Planning for Sales Behavior
The Challenge
How does a business get sales people to do system work they don’t care about? Fun topic, right? Wrong.
Now that we have established the baseline challenge, let’s add more complexity to this topic:
How does a business get salespeople from older generations to adopt new technology workflows that are foreign to them? The fear of failure drives the resistance seen in human behavior for adopting new technologies. There’s a 10-80-10 early adopter rule at play here, but that’s a story for another time.
A software sales company was using...
11 different software programs
A software company was using 11 different software programs to accomplish day-to-day operations. This company had integrated each program to the max and overstressed the integrations on a regular basis, resulting in frequent work stoppages and lost revenue.
Leadership eventually realized data silos, redundant work, lack of real-time insights, and frequent work stoppages were restricting the managers abilities to hit the next growth targets and decided the time had come to move to an all-in-one ERP.
Lesson 1
The people in charge should not be the final designers of the day-to-day workflows for the employees. Why? The people in charge don’t know the day-to-day steps. The people in charge know the outcomes necessary to operate the business but more frequently than not, do not have intimate insights into the daily challenges faced by the people who do the work. A new CRM is an opportunity to reimagine how current sales CRM steps can be consolidated, automated, and done in a manner that is easy and natural for a non-technical sales person to follow. All involved benefit greatly from leveraging a SME who clearly understands the goals of leadership and the current needs of sales to get revenue across the finish line and handed off to delivery.
This SME is someone that understands how to systematically join the desired outcomes from leadership and incorporate the steps required to drive these outcomes into the new CRM for the sales team. This person understands the pressures of being in sales, the drag of the data entry requirements, and the business value behind the needs for reporting accuracy.
This was not the original approach taken by the CFO at this business who also led sales. This CFO tried to reimagine the entire sales process by himself. Because of this the CFO missed multiple implementation deadlines and was ultimately yelled at by the CEO (co-owner) when the new system was not live after 8 months of effort. Once the CFO set their ego aside, they tapped a 24 year old program manager on the sales team to do the work. The workflow was documented within 5 hrs, and ready to hand off to implementation for system configuration.
Lesson 2
After the CRM build out was completed, the training period leading up to go-live began. The entire sales team was granted access to the sandbox of the new ERP to familiarize themselves with the CRM. Everyone was granted access. The CFO would frequently tell the sales team during team meetings to login, get familiar with the new system, and ask two designated people on the team for help. Shockingly, the sales team did not take these practices seriously but still claimed they would invest the time to learn the new system before go-live. This never happened. The SME’s on the team asked to host live training sessions where each individual on the sales team would go through the CRM steps in front of a group as a behavioral training exercise. The CFO opted to not do these steps, thinking go-live would be delayed and said if the team members do not use the new system, they do not work here anymore.
Lesson 3
Keep the new system roll-out as simple as possible. Do not automate everything yet when rolling out new technology. Set the expectation go-live will contain the business process steps to operate, and automation will occur as everyone becomes more familiar. The teams need to understand what steps in the CRM are their responsibility and what can be automated away. This is a pattern to establish value and further adoption within your teams. When the initial go-live period occurred in this story, the outside implementation team had automated so much functionality, the internal teams did not trust the system mostly because they did not understand the steps under the hood. They actually became afraid to touch the CRM after a sales rep accidentally charged a client the entire balance for a new order, rather than the payment schedule the client had signed off on. Once this story got around, the team began demanding other departments’ own steps in the sales process, all because the reps didn’t trust the new system. This was a gap created by the lack of exposure to the new practices prior to go-live. The SME’s were not empowered to drive change management amongst the team, and had to course correct live, during selling hours, which put unnecessary stress on the sales reps, SME’s and CFO. There was yelling on the sales floor that could have easily been avoided.
The Sales Outcome
Unnecessary stress was put on the teams, SME’s and CFO that could have been easily avoided with intentional change management planning. Rather than prioritizing change management adoption before going live, the effort was delayed and implemented after the new CRM was live, leading to negative impacts on revenue and system confidence. One can argue that frontloading the change management effort would impact revenue as well, but ultimately is the lesser of two evils. New systems are disruptive but necessary for future company success. This change management was ultimately successful, massive amounts of time-saving automations were put in place. This led to automation handling most of the sales order processing that a team of 11 were doing manually. That same team was cut down to 4 members and the other 7 were allocated to other teams responsible for producing revenue. Automation, efficiency and top-line revenue growth were the final results.
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