The Hard Sell: Six Tips for Convincing a Tech-Averse Sales Team to Use a CRM
(Editor’s Note: the following is a guest post from Mike Leatherwood, the Lead Industrial Development Manager at W.O. Grubb Steel Erectors Inc. Mike wrote this post for Upshot, a place for Sugar Insiders to tell their stories).
I like blank canvases—something that I can take responsibility for and build from the ground up. I like it, quite frankly, because it’s mine. I get to hire and grow and see businesses take off. In my years working in operations, I’ve had a lot of those canvases. But I’ve found that regardless of what the product is—whether making salami, countertops, dry ice, or even processing plastic pellets—it’s all about communicating with people and aligning resources. The particulars might be a little different, but it all comes back to those two things.
That’s exactly what I’ve been doing at W.O. Grubb. I joined the crane rental company last year after a lifetime of managing and building across different industries.
I was brought on to find and track down leads for our sales team. These are guys who work at 100 miles an hour. They go from meeting to meeting, spending all day in their trucks, and taking calls from leads and managing clients as they drive to their next meeting. Many others get calls in the middle of the night.
So you can imagine it’s not easy for them to find time—and the willingness—to learn something new. However, there are a few lessons that I can pass on to help get any sales team on board with a new CRM.
