7 Common Pitfalls of CRM Adoption

Chip: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us today where we’ll be discussing the seven common pitfalls of  CRM adoption and how to level up to beat them.

I’m Chip House, CMO here at Insightly and I’ll be moderating today’s webinar. This is the reason that we’re here today.  70 percent per some data sources of  CRM implementations actually fail. And this has been studied for the past 20 some years. You can see all the different sources there on the screen. And  really a CRM implementation becomes successful when the internal strategy marketing sales service has been very well defined. The way we think about it is that the  CRM system should follow the strategy rather than the other way around. That’s why we’re all here today to talk through. This can be tough over time as you add employees, add functionality and features or add new products and so I’m super excited to move into the content today and talk and meet our today’s speakers.

We’ve got Zeke Silva with us today and Zeke brings his eight years of customer support and expertise to today’s discussion. He currently serves as the VP of support and services at Insightly where he leads teams that are in the customer support and professional service teams. Prior to Insightly, he held technical support management roles at both Intuit and Apple, and he’s no stranger to implementation and onboarding best practices with all of his work.

We also are super excited to be joined by Erin Mathie today who’s today’s main presenter. Erin has worked with small businesses for over 10 years helping them grow/scale and train their teams. She’s the founder of business made simple, a consulting company specializing in workflow management process mapping and documentation training solutions and standard operating procedures. She’s helped several companies get the most of their  CRM so welcome Zeke and Erin i’m super excited to have you both today and Erin i will pass it to you.

Erin:  thank you so much Chip um i appreciate the intro there.   I think those metrics there definitely tell the tale that if you don’t put some thought and have a lot of preparation and that it’s very difficult to roll out a successful  CRM without you know overcome a lot of pitfalls. And so our goal today is to help you to help everybody understand what a full   CRM adoption plan looks like so what should be a part of that and how to get your team excited about the changes. 

When you’ve got a good rollout plan and your team on board those are the two biggest things that will make the biggest difference in helping you to get a successful adoption plan to overcome those pitfalls. So with that let’s jump in and talk about pitfall number one. 

So pitfall number one is assuming that everyone has your same vision. How you perceive your   CRM implementation and how your team sees that implementation may be very different. And the reason for that is you’ve done a lot of work helping to get the  CRM ready ahead of time. So you’ve thought about what is the functionality that we need you’ve been thinking about,   which software is going to best match that functionality and all of the customization that you’re trying to do. You’re very clear on what your goals are that your team has not likely been as involved in that selection process.

So your visions look a little bit different there we go so what you see here on your side of the project is you may be looking at things. Like hey we’re going to have increased automation. Our sales are going to go up we’re going to have that one central database. And we’re going to have streamlined communication with everyone in the team, because you’ve done all the work and you know what the background is and it’s very clear on what the goal is.

That’s what you’ll see but your team because they haven’t been as part of that adoption process they may be just looking at it saying oh I’ve got a new software i’ve got to learn and i’m gonna have to change all of my habits. And it’s gonna disrupt my daily flow, and there is just that fear of the unknown. That they’re not sure exactly  what this new software is gonna look like and so to get everyone on that same vision. 

It’s important to view the CRM adoption from the perspective of who’s going to be using it and show them how using it is going to make their lives better so there’s two things there that we’d like to talk about one is recognizing the impact that the   CRM is going to have on each role. 

The way that i recommend that you do that is by starting by listing out all of the roles that are going to be impacted by the change so who’s going to be on that software who’s going to be using the  CRM and then think about how that change or that impact is going to show up for him So think about what processes is it going to impact and how is their normal workflow in the day going to be changed.

So for example if you were if you’re looking at it from the eyes of a sales person you’re going to be saying well the way that their leads come into them is going to be different and how they move them through the pipeline is going to be different and it’s going to impact them hugely because sales people are in those   CRMs all the time so think about    is it going to impact how they’re sending emails is it going to impact are they calling through the new   CRM they’re just so thinking through how is their everyday going workload going to change and then next i want you to think about how does the   CRM benefit them in their specific role you’ll always get a higher buy-in if you tell them specifically how it’s going to make their life better right so think about how what problems this year i’m just going to solve for them is it going to reduce their keystrokes you know is it going to help them through automation or are they looking for better reporting or more accurate data but thinking through how can you pitch it to them so you’re going to be selling it to your end users and so it’s important to be able to tell them how it’s going to benefit them

Chip:  Erin i was wondering…you bring up a good point about  how it’s going to impact them. Do you feel or do you find that this kind of breaks down to a kind of a typical percentag? Meaning like when doing this you’re going to find x percentage that are   super excited? Maybe there’s going to be some that are upset and maybe some that are kind of in the middle?

