Winning the User Adoption Struggle: Microsoft Dynamics CRM Customers Describe Challenges in Deploying to their Sales Force

Sometimes technology, in and of itself, isn't the problem; it's figuring out how to get your organization to use it that's tough.

When it comes to handing over Microsoft Dynamics CRM to sales teams, good user adoption is an issue that some customers know all too well.  At a recent webinar of the CRM User Group's Sales Process Special Interest Group, customers shared common tales of frustration and a few success stories.

"The challenge is enforcing good consistent user data entry," said a representative of one Dynamics CRM customer "We published some process documents to give them some guidance as to what the different fields are and what we expect them to put in there. But the sales people don't actively maintain that. They know they have to do it but they procrastinate doing it."

The consensus among members is that organizations need to do whatever they can to make it easy for the sales team to use Dynamics CRM.  If the problem is getting people to enter the necessary information, then the business process manager may also want to take a step back and ask if it's a system issue, a design issue or a business process issue.

"We want to make the entry as easy as possible for them so we've involved several of our sales people in developing the system to work for sales," said one customer. "We've looked at our business needs and tried to figure out what we're trying to get out of this data and why we're we putting it in to begin with. Those questions helped us as we revisited those processes for CRM."

A representative of another company that uses Dynamics CRM ...