Sell the system to your team before you buy it
A well-built system still fails when the people who have to use it never bought in. Sell it to them first, in their currency.
Before I started this company, I ran enterprise CRM rollouts for someone else. Big ones. The client was paying top dollar for every feature, and the implementation was well thought out.
It still failed.
The sales team never bought in, so they barely used it. So the data was wrong, and so were the reports. Within months the CRM was a mess, and the company was paying a lot of money for a tool that told it things that weren’t true.
You spent a lot of money, but you forgot the humans.
I was doing what I was told at the time. It took me a couple of those projects to see what went wrong.
Compliance is a sales problem
Later I was the ops person pushing my own systems. Please use the desk management tool. Please log it in the CRM. I wanted people to comply with my thing.
It didn’t work, and eventually I understood why. A rule gets you grudging, half-hearted use at best. People adopt what they’ve been sold on.
The question is, dear sales guy, why does CRM hygiene help you? Not “use the CRM, damn it.”
Sell it in their currency
People buy for different reasons, and that includes your team. Some run on money: commissions, bonuses, the number. Others run on contribution: they’re here because they care about the customer or the mission. A healthy company has both.
Pitch the wrong one and you lose them. Tell a mission-driven operator the new system will make the company more money and you’ve sold them the wrong thing. So before rollout, know where each person sits, and tell each of them what the system does for them in their terms.
Plan for the humans before you pick the software
Most companies choose the tool first and figure out adoption later. Flip it. The psychology of the people who’ll use it belongs in the platform decision.
Before you buy, show two or three options to the people who’ll live in them every day. Watch how they react. If your sales team hates the interface, you want to know before you sign the contract.
Once it’s live, score it two ways. Hygiene: how clean is the data? Human compliance: how often do people use it the way they’re supposed to? Messy data with high compliance points at the tool or the setup. Low compliance means the people were never sold. Those need very different fixes.
Listen past the complaint
When your team says “we have too many tools,” take it seriously, even if you disagree. Their opinion is valid even when the reason behind it isn’t the one they’re giving you. Often the real complaint is that nobody ever explained what each tool is for, or why it helps them.
Who this is for
If you’re about to roll out a CRM, a project management tool, or any system your whole team has to use every day, this is for you. If you’re three people who picked the tool together, you’ve already done the hard part.
Someone still has to own adoption after launch (I’ve written about finding that person before). That job gets much easier when every person was sold before the switch flipped.
Before your next rollout, ask each person one question: what would make this worth your time? Then build the launch around their answers.