Erin: Yeah i think that varies so much based on your company culture and how tech savvy people are so i think as you’re doing it you’ll know who’s going to be more resistant and we’re going to talk about how to overcome that resistance with our next pitfall so let’s jump into that the second pitfall is not having a champion so if you’re not familiar with a champion champion’s a term that we use a lot in software rollouts but when it comes to having a champion a champion is somebody that helps to bridge the gap between the upper level management that’s that’s creating the software    has designed it and is ready to roll it out and this the end user that’s gonna be using it on an everyday basis so let’s talk about what this champion does the the role of the champion they have kind of four main roles here let the slides catch up with us there we go awesome this is what your champion’s going to make you feel like like you’re jumping over those alligators there but the role of the champion is to do a couple of things for you one is that they’re going to help you with your beta testing so the beta testing is crucial because you’re going to get to roll it out to the set of people that know that they’re in beta test and so they are able to give you feedback and they’re able to help you to solve some of those problems before it gets rolled out to the whole team they’re also going to help to share feedback so they’ll let    what they like about the system or what they wish was different the the champion is also responsible for helping to create excitement around the change so creating that that contagious um attitude of enthusiasm around the change is super helpful and they can also help to assist in the training so the champion really is essential to give you that outside perspective and help to reveal holes in the setup that you may not have previously noticed one of the things that or there’s a couple of holes that are often discovered by champions and those are things like data import issues because they’re used to looking at the data and so they’ll be able to recognize oh there’s a problem here or they may recommend like custom field changes of hey we should have a different job down here or maybe they can help to identify problems with pipeline or automation so it’s really important to get their feedback and getting in front of those problems to help get them corrected before they roll out to the rest of the team so as you see here looking at what is a champion what makes a great champion um they all champions definitely need to be well respected so this should be somebody in your team that other team members listen to and they Value their opinion and because they’re working to bridge the gap between the management team and the end users it’s important that they’re great communicators and that great communication will also be important for training and then in order to be really effective at the beta testing that’s why i recommend that it’s somebody that understands what the business needs and it’s a bonus if you can find somebody who knows what the management needs and also knows what the end user needs that really helps to make a great champion and then of course that positive attitude about the change because your champion is really going to be your cheerleader of the   CRM the things that i think we kind of get stuck on sometimes in thinking about a champion is thinking oh this has got to be somebody that’s in senior management that’s not necessarily true um and it doesn’t always need to be somebody that’s tech savvy in fact oftentimes it can be helpful to get feedback from somebody that is going to be an end user and somebody who is more tech averse because you’re going to know what the challenges are as you’re rolling it out to other people and they’re going to be using it and that maybe are a little bit more tech verse    Erin you bring up a really interesting point especially around identifying the right individual within the organization someone that really knows the business front to back i’m curious your thoughts do you find that there’s a specific job title or kind of common job titles within organizations that you work with that are um    going to be good fits to be like the champion within this rollout yeah some of the roles that i see most frequently are things like the office manager or the sales manager sometimes like the marketing assistant or sometimes even an administrative assistant somebody who’s in the data a lot and knows    is working kind of that as a liaison between the top and the bottom oftentimes those people make great champions because i understand both sides agreed awesome okay let’s move on to pitfall number three um the pitfall number three is failing to create training materials on your system now every great   CRM has a help center that has general information about how the   CRM functions right where people could go to learn how to do different setups and those trainings are super helpful especially for the staff as you’re vetting the   CRM or as you’re learning about functions and deciding how you want to set things up but in general these trainings are less helpful for the end user and the reason for that is because they’re looking at the training going how does this apply to me and because with the general trainings    you’re talking about here’s how you can enter a lead but on your training you want to have specific things where you’re saying these are the fields that need to be filled out here’s exactly how our pipeline works and it’s much more powerful to provide that training on your system with your data your custom fields and your processes it really helps the end user be able to visualize how it’s going to impact their workload and because they have a connection with the information that they’re seeing it’s easier for them to digest it and get on board and i know that you may be thinking oh man how am i going to make custom training time    how we’re going to make custom training but it’s really less work than you might imagine because the software that’s out there like screen recording software like loom that you could use to walk and talk through a