How to Get Reps to Use a CRM They Don’t Like
Some reps keep their notes on paper, take every call on their cell phone, and never log anything in the CRM because they don’t see what it does for them. Max Bevan, our principal account executive at Fast Slow Motion, described how he approaches that situation with Eric Housh on a recent episode of The Fast Slow Motion Podcast. This post covers what motivates salespeople, how to reframe the CRM for a rep who sees no value in it, what leadership has to change, and where automation helps. It’s part of a group of posts that start with Why Your Sales Pipeline Isn’t Closing Deals.
Start With What Motivates Salespeople
Max said salespeople tend to be motivated by money, so tying the process to commission gets their attention quickly. His example was a rep who closes a deal without filling in the dependent fields or information needed for the sales-to-service handoff, and who doesn’t get paid commission downstream until the process is followed. He called it an extreme example and said it works remarkably well, though he described it as a last resort for when nothing else has worked.
The gentler route he described starts with communicating proactively and setting expectations at the point of rollout. From there, you tie each rep’s own motivation to the process you’re building, because the habits that process creates are the ones that make their job easier. Max said that connection alone drives a lot more adoption. The conversation didn’t get into how to structure commission rules, and any change like that depends on a compensation plan the business is able to adjust.
The Rep Who Sees No Reason to Log Anything
Max called the rep with old habits the real challenge: notes on paper, calls on a cell phone, and nothing logged because the CRM doesn’t seem worth the effort. His approach is to reframe the question for that person. What would change once logging into HubSpot, checking a dashboard, reviewing the pipeline, and working from a sales workspace showed them where to spend their time and how, with AI making the job easier?
In his view, the people and culture may not be the real problem in that situation. The rep just hasn’t seen value in the tools that were introduced, so the work is to build infrastructure that helps them and bring in tools that deliver on that promise. Max was also clear that there’s no single silver bullet. Some of the work is training, some is adoption and process, and some is tying it back to motivation, and the goal is to do several of these together in a way that gets people genuinely on board.
Leadership Behavior Sets the Standard
Max said the momentum has to come from leadership too. The conversation described a pattern where leadership decides the business needs a new system or CRM, rolls it out, and never changes its own behavior. The CRM doesn’t get reinforced as the single source of truth, and leaders keep walking the halls or pinging people on Slack for deal updates in place of holding the team accountable for keeping the CRM current.
Eric asked listeners to picture a world where micromanagement disappears because the CRM data is trustworthy. Executives stop pinging people and stop knocking on doors, because the tooling already gives them visibility. Everyone gets treated like an adult, trust builds across the team, and the inefficiencies that came from chasing updates go away as the culture shifts toward trusting the data. Eric said that alone should be enough motivation, and we go further on that picture in What Changes Six Months After Your CRM Finally Works.
Making the CRM Work for the Rep
On The Fast Slow Motion Podcast episode, Max’s answer about the cost of waiting included automation. When a business builds automation so the CRM works for the team in place of the team working for it, and the team follows the right process consistently, the risk of human error drops and the right steps get checked off each time. Max said the numbers climb and consistency improves as a result, because the CRM is backing up the right behaviors.
Max also listed automation around reminders, tasks, and follow-up among the quick wins available to a business that’s starting to fix its process. HubSpot Automation That Keeps Deals Moving covers what that looks like in HubSpot.
Listen to the full podcast episode here.