6 CRM Adoption Red Flags You Can’t Afford to Ignore

Are you sure you are not ignoring your CRM implementation red flags?   

I guess you’ve probably seen memes on Instagram or TikTok where people list “red flags” when dating. Surprisingly, many of us ignore such red flags in real life. That’s understandable. We fall in love and don’t notice anything negative, only the positive sides of the person.

But what’s even more surprising is that we sometimes ignore red flags in areas where we’re supposed to be rational – like at work

Sometimes it’s simply because we don’t know what those red flags are. So I’ve decided to fix that. At least with CRM systems. 

In this article, I’ll share six red flags that indicate your CRM implementation has gone wrong and it’s time for a review. And if you keep reading until the end, I’ll give you a tip that could potentially save you from ever facing these challenges in the first place.

Ready to uncover the red flags in your CRM implementation? Let’s get started!

Red Flag 1: CRM Isn’t Part of Daily Routines

The first major red flag is when CRM isn’t a part of your routines. When I say routines, I mean something that is an integral part of your daily operations. For me, personally, my morning starts with tooth brushing, shower, breakfast, coffee and a 40-minute drive. Only after that routine I can comfortably start my day, I feel switched from rest mode to work mode.  

Something similar should happen with your CRM. You should have routines built around it. If your employees don’t naturally integrate the CRM into their work, if you don’t have regular meetings to discuss CRM data, or if you don’t use CRM data in your daily, weekly, monthly, or annual analyses, it’s a clear sign that your adoption of the CRM deserves attention, to put it mildly.

Think about it this way: What do you do regularly as a company manager or a sales leader? You review P&L and sales reports. Hopefully, your sales reports are generated by your CRM system, but if not, you’re probably using data from your accounting app. 

A monthly P&L and sales report review is a routine. With a CRM, the routines are similar, just the data is different. Companies that have adopted a CRM well typically review metrics like:

• Quota attainment.
• Lead-to-cash conversion rates.
• Number of leads created.
• Number of opportunities created.
• Number of opportunities and leads by sales rep.

With customer support, the approach is similar, just the numbers are different, such as:

• Time to resolution.
• Number of cases created.
• Number of escalations.

And anything that would indicate if any part of the sales or customer service deserves more granular attention from a manager.

If you don’t get back to your data in the form of reports, if you don’t rely on it, and if you don’t challenge the reports you look at, it means your CRM adoption should be re-evaluated. It seems you’re paying for a product you aren’t using. This brings us to our next red flag: Treating CRM as an IT project instead of a business initiative. 

Red Flag 2: Treating CRM as an IT Project

If you think about your CRM system as an IT project I have bad news for you. You will inevitably end up building a team of IT specialists around the product who will be detached from real life and your business users like sales reps or customer service agents will ignore it.

Don’t get me wrong, a CRM system is an information system, and technically it is an IT project – but only partially. Most importantly, it’s a tool for the business to control the sales process, collect data about the market, and make proactive decisions to prevent a company from losing to the competition.  

A CRM implementation project is an important administrative task. Sales leadership, customer service managers, and C-level executives should all be involved in the project. Otherwise, it will end up being too complicated, over-engineered, and never used by its users.

However, there is another extreme on this scale. Sometimes companies treat a CRM project as if this could be done by anyone. What I mean is not hiring the right technical people to implement the CRM. This is also not good. 

You should find the right balance between making this a tech implementation and a business initiative. The key to success here is balance.

Red Flag 3: Low Number of Records Created

While I’m not a big believer in tracking the number of records per user in a CRM, it can be used as an indicator.

Let me put this into perspective. How would you measure your friendship with someone? Would you check if you had any digital traces of that friendship? One of the ways is to measure the number of messages you exchange. It’s highly likely that your close relatives and friends receive more messages from you than all other people.

While this is not a quality measurement of how good relationships are, this is a quantitative indicator that would allow you to at least establish a high-level benchmark of the activity.

If you report on the user activity in a CRM and you see that a certain user creates zero, or close to that number of records, you could assume a user is not using the CRM. You still have to establish the reason, but you would at least find a starting point for your research.

When I join a new client project where a CRM has already been implemented, I normally run a few reports that are already available in the system: number of leads, opportunities, and tasks created. This gives me a quick snapshot of the situation with the adoption of the CRM and tells me if we should start with improving it, or we could proceed with enhancing the functionality of the CRM.  

