In today’s episode of the ‘Sales Samurai’ podcast, host Sam Capra, who helps marketing leaders in the retail space go beyond the sale/transaction, talks with guest Sarah, sharing the best practices to get your team using it and maximizing the solution for them.

Episode Highlights

• 01:55 – Sarah shares, she started working with a bunch of start-ups and a lot of her role within those start-ups was implementing CRMs and getting them set up with them.
• 03:43 – Sam enquires from Sarah if she has a very broad spectrum from a sales perspective, and what made her start in sales.
• 05:40 – There's a lot of value in starting at a more established organization, says Sam.
• 07:25 – Sam asks Sarah if she is seeing the space getting more crowded in the CRM? 
• 09:39 – CRM has always been the necessary evil, and that should be the foundational tool of any sales organization, mentions Sam.
• 11:00 – There are so many different ways and methods to keep track of your contact information. So finding the right tool for you and your company is important.
• 13:04 - Sarah highlights, it's important to think about what is your current process looks like, and what potentially is it going to look like a month or even a year from now?
• 14:49 – If you move to a new tool with the same types of processes and behaviors, you probably are going to end up at the same place, says Sarah
• 17:25 – It would be great if the flow of data, and where it is coming from can be stored into your CRM, but it doesn't necessarily mean that your team has to be working out of it constantly, it depends on what you need.
• 21:40 – Sarah points out that there is a reason why user adoption is lower because the users get overwhelmed by the amount of data that's in there. They don't know what they're supposed to update.
• 23:11 – A lot of sales leaders will stick to a field because they think that they need it. 
• 26:00 – Sarah states, standardization is trying to keep things aligned across the system.
• 28:25 – Inefficiencies in redundancies if you don't standardize it leads to that drop off from an adaption and those challenging conversations probably with your sales team, states Sam.
• 31:54 – Sarah highlights, regular conversations, and check-ins are also very important because you implement something in one way doesn't mean it's going to stay that way.
• 32:22 – A lot of times CRMs are implemented and managed by IT teams or leadership, that's fine, and it's great. However, you do need to have the voice of the everyday user constantly, mentions Sarah.
• 34:31 - When you initially roll something out, it's easy to create something, but then it can be hard to remember to go back and update those materials.
• 35:41 - If you're going to document that you got to keep up with the documentation to make sure it's up to date.
• 37:22 - If everybody is using it, then everybody is going to naturally have that feedback and those types of conversations with each other.
• 40:10 - If it's implemented and used correctly, then you can see that in the long term.

Three Key Points

1. When you're rolling out initially, there are two buckets, first is, rolling it out initially and making people aware of how to use it, what this tool is, where things go, why it goes there, or what this field is used for. Then the other piece of it is what the feedback loop is? Is it working the right way? Do we need to switch this? What do we need to do here? 
2. Sarah says she is always on the side of getting everybody on to the CRM and getting everybody involved and trying to get everybody's workflows built-in there because it's not a sales tool anymor