Simple Steps to Avoid Costing Your
Company 50% of its Data

By: Tom Yen | 8-minute read

At Hey DAN, we’ve been partnering with leading asset management firms for over a decade. In fact, we serve firms with over $7.6 trillion in total market capitalization. Our position as an industry leader in CRM enablement has afforded us a unique perspective on the benefits and challenges associated with CRM adoption and compliance.

When implemented correctly, CRM systems become a valuable source of institutional knowledge that can be leveraged to generate business insights that fuel future growth. Unfortunately, many organizations struggle with implementation and find themselves unable to generate meaningful insights or significant growth. Most commonly, the missing ingredients for success are communication strategies that create buy-in from key stakeholders and the deployment of tools that facilitate CRM adoption and ongoing use. Volumes could be written on the finer details of either of these topics; in the interest of brevity, we’ll adopt a 30K foot perspective.

Buy-in must be established throughout the organization, from senior leadership to the sales team being asked to enter their notes each day. A well thought out communication strategy is essential to creating buy-in. For senior leadership, it’s important to emphasize how data from the CRM system can be leveraged to optimize targeting and the long term ROI of sales force effort. For members of the sales team, it’s all about providing tangible examples that illustrate how capturing data in the CRM will lead to improved business intelligence for the field resulting in higher success rates and more money being paid out to the sales team.

Tools that facilitate CRM adoption and ongoing use are another key ingredient to success. Although CRM systems are powerful tools themselves, they are not known to be user friendly and often require significant behavior modification from the sales team. Before adopting every tool under the sun, work with your end users to understand their current process as well as the friction points that hinder adoption and ongoing use of the CRM. Armed with that knowledge, look for tools that will address the greatest sources of friction.

Okay, let’s dive into a real world example that shows how effective messaging, combined with the right tools can have a significant impact upon data capture within your organization.We’ll start with something that all of us have observed: The longer salespeople wait to enter their meeting notes, the more information they forget and fail to capture in the CRM.

To quantify this observation, we looked at notes submitted by Hey DAN users. Our first step was to separate the notes into buckets based on the number of days that had elapsed between the meeting date and when the note was submitted. To assess data loss over time, we compared average note length for each bucket relative to the length of notes submitted on the same day as the meeting. The results, summarized below, are fairly astounding:

Avoid Costing your Company 50% of its Data

Note Length Deterioration Relative to Same Day

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When notes are entered just 1-2 days after a meeting, note length falls by 33% relative to same day entry. Take the more common example of a salesperson who waits until the end of the month to enter notes for meetings that happened two or more weeks ago and the note length falls by 62% relative to same day entry. Although it may be tempting to attribute this loss of information to salespeople who refuse to follow instructions, it’s important to recognize that the behavior of the sales team is shaped by the organizational priorities that are communicated to them and how easy the systems they’re asked to use are to interface with. Ultimately, the best way to minimize this loss of information is to adopt tools that lower barriers to use and to pair those tools with an ongoing communication strategy.

Here at Hey DAN, we’ve partnered with a number of clients to design adoption programs that have led to well over 50% of notes being entered on the same day as the meetingand more than 85% being entered within the same week. In many cases, these programs involve:

1. Mandating use of Hey DAN with minimal behavior modification to improve:

CRM utilization
Data quality
Data consistency

2. Generating weekly lists of users with suboptimal usage
3. Sending out timely and tailored communications that encourage best practices
4. Performing ongoing training for new and experienced users
5. Leveraging touchpoints with salespeople to prioritize the latest sales ops initiatives

The table below illustrates the dramatic impact that the steps outlined above can have by comparing the average for power users of Hey DAN services to the average for non-power users.

No matter what tools and communication strategy you choose, just make sure that you adopt a coordinated approach and that modifications to salesperson behavior are minimized.

Please feel free to contact us if you’re interested in learning more about partnering with us or if you’d like to discuss unique CRM or data related issues that your organization is facing.

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