talk you through where things are. And when you are preparing for the board, you ask someone to pull together a summary rather than looking at the data yourself.
None of these feel like big decisions. But when your team is watching, and teams are always watching, what they see is a leader who says the CRM matters but does not actually use it to make decisions.
The conclusion they draw, quite reasonably, is that it matters for them and not for you. That it is a reporting obligation rather than a shared tool. And from that moment on, they will give it exactly as much as they have to, which is probably the bare minimum .
The good news
Here is what we love about this problem: it is one of the easiest things to fix, because the fix is almost entirely FREE and does not require a single new workflow or a reconfigured pipeline stage.
The leaders whose teams genuinely use the CRM tend to do a handful of small things consistently. They pull up the deal record during conversations rather than asking for a verbal update. They ask questions based on what is documented. When something is missing, they say so in passing, without making it a thing. Gradually, without any grand announcement, the CRM becomes the place where the business actually thinks rather than the place where it files its homework.
The team starts to notice and suddenly updating theCRM stops feeling like overhead and starts feeling like the thing that gets you taken seriously in the next meeting. Which is, let's be honest, a much more effective incentive than any adoption dashboard.
Be honest with yourself
Be honest. When did you last open a deal record during a commercial conversation? When did you last make a decision based on something you found in the CRM, rather than something someone told you?
If the answers are making you a little uncomfortable, that is fine. That is useful. Because the gap between what you say matters and what your behaviour suggests actually does is almost always where the adoption problem lives.
The brilliant thing is that closing that gap is entirely within your control, costs nothing, and tends to move faster than anyone expects. One visible behaviour change from the top, done consistently, does more for CRM adoption than any number of training sessions. We have seen it happen, and it is genuinely satisfying every time.
If you want the full picture, including the process and data changes that sit alongside this, our guide on CRM adoption has got you covered.
Or just drop us a line at team@hellodisruptive.com. Honestly, this is one of our favourite things to talk about. We’ll bring the coffee and maybe a bit of cake.