video and software like tranual that manages the documentation in an engaging way really helped to make that custom training easier and i am super passionate about training with what i do with standard operating procedures and with helping businesses train and onboard people and so i really encourage you to put this custom training together because it’s worth it it’s not just a one-time training so yes you will create training for the initial rollout but you’re doing much more than that and you’re creating a reference of training that’s not you which is super powerful you want somebody to have a place to go to to get answers without having to come and interrupt you all the time and then that training now becomes a standard that your team can be held accountable to you’re saying this is the way that we are doing it and so they know what that way is they can reference that again and you will reuse that training as you um train new employees and it’s great too to have training in place so that if you make updates to the system you have a place to roll out that update so i because i love training i created a training tool for your training tools because that’s the kind of the kind of nerdiness around training that i love but i did create this in-depth training for you that goes over how to do a full rollout plan there’s a swipe file in there that guides you step by step through that process so i’m happy to share that with anybody watching today you just need to enter in your email address at that url and we’ll get that immediately out to you Erin i’m curious with customized training because    some people can feel like it can be a lot of effort um or a lot of work to put into it do you either a find it challenging to convince people that it’s worth it and or how do you ultimately tie back to this is something that’s going to be super worthwhile for them like ultimately how do you convince them that this is a this is something they should be thinking about yeah i think that the metrics speak for themselves in the adoption you guys have already put so much money and effort and time into customizing the   CRM that you really want to increase that adoption rate and then when we talk about hey this is not one time you’re not creating it one time and nobody’s going to look at it again it really is going to be a reference that people use over and over again and then the second thing to really help with that training and kind of get over that effort level bump is to break it down the training really is not as difficult to create as one might imagine so like i said with like screen recording software like loom and training all that helps to organize everything it does make it much simpler to be able to create a comprehensive internal library yeah i mean they’re going to be adding more users down the road eventually you’re going to need to be able to enable and train them it’s just not a one-time thing it’s it’s an um kind of ecosystem so i think you bring up some great points there thank you yeah absolutely okay let’s move on to pitfall number four pitfall number four is not providing hands-on training so i think we’ve all been through a training where we’ve watched somebody do something and then went to go do it later on our own and couldn’t remember how to replicate what they were doing it there’s something just magical that happens when we are hands on on the computer or    on the tablet or whatever putting in our own information it’s much more effective for you to demonstrate things and then allow the team to follow along with their own computers so as you progress through the training too i recommend that you do a series of trainings and there’s couple reasons for that one is that you’re going to show people how to use the   CRM if you only did that in one meeting and then you ask at the end do you have any questions and they say no because they haven’t even been in the system yet right and so it’s help but then a week later you’re going to have a million questions so i recommend that you create a series of trainings and as you’re doing that series of trainings you can adjust the content so initially you’re going to do a lot of training and a little implementation so give them a taste of the system and then maybe three days later you do another training but it’s a little less on the training more on the q a more on the implementation because they’re going to have more questions now and then you can scale out    how much you’re actually training and how much they’re implementing again you can you can bump out the time frames too between the training so    group them together at the beginning and then slowly space them out and you can adjust to    when the training is required and when it’s not required you can customize that but it’s important to be able to think through and to plan and schedule those specific trainings and then as you’re doing the trainings it’s important for you to be role or task specific so if you have a large team that you’re rolling out to i recommend that you break the training into different departments so that you’re not overwhelming team members with information that doesn’t apply to them so if you’re talking to a marketing team they don’t need to know how to onboard a new customer    it’s totally different how they’re going to be using the system so it’s helpful too to break it down um i wanted to go over a little bit of an agenda about how to do that hands-on training what you should include on that and you do want to be hands-on that’s why we’ve got our friends there typing there for you but again be role and task specific i love to follow the the watch one do one teach one so if you were talking about leads you’d say here watch me enter in a lead and now you enter one in and now teach one teach somebody else how to do it so that can be really effective um also when it comes to the live training you should always have that q a and then set some goals for implementation so they need to know that they’re accountable for implementing what they’ve learned during that training session so talk to them about hey you need to be able to before our next training session you need to have