If people don’t create records, they don’t look up those records later, which brings us to the next red flag – Low dependency on CRM. 

Red Flag 4: Low Dependency on CRM

You can ask yourself a simple question to get a good sense of the state of your CRM. “If tomorrow I were locked out of the CRM, how terribly would this affect my work?“

If the answer is, “The world would collapse and we couldn’t do business without it,” then that’s great news. You probably have a great adoption level. The more dependent your employees are on the CRM, the better the adoption. Do this exercise with your sales reps and ask them, “What would happen if you didn’t have access to the CRM?” The answer will tell you a lot. 

This rule interestingly works the other way around. I see a lot of managers who think that CRM adoption is simply a matter of user training, communicating its importance, and working with middle management to make it part of the routine.

It’s partially true, the most efficient way of adopting CRM, from my experience, is preventing people from doing their job without it. But not in a bad way.  

 I don’t know how much you use ChatGPT in your daily life, but I’m heavily dependent on it. A good part of this article was edited with the help of ChatGPT. It simply helps me, as a non-native English speaker, formulate my thoughts better and easier. I’m dependent on this tool in a positive way. I don’t need motivating speeches or reports on how many messages I’ve generated with it. I’m using it naturally because it helps with my daily routine and helps me produce better content in a much shorter time.

The same applies to a CRM. If you make it so useful that people naturally use it to make their lives easier, you get the point. To make it useful, you have to be very realistic and self-aware, which brings us to the next red flag: Belief that your processes are unique.

Red Flag 5: The Belief That Your Processes Are Unique

If I hear someone say, “Our processes are entirely unique, setting us apart from everyone else,” and then I check and find the company is not on the S&P 500 list or providing some sort of unique services, I immediately flag them as potentially not suitable for a CRM implementation.

Honestly, I try to avoid such clients. And you know why? Because the belief in the uniqueness of your company is great and welcome, but the belief that your business processes are unique and no one else in the world does things the same way is dangerous. It’s dangerous because of the high risk of failure.

Imagine going to the dentist and he says: “We’re going to clean your teeth in a unique way.” It will probably get the job done, I guess. But what’s the point? The industry has already learned the simplest and most effective way. Yes, sometimes it’s not the most efficient, and there’s always place for innovation. But you should be very conscious about innovation, and as long as your process isn’t yet systemized, I recommend starting with what others are already doing. Use that as a starting point.

Just make sure you don’t stretch your timelines when implementing standard processes. Take small steps at a time and keep it simple, which brings us to our next red flag: Long implementation timelines.

Red Flag 6: Long Project Timelines

When I see a company with a plan for CRM implementation that will take two years, I freak out. A CRM is not the delivery of trucks of goods. Even deliveries of goods can go wrong. But a CRM is your company’s intangible business asset. 

Its implementation should be split into very small chunks, tested, iterated, and only then moved to the next step. When I say iterated, I mean you should find things that don’t work in your company.

I get it – for a lot of business leaders, it’s almost impossible to accept that you have to incorporate failure into the process. On paper, everyone agrees with making mistakes, but when it comes to reporting to management, I see overexcited presentations with unbelievable achievements that justify year-end bonuses, without a single mention of lessons learned, dropped functionality, or inefficient processes.

If this is the case in your company, that’s a red flag. An approach to innovation with a thorough long term plan is simply impossible. 

If you had asked Alexander Fleming a year before he discovered penicillin what he was up to, you would probably not even have gotten a clue of his upcoming discovery in medicine that most likely saved your life a couple of times already. The same applies to your business – discoveries are the side effect of iterations and short project cycles and most importantly – mistakes that are made along the way. 

Bonus Tip

At the beginning of this article, I promised to give you one tip on how to reduce your failure rate, if not to zero, then close to it. And I actually already gave you that advice: make your CRM implementation iterative. Be agile. Stick to the principle of failing fast, failing cheap, and failing early. Look for methods and approaches for your business that work and throw away those that don’t.

If you’re unsure about your CRM implementation or want expert guidance to avoid these red flags, reach out to us at Muncly. We’ll help you assess your needs, prepare your business, and implement a CRM system that truly supports growth. Contact us today to get started!