Data & Mash

Law firms and some other professional service companies face an additional complexity in achieving good adoption rates when they deploy CRM.

Fundamentally, all CRM is hard to implement. In large part this is because using the technology requires people to change the way they work and to behave in a way that doesn’t fit with their habits and the way they approach their work. For sales people CRM adoption remains challenging even though it’s far easier than it was 13 years ago, when I did my first Goldmine implementation.

Accountants and marketers tend to adopt new software more readily than sales teams because they can’t do their jobs well without it. They appreciate process automation because the boring parts of their jobs are taken away from them and they can focus on the more interesting elements. For sales, CRM can do the opposite. There are rewards but they are different and sales people to make an effort before they can be realised.

In law firms, it is this relationship between effort and reward which is less easy to create. Usually it is solicitors who are asked to fill in CRM information. They are encouraged, cajoled and ordered to do so. Often they are doing so with rather unwieldy interfaces and large numbers of fields to complete or worse, the same information has to be rekeyed into more than one system.

Unlike sales people having to enter CRM data, in this case the data entry folks don’t get any benefit from this extra effort. Except the warm glowing feeling that they’re helping their company – yeah, right, that always works.

Meantime the main users of CRM data are the marketers, the business development people and the partners. They find the data invaluable and though they may also add information they at least do so knowing they can probably generate more business as a result or manage their client relationships better.

This is a tricky thing and it’s not solved by someone adding “must have a user friendly interface” on the requirements document. (If I had a pound every time I saw that).

So what to do about it.

Well, sometimes it’s not a problem you can solve but it is important, when introducing these systems, to try and find carrots that will encourage your people to enter data. Definitely try to avoid multiple data entry points for the same data; look at integrating with software they are using all the time (so you get a single customer view that’s useful to the solicitors too); and don’t let the marketers ask the solicitors to capture excessive detail. But in the worst case, recognise that you are increasing their burden and tell them that and ask for their help. Reward them for helping, and doing their bit and provide feedback to them on how that effort has helped the business, in what way and show them the £££ and the ROI.

What sort of reward? Smarties, days off, bottles of tequila, whatever motivates your team. And get the partners to show them that the firm appreciates the effort and remember it is in effort. When you buy something online, that you really want… how tedious do you find it filling in the order form? Well it’s 10 times more tedious if it’s filling in contact data forms for work.

~ by Kate Mayfield on 25 January 2011.

Posted in CRM, data management, IT Strategy, marketing databases, marketing software
Tags: business development, CRM, CRM adoption, CRM deployment, CRM information, Goldmine, Law firm CRM, process automation