By Ritvars Mētra, Founder of ReadinessCompassEvery CRM programme reports that the sales managers are bought in. They attended the briefings, they said supportive things in the kick-off, and none of them has objected.
And every Monday, the pipeline review runs off a spreadsheet that a sales operations analyst prepares by exporting from the CRM and cleaning it up by hand.
Both things are true at once, and the second one is what the team is actually reading.
Endorsement and use are different signals
The evidence here is unusually specific about which one matters. In the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Christian Homburg, Jan Wieseke and Christina Kühnl reported a multilevel analysis of social influence on salespeople’s adoption of sales technology. When salespeople observe their superiors using the technology, their own willingness to adopt and use it is strengthened; adoption by co-workers and superiors has a positive effect on ongoing use. The authors explain it through informational and normative social influence — people infer what is expected, and what is normal, from what they see others do.
Note the verb. Observe their superiors using. Not hear their superiors endorse.
A manager who praises the CRM in a team meeting and then asks for a pipeline update by email has sent two messages, and the second one wins because it describes what will actually happen on Friday.
Why managers do not use it
It is worth being fair about this, because the usual explanation — that they are resistant — is both unkind and unhelpful.
- They are measured on the number, not the system. No sales manager has ever been performance-managed for a poorly maintained pipeline. They have been performance-managed for missing quota.
- Their spreadsheet works. It contains their judgement, their adjustments, and the deals they know are real regardless of what the stage says. Switching to system data means giving that up and looking less certain in front of their director.
- They are shielding their team. A manager who knows the CRM data is patchy also knows that exposing it invites scrutiny of their people. Cleaning it up before the review is protective behaviour.
- Nobody told them what “using it” means. “Support the CRM” is not an instruction. It cannot be done on a Tuesday.
The third one is the most important and the least discussed. Manager non-use is frequently a rational response to a data quality problem that the manager did not create and cannot fix alone.
Specify the behaviour, not the attitude
| Usually asked for | Specify instead |
|---|---|
| “Support the CRM rollout” | Run the weekly pipeline review from the system, on screen, with no export |
| “Encourage the team to use it” | Do not accept a pipeline update by email or in conversation |
| “Model good behaviour” | Enter your own coaching notes in the opportunity record, visibly |
| “Reinforce data quality” | Thank the rep who moves a deal backwards. Out loud, in the review |
| “Escalate issues” | Bring one broken thing per month to the CRM owner, with a deadline for a reply |
The right-hand column is observable. That is the whole difference. Each one can be watched, coached and checked, and each one is a thing the team will see happen or not happen within a week.
The fourth row does more work than the rest combined. A rep who moves a deal backwards is doing the most valuable and most exposing thing available in the system. If that is met with a raised eyebrow, honest staging ends permanently across the team, and no dashboard will show you why.
Remove the alternative before demanding the behaviour
Asking managers to work in the system while the parallel spreadsheet still governs the monthly review is asking them to do the harder thing for no reason. The sequence has to run the other way.
Decide that the sales director’s review is run from system data on a stated date. Then hold one review from the system with the gaps visible and unmanaged. It will be uncomfortable, and it is the single most effective intervention available — because it establishes that the cost of poor data now lands on the people who can improve it, rather than on an analyst cleaning up an export at the weekend.
Do this once and manager behaviour changes in a fortnight. Announce it and do not follow through, and nothing changes at all.
How to know whether it is happening
Manager reinforcement is measurable, and it should be measured directly rather than surveyed:
- Manager logins and report runs, separated from rep activity. A manager who never opens a report is not running reviews from the system.
- Comments and coaching notes entered by managers in opportunity records.
- Exports. High export volume immediately before review day is the signature of the parallel process.
- Backward stage movements by team. If one manager’s team shows honest staging and another’s shows none, that is a management difference, not a team difference.
That last comparison is the most useful diagnostic in the whole programme, because it isolates the variable. Same tool, same training, same incentives, different manager, different behaviour. It is the general form of measuring whether managers are ready to reinforce a change, applied to a pipeline.
When a manager will not
Some managers will not move, and it is worth diagnosing which kind you have. A manager who cannot get the reports they need has a tooling problem and will change once it is fixed. A manager who is protecting their team from scrutiny has a trust problem, and the answer is a commitment about what the data will and will not be used for. A manager who simply prefers their own spreadsheet has a preference, and preferences yield to the review being run from the system whether they participate or not.
What does not work is more encouragement. The team is not listening to what managers say about the CRM. They are watching what managers do with it on Friday.
More on manager-led adoption in the Adoption Risk Hub, or see which pipeline measures show whether reinforcement is working.