Five Stages of CRM Integration: From Denial to Acceptance

A company's first CRM rollout is like your first ride on a bicycle. At the start it is hard and awkward, and you keep wondering why you need it at all — walking on your own two feet works perfectly well. Then you learn to keep your balance, you fall less often — and suddenly you are discovering new horizons and new speeds. Only in the case of CRM the bike ride is a collective one.

If you use the staff's reaction to the rollout as your yardstick, you can identify five stages of CRM integration into a company's workflow. This is a psychological chronicle: the stages repeat, almost word for word, the classic stages of accepting the inevitable — and that is exactly why they are so easy to recognize in your own team.

1. Denial. The team is convinced that a mistake has been made and that nobody is actually going to roll out any CRM.
2. Anger. As soon as it becomes clear that you mean it, denial gives way to blame — of the system, of management, of circumstances.
3. Bargaining. Resistance weakens, and employees try to postpone CRM or reduce its impact on their familiar processes.
4. Depression. Even the most stubborn opponents run out of arguments against it.
5. Acceptance. The system becomes a familiar and, before long, an indispensable working tool.

Stage one: denial

At the denial stage the team will be convinced that this is some kind of mistake and that you do not really want to roll out any CRM at all.

It is a passing whim of the boss, and it will blow over. We used to manage somehow before. We served our clients. We brought in the money, and there was enough for everyone's salary.A typical first-stage reaction

Employees may even start to doubt your ability to keep the situation under control if you need a whole CRM to do it.

At this stage there is a fair chance that they will start reaching out to friends who work in other departments or at companies similar to yours, where nobody is planning a CRM rollout yet — in search of proof that a CRM system is of no use. And that it is not the whole progressive world that is striving for this, and that the world does not need it in the slightest.

At this point employees may not only deny that the rollout is coming, but also feel real fear: that they will not be able to work the new way, that all their weak spots will be in plain sight, and that they could easily lose their jobs. Some may even refuse on the grounds that CRM does not fit their religious beliefs, their traditional working rituals or their sense of beauty.

What to do?

Talk to your employees. Explain why their work will get better because of this. If the team is large, talk to the managers so that they can pass the benefits on to their reports. If it is small, gather everyone together and tell them yourself.

• Sales managers will no longer "lose" clients somewhere on the way between the phone call and Excel.
• They will stop calling the same client with the same offer because of duplicates in the database.
• The contribution of the people who really do the work will become even more visible.
• Problem areas in the workflow can be tracked down and fixed.
• Contacts, clients' interest in particular products and everything else that used to get "lost" in email will be stored in the system.
• Employees will be freed from routine work — sending emails to clients after meetings, for example, will happen automatically.

And yes, you will now be able to keep a better eye on what they do during working hours.

Stage two: anger

Old habits are hard to change, but as soon as your employees realize that you are serious about rolling out a CRM, denial gives way to anger.

Why me, why us, why do we need this, why does nothing work here, and why is there no such feature there — I cannot do my job!A typical second-stage reaction

At this point the team cannot understand what it has done to deserve such a trial, and it starts blaming everyone around: working the new way is simply impossible, because the system is bad, inconvenient and not designed for their tasks. Employees feel they are not getting the attention they deserve, and they start complaining to management about the product and to each other about life.

What to do?

So, you have someone who owns the CRM rollout, and you have chosen a product. To make the rollout as smooth as possible, agree the go-live points together with your clients.

For example, the first point is when employees start sending emails and making calls only through the CRM. It is the simplest point and an easy one to reach — so that you can move on to the next ones. New CRM capabilities should be introduced in stages, so that it is easier for employees to get used to the product. In time the company comes to understand which other CRM capabilities it needs for its own tasks, and either asks the developer for help rolling them out or does it in-house.

Stage three: bargaining

The third stage of accepting the inevitable is bargaining. Employees try to strike a deal with fate, or with you, just to postpone CRM or reduce its impact on their familiar working processes.

At this stage resistance weakens, and some people start working more efficiently under the first influence of the CRM. A few employees carry on sabotaging it and complaining.

What to do?

The people who resist a CRM rollout most actively are those who leave things undone at work, perform mediocrely or personally benefit from the absence of strict control tools. In such cases a company can come up with its own rules to encourage people to use the CRM.

Stage four: depression

Bargaining gives way to depression — even the most stubborn opponents of CRM run out of arguments against it.

Employees have got used to the CRM and are already making the most of its capabilities. Questions come up as they work, and they now take them to the support team constructively, rather than emotionally to the person who owns the rollout, as they did before.

Little by little the system becomes a familiar working tool, the company develops its own style of using CRM, employees start to see the system as a useful — and before long an indispensable — working tool, and they share tips with each other. All in all, life gets better.

What to do?

Keep going in the same spirit, and still do not forget about oversight. It is worth talking about the first wins and putting the information you get from CRM statistics to work for the company. That is what all of this was started for.

Stage five: acceptance

Everything inevitable ends in acceptance. And accepting a CRM comes with a happy ending on top of that.

So, your employees have stopped grieving over the CRM, they have learned to use it, they write to clients and call them through the system without being reminded, they enter the data on deals, and you regularly review their work with the built-in tools. You do remember that nothing will start working by itself without regular spot checks, right?

Congratulations, you have reached the final stage of the rollout. At this point everyone in the company understands why transparency at work, clear reporting and routine automation are needed.

Your employees no longer object to working in the CRM — on the contrary, if you took it away from them, they would complain that they cannot do their job properly.

What to do?

Use it, and at the same time think about which other processes could be improved. CRM and ERP are systems with an enormous number of tools. That means full oversight of employees, automation, targeted work with clients, and the capabilities linked to big data and artificial intelligence that are only just appearing in these systems but will gain momentum in the future.

Five stages on one screen

What it looks like in real life

And to see how it all actually happens, we recommend reading our case study on a CRM rollout for a media holding — it describes the story of a CRM rollout in detail, using a vivid example from our own practice.