created a report or entered a lead or completed a pipeline or sent an email but set some goals on what that implementation should look like between your different training sessions    Erin one challenge that i know we run into a lot especially with individuals and users being busier than ever is not everybody has the ability to be hands-on in that training do you find that there’s a middle ground and if so like how do you typically approach that yeah and that is true especially if you’ve got a large team it’s hard to get everybody in at the same time some of that is helpful if you break it down into smaller groups of training so that you’re saying hey we’re going to get with a marketing team and do a set you know do a training here and then we’ll meet with a different group another thing that i see sometimes is that you have more people than than software so you have more people than computers when you’re doing the training and so i’ve seen people bring in all kinds of laptops from home and everybody’s getting on so be creative with how you’re getting the tools in and then don’t be afraid to do virtual training    that’s a great way to do it too you can do it on a live zoom call where you are demonstrating and then asking them to do it so just the same format as what you would do in person you can do virtual as well yep love that great let’s talk about pitfall number five and pitfall number five is not defining what implementation success looks like so it’s hard to hit a target that you’re not aiming for and so when you define success then you’ll be able to actually make a plan and adjustments to that plan as needed to reach success so there’s a couple things that i recommend you include as part of that definition of success one of those is dates so putting in these are going to be our training dates and these are going to be our implementation dates and that will help to keep your team accountable and preparing for the rollout and the other thing that i recommend you that you set in as goals as goals for utilization so there’s lots of different ways that that could look that could look like the number of logins or how many records were created or tasks completed or email sent there’s a lot of different options for what that utilization could look like but it’s important that you get clear on what those goals are and then be able to be able to track those metrics to know when success is happening    those milestones are super critical you know because it also helps Validate and reinforce the velocity that’s happening i’m curious your thoughts on when you think about these metrics and when these metrics are being defined do you think about these through by user by team both um i would really love to your i’d love your thoughts on that i’m a super heavy metric person myself so i’d love to kind of hear your thoughts yeah absolutely i think the metrics that you have are going to be different for the team but i recommend that you track the metrics by user so for example um you may track the number of new leads added by    in the sales department but that is not a metric that would make sense for the operational staff so you can set different metrics based on what department that they’re working on but then i would track how those metrics are actually fulfilled by individual and that’s a place where    your champions can really help to impact what success looks like too and help you to define what some of those metrics should be totally awesome okay let’s talk about pitfall number six here a boring rollout so um in team one we talked about how your team vision may or your vision may be different from the rest of your team and how you present that rollout can also help to bridge that gap and get your team excited about it and in our entertainment based society we’ve all got super short attention spans right and we love to have things gamified um and so we’re going to talk i’m going to give you some ideas for gamification but one thing to remember as you’re doing this gamification is it’s not going to just help the end user it’s also going to help you on the admin side and the reason for that is because if you are saying hey i want you to put in a certain number of leads per month or whatever then you are also going to be pulling reports and getting practice on the admin side as your team is is getting getting experience on the on the end user side so here’s a couple of fun things that you can do um some people love to do like a a nice visual    to kind of if your team likes competition it’s a good way to be able to put some of that competition together you can give out prizes like movie passes or gift cards if you have a trophy that you pass around each day for who got the best implementation and sometimes even just a simple slack shout out saying hey i noticed that this person    has been in the system and great job with adding in that new opportunity or whatever but there’s lots of different ways you can gamify it so think about what works best with your company culture and put a plan together for that i love the gamifying of it and the adoption and how that kind of ties users in because i mean everyone’s everyone loves that feeling of being like a winner or winning have you seen particular prizes that have been very successful when you’ve implemented this approach um a lot of it depends on your culture but one thing that i have seen that works well overall and is really fun is to get a big prize    a tv or something big and then have people earn raffle tickets based on the metrics that they get for implementation and so you know they’re getting their raffle in and they’re getting their tickets in and then it’s a big reveal when you do the big draw maybe on your full implementation day to be able to say okay we’re up and rolling and who won the tv and you can pull that metric you know that raffle ticket i love that you can invite me to that training i’ll join that one yes i have to say Erin this one really stands out to me it seems super simple but it’s just it’s so common right i think that people feel bored but even before they go to a training and so by gamifying it you’re really differentiating