Getting a Sales Team to Adopt the Sales Process

The Psychology of Sales Process Adoption

Most sales processes lack adoption for the same reason:

They are just administrative mechanisms, not actual processes.

“Process” is often the wrong word for how sales organizations actually operate.

Most internal sales processes are just fields in the CRM that don’t accurately reflect the day-to-day of a sales rep, or the deals they are managing.

Sales reps quickly realize that the internal “processes” don’t help them create outcomes, so they begin to view it as something to be navigated, not a process to use.

Understand what is happening in the mind of a sales rep. There are two self-reinforcing narratives around administration: The sales reps who are successful think: “I don’t need to do that, look at my results.”

The sales reps who are struggling think: “I’m following the process, the results aren’t my fault."

Neither of these narratives has a reason to use the internal process productively.

The Problem This Creates

When these narratives appear, sales reps only comply with process when leadership applies enough pressure. When compliance is something that only happens with enforcement, one of two outcomes tends to emerge.

Either: Leadership stays deeply involved on the sales floor. Reps respond by producing low-quality inputs to check the boxes and get leadership off of their back. Data quality will be low, and leadership will get stuck on the frontlines.

Or: Leadership takes a more hands-off approach. Without utility driving usage, reps abandon the internal processes and manage their deals outside of it. Leadership focuses on strategy and management, but their ability to make good decisions suffer for it. Either leadership needs to be too involved to scale, or leadership doesn’t have the visibility they need to scale.

This is the mistake of confusing forced compliance with adoption.

What We’ve Seen Work Extremely Well

The issue comes from the fact that the administrative tasks aren’t actually a process the sales team is using. Sales reps will willingly adopt something that enables them to create desired outcomes.  They will rarely adopt something that just introduces unnecessary friction.

Continuous reminders and oversight don’t fix that problem.

The upside is that sales reps will naturally use a process that aligns with most required administration.

Most importantly, they will do it without needing to rely on so much enforcement. 

The game that always works is: make the administration part of a process the rep runs, not a separate step from it.

Below is a comprehensive framework that leaders can use to identify adoption obstacles and make administration part of the rep’s process.

A Comprehensive Framework for You

For a process to be adopted, administrative requirements have