Managing sales professionally within any business requires a great deal of focus and effort. You need to define pricing, set quotas, establish activity goals and build momentum, all while ensuring that customers and prospects receive timely support and follow-up from your team.

One of the tools that can help you with the job is customer relationship management (CRM) software. Going all the way back to the early days of the personal computer era, contact management applications such as ACT! quickly became mainstays for individual salespeople looking to stay on top of contacts, companies, opportunities and next steps in their sales pipeline.

Now, the leading application is Salesforce.com, which was founded in 1999 as the very first cloud-based solution in the CRM marketplace. Today, Salesforce.com is the most common solution found in large enterprises and many middle-market companies alike.

But for most small businesses and for many sales teams, finding long-term value from the use of customer relationship management (CRM) software still seems elusive. Does it really make sense to burden your top-selling reps with software and reporting responsibilities when they’re already busy meeting or exceeding quota?

The answer is…yes.

The reality is that the complexity of sales today is precisely the reason why you and your team need to use a software application to support the sales process. It is more important than ever to have a centralized, easily accessed database of comprehensive prospect and customer information. The volume of people you contact, the complexity of the sale, and the need for more than one person to access sales process information are just some of the things that a CRM system can facilitate.

In order to establish and succeed with a customer relationship management (CRM) system for your sales team, consider these five steps:

1. Put the process before the product.

Too many business decision-makers become wrapped up in the details of selecting a new business technology, rather than in creating business processes that will work across any technology. While it certainly does matter what CRM system you choose, the fact is that the success or failure of the CRM project is 90% driven by your sales processes and only 10% driven by your choice of product.

2. Establish clear usage objectives.

One problem with software in general (whether it’s running on your local computers, hosted in the cloud or accessed on a mobile device) is that software developers are engaged in a race to add new features and functions, even though 90% of users only need 20% of the functions the product already provides. Your objective, therefore, is to define clear goals for use – starting with things as simple as entering a new contact, marking a follow-up reminder and adding notes from a recent call or meeting. Keep your usage expectations relevant and as simple as possible.

3. Demand little, but discipline a lot.

Since you’re going to start with a simple and straightforward list of functions for the sales team to use, make it clear that you expect everyone to comply. If you think taking time out to perform a given process in the CRM system is time-consuming yourself, remove it from the list of expectations. Once you set the standard, however, diligently enforce it.

4. Focus on the benefits to the sales person.

Chances are, even your best sales people are missing soft deadlines, failing at some of their follow-ups and dropping less urgent (but perhaps more important) contacts in the process of moving from priority to priority over the course of a day. That’s why it’s critical to present the benefits of using the CRM system from their perspective – “what’s in it for them”. Be explicit with examples of how using the system will benefit them.

5. Evaluate what you can do with the software, not what it can do for you.

Software vendors love to focus on all of the capabilities the product offers to the user or to the manager today. However, the biggest question worth asking and assessing for yourself is a completely different one: How easily can your team (without programmers and technical experts) make the little changes to the software that can be essential to the long-term success of your CRM system?

For example, if your company calls companies “accounts” and the system calls them “enterprises”, can you easily change this label? If your reps call their territories “regions” and the regions partly overlap, can you make a adjustments so the system can support how your business functions?

By giving emphasis to these five steps, you’ll choose and be able to implement a CRM system that enhances the sales process in ways that bring greater success for you and your sales team. The result will be easier sharing of best practices, greater visibility into the status of sales activities, and more effective sales progress across your organization.