it in their minds yeah absolutely yeah okay let’s talk about pitfall number seven so pitfall number seven here is forgetting to collect feedback so we’ve talked a little bit about asking for feedback with champions when you’re testing the team but i want to talk about feedback on a broader scale um and so there’s there’s two main areas where you would need to look at collecting feedback one is feedback on the training and one is feedback on the system itself so when you’re looking at feedback on the training there’s two ways that you can gather that feedback one is asking    asking people what questions do you have because if one person has a question that multiple people have that same question and that can help you to improve your training    in your next training session it can also help to improve that training for new hires because    what their questions are going to be it’s also important to get feedback through monitoring the system itself so pulling some of those admin reports to see where is data being entered incorrectly or how    is there something that people are doing that’s wrong within the system so monitoring it the use as as new data is coming in and then helping to create training to fill that gap and the other way that you need to be open to receiving feedback is on the   CRM functionality itself so i suggest not opening this up in broad all the time hey send me what your wish list is all the time because sometimes their wish list is is something that will be revealed later on in the training    maybe you’ve already addressed it but i recommend that you collect suggestions after each scheduled training so    you do your q a at the end of your training and then you say okay    what if you have any suggestions on or feedback on the   CRM itself that you want to talk about    you can be open to that and then if you do decide to implement any of the changes or suggestions make sure you’re letting the team know that you’re choosing to implement or not implement those changes and the reason behind that and that’ll help you to improve your system as well as to improve your training i couldn’t agree more    something that i i believe and a lot of a lot of the leaders    within our organization think about is feedback is a gift but you mentioned something there that i just wanted to call out because closing the loop on feedback is super important too because it’s it’s one thing    to get that feedback but to let them know hey that feedback that you gave it’s been implemented like that’s a that’s a good dopamine hit like that’s really exciting but also let them know hey you know what we’re not going to be implementing that right now it’s also really Validating to at least that let your team know that they’ve been hurt and so it sounds like what you’re also saying is it’s important to do this    right away and also like after each session is is kind of like the timing cadence you’re talking through is that true yep absolutely yeah so after each session um and you’re going to get more suggestions as they come come down the line one of my favorite questions that i love to ask at every team meeting is what can we do to be more profitable and what can we do to be more efficient and oftentimes the   CRM stuff comes in on those points too so being open not only during that training phase but somebody else may come along with that has an awesome idea about how to improve your efficiency that and so i’d definitely be open to that and closing those feedback loops yeah creating that safe space so that they feel comfortable talking about it that’s super critical i love that yeah absolutely okay so here are my big takeaways so at the beginning we promised that our goals were to help you to build a comprehensive adoption plan and to get your team on board and so to address building that comprehensive plan i highly recommend you get a champion you create your own training materials that are on your specific system do some live trainings and define what success and implementation is going to look like and then to get your team on board we talked about how you need to share your why so why are we doing this why    how is it going to benefit you as an agent as an individual user and then make sure you’re providing support through those live trainings and through accepting that feedback and make it fun through gamification and when you’re doing these pieces you really can increase your your chances of having a successful adoption and ultimately having a better product at the end because of the feedback that you receive from your team Erin thank you so much for those seven tips and Zeke appreciate you riding along there as well with some great questions uh we’re gonna have a second to get some more to more questions from the audience here so make sure that you’re taking this time if you have a question to chat it in via the q a but again Erin thank you so much those are great tips that businesses can follow to ensure they successfully install launch and adopt   CRM in their own organizations so excited about sharing those with everybody that joined us today um so Erin why don’t you take a few seconds and talk more about your business if you could sure yeah so if business made simple our mission is to systemize and document the processes of small businesses so that they can grow and scale and successfully train teams and how we do that in in practicality is by creating playbooks of standard operating procedures that you can use and those playbooks help the owners to be able to step away out of daily operations and be able to delegate successfully without losing any kind of quality because you’ve documented what are the rules that you want your team to play by and so i love it i love being able to do that and you can kind of get a sample for that like i mentioned in that free in-depth training on the   CRM rollout plan and that’s that link there that you’re seeing below but along with this rollout plane you’ll get a swipe file that i’m happy to share it’s walk you step by step and this will give you an idea too about what customized training could look like so it’ll give you a good visual but we love being