This week, I spent a little bit of time with a sales force I had not visited in several years. Plenty of change has been introduced, just as it has been in every sales organization. What was palpable in this team, however, was how adamantly opposed so many team members were to the new tools and technology the sellers have been asked to use.
My first hint at their disgruntlement came with an innocuous question. I simply asked a group "what's new?" and got an earful back about the new CRM and pipeline reports, the auto-dialer, the LMS and a new performance metric requiring prospects be researched on social media.
The group of eight people I was talking with has an average age, I'd estimate, of 50 years. I'm close enough in age to be concerned by their response because I wouldn't want this group's sentiments to be an unfair reflection of other sellers in this age range.
I asked them if newer, younger sellers felt the same way. This group convinced me that the younger crowd shared the same feelings about the technology and the way it had been introduced in this particular organization.
That's not always the case. Many sales organizations report that there's a generational divide. It may be nothing more than perception. But that's beside the point. Whoever it is, whatever age they are, no sales organization disputes the fact that some of the sellers in their organization resist new tools and technology.
As a seller, it's your job to sell. It is the job of the organization you work for to enable you to sell. The tools and technology introduced are intended to help you sell more and to sell more efficiently.
The only way these tools can actually work for you, though, is if you actually use them as they are intended. When sellers try to work around the system, try to take shortcuts, try to do the bare minimum, or procrastinate and fall behind on input into the system, then the tools and technology do not work as promised.
That's when it becomes a vicious circle. Sellers don't do their part. The system doesn't do its part. The company does not see the expected return on the investment. Information that sales managers and others had hoped to utilize is unreliable or unavailable. No one is satisfied.
When sellers say, for example, that using a CRM is a waste of time, chances are good that they are absolutely right. If not used as the system has been designed to be used, the time the seller spends minimally using or misusing the system is, indeed, a waste of time.
In the organization I visited, the group I spoke to acknolwedged that the only way they consistently use their CRM is to tag prospects. In other words, by putting their name with a prospect in the system they prevent other sellers from calling on the account.
That is unfortunate. There is much more the system could be doing for them. They refuse to see it because they are uncomfortable with the very idea of change. They have convinced themselves that it's better to do things the way they've always done them.
Ultimately, the management team bears the responsibility for this misperception. A lack of timely training always results in people misunderstanding technology. Not offering relevant benefits equals not selling your sales team on adopting a new way of doing something. Not setting appropriate performance standards to inspect what you expect gives no teeth to what you have asked.
So the sellers get together and grouse about the systems they are not using properly. The sales managers go into their meetings and wring their hands about the sellers not using the system. Senior managers then wonder why they are not getting the data and results promised by the investment.
All these unproductive conversations lead nowhere. More often than not, the outcome is a conclusion that the system just isn't a good one. So the whole ineffective process gets repeated in the future. Same problems, new systems. Without aligning the introduction of the new system with internal sales productivity drivers, the results will be no different.
Rather than raging against the machine, sellers, sales managers and sales leaders would all be better served to think about how to use the system effectively before it's ever installed.
Training, incentive programs, account assignments, goal setting, reporting, meetings, hiring, performance standards, and every other aspect of managing the sales team should be aligned with the system.
No tool or technology is a stand-alone magic bullet.