able to help make businesses simple by helping them develop those roles and implement them so that they can focus so owners can focus on the things that they need to and everyone can be successful in their own roles uh well thank you so much Erin and for all of you watching if a new   CRM is in your future it’s a good time to check out Insightly insanely   CRM is easy to adopt we’ve been told by our customers uh it’s very customizable and integrates easily with every other application you use to run your business we hear from our customers that they are fully up and running with Insightly in as few as eight weeks sometimes sooner and some are growing revenue 3x in less than a year customers also tell us that they’re able to significantly improve key sales metrics using Insightly they’re able to increase sales pipeline sales velocity deal size deal predictability things like that help aligning marketing sales and cx teams and they’ve really found that they can improve their team’s efficiency and reduce errors with advanced workflow automation that the system offers Insightly again is it’s it’s extremely flexible system and customizable and really grows with you as a business um and    as we are uh near the end here you won’t have to worry about the pitfalls and hungry alligators of   CRM adoption by choosing Insightly and Zeke can tell our viewers a little bit more about our own service plans that we provide to our customers yeah thank you Chip    we talked a lot about those challenges today and    our ability to help    provide an advanced onboarding    system and process with aligning you with a csm    a technical account manager this the support team really surround you with a team of of individuals that are that are going to be there to be aligned with your business needs    one of the advantages of    our company now being fully remote and distributed is that we can also    align    the team the csm    with you uh potentially in or close to your time zone which is going to be huge and so they’re going to be there to work alongside you to achieve those long-term goals    to take you through you know the the initial implementation and that adoption but also that ongoing um evolution    because we talked about that earlier you’re gonna have new users come on your business is gonna change and as your business change changes    you to make sure that the   CRM is going to be able to keep up with you so we’re there to help support you through that change and that overall adoption    being able to see uh to mitigate those risks to be able to see the higher higher engagement and also your the   CRM to help your business grow is    it’s really our north star and what we’re there and when you compare that to    legacy tools um this is where Insightly    as a company and his teams we’re going to be there and we’re going to help shine above all those so it’s definitely something we’re super passionate about it’s why i get up every single day and do what i do so if you want to know more please chat with us we’d love to you know we’d love to get on a call with you understand your needs and see how we can help align with that and create that personalized demo for you    to move things forward yeah thanks so much Zeke so why don’t we move into questions we’re getting some coming in here um again please chat yours in via the q a if you do have questions so i might hit this one first so this was it came in with a bit of a mystery but typically how does a   CRM implementation and training take for a small to mid-sized company say under 50 employees Erin so a lot of that depends on this customer support success that you get so    i i highly recommend working with a company to i think a lot of it is just getting it customized and right um and so i think your metric that you’re saying is of eight weeks is super reasonable for getting it customized and then i would plan on another month to be able to get it tested by your beta team um and then get everybody trained so in general you’re looking about three months if you’re doing it on your own and that can be a lot faster if you’ve got somebody on the   CRM side or a consultant that can help to customize it for you yeah that’s great one interesting question uh jordan p is asking here do you any   CRMs gamify on the platform that you’re aware of Zeke or Erin yeah i don’t know and gamification as far as like number of points and that kind of thing but a lot of   CRMs i know Insightly included has great dashboards where you can make more of that visual but i think as far as gamifying what the rewards are going to look like and that kind of stuff that i don’t know of any   CRMs off vm that do that but you can definitely build some strong dashboards that will make that visual for you yeah i love that i mean i’m a huge fan of of dashboards and also leveraging workflows    for notifications leveraging tools like app connect when deals are won to notify teams via slack channel there’s there’s definitely ways jordan that you can build that gamification in there and it could be something as simple as as Erin’s point which would be utilizing uh our native dashboards but you can definitely and    i i’ll turn the nerd out a little bit because i do work on the professional services side so i’m very technical in that and that nature so if you want to talk about how to take even further with some automation and integrations i think we could definitely find some some cool ways to do that with you yeah i’m kind of right there with you Zeke i think it’s    uh a customized dashboards where you’re dragging in your own cards and stuff can definitely feel like gamification so totally um great question here leah a is asking what tools are provided to help the planning process of customizations and data mapping Zeke that might be good for you uh yeah    so one of the things that we’ll do leah is we’ll have a kickoff session with you where we’re gonna    we’re gonna understand everything that came through that sales cycle and everything that you shared um with the sales team but we’re also gonna we’re gonna take that a step further and we’re going to further Validate that and we’re going to provide    a checklist for you Erin talked about playbooks we do something very similar we have playbooks that will walk you through that and really start to look at your timelines and take your timelines and fit that into the checklist and build those necessary things and making sure that you’re we’re properly setting up to meet those milestones and to have that that level of customization for you that’s that is super key for us great did you have anything to add to that Erin i mean from your own perspective no i think that i think you hit it right on yeah i think as far as that planning process and you know data mapping and that it really is critical to put a lot of that thought in at the beginning and i think it’s super smart to work with your customer service reps at your   CRM to be able to help you with that customization great so Erin i wonder if you can speak to    what have you seen    sort of like the best timing to to start the implementation    if there’s any tips that you would have    um parts of the year days or morning evening yeah so i think different businesses are different baits because some businesses are more seasonal than others so like we work with a lot of hvac companies for example and hvac has a super busy season and    a less busy season so if you if your business is seasonal like that i recommend starting the implementation or starting the planning of your   CRM and the customization right at the start of your slow season and plan to complete the rollout before your busy season so that people aren’t trying to learn while they are also um    in the throes of their busy season as far as like days and things like that i don’t think that that really has an impact it’s just more of thinking through what the workload of your team looks like and making sure that you’re not overwhelming them when they’re already busy right you’re going to want to make sure that your team has time to pay attention is not frustrated and bored as you showed with some of those graphics um you’re presenting to them another great question that came in so is it okay to have a lot of customizations in a   CRM or is it best to change our system to fit the   CRM structure i know that   CRM customization and kind of configuration is a super commonly asked question and it’s it’s a common need and Zeke maybe you can talk a little bit about the customization capabilities of Insightly yeah yeah i mean it’s it’s really easy to over engineer and to overthink your implementation and that’s actually one of the pitfalls that we hear or one of the challenges we hear as when users are coming off of other tools is they’ve over engineered it they’ve they’ve they’ve really overcranked it so i don’t think there’s anything wrong with customization at all i do find a lot of Value in taking a look at what are the core functions that are built within the tool first and    that does mean at times you’re gonna have to readjust your own business processes to fit that um and i think it’s gonna be dependent on your business but i think there’s there’s definitely some give and take but starting with the core functions that are in there first and then from there starting to branch out into you know the more advanced features think of it as like the land and expand type approach    getting your team in there and using some of the core functionality that hundreds of thousands of customers find a ton of Value in is a great starting point and then from there you start asking for feedback and how can we start to make things how do we start to build in improvements and those improvements sometimes can come with levels of customization and that’s where you’re going to continuously evolve the system i don’t think it’s ever done um i think you’re always going to be making little tweaks here and there because your business is going to change a little bit you’re going to add in you know you’re going to add to your team your team’s going to grow and as your team grows and maybe they start to become remote you need to rethink things a little bit and so you got to be okay with    readjusting that customization but you don’t want to start heavy on the front end and have to completely    blow the thing up that’s why you want to start small and grow into it yeah and i think Zeke on that too one thing that i’ve seen a lot of people do is they want to go straight to like full automation and sometimes it’s better to start without all the full automation where you’re proving the process manually first and then doing the automation because if it’s all automated you may not know what’s happening behind all that all that automation so i completely agree with you on that great thank you Zeke so    i know that um a lot of go to market teams across you know sales and marketing you use Insightly and we have a great question for it’s anonymous here but does Insightly have an in-house proposal generator that if you’re a go-to-market team you could use i’ll take that one so we do i mean we have our products price books and quotes but we also have the our opportunity object that    you can tie all that together to create that proposal into    create that quote and then you can then tie on some integrations either through like panadoc or use something like app connect so that you can tie in an e-signature every    every sales team out there that i know of has some form of the signature and has an integration need so    we have we have tools that we offer that can help support that um so i think in short yes we do have that um and there’s a lot of    really creative ways you can do that with opportunities price books products and quotes and also leveraging something like app connect which could help tie in a third-party tool like a    a docusign or a panda or    adobe sign great tips Zeke well we’ve run out of time for questions during this webinar if your question wasn’t answered someone from our team will reach out to you directly this week i want to thank Zeke and Erin again for joining us today thanks great content really appreciate it Erin absolutely thank you for having me and Zeke appreciate you coming and asking great questions uh have a great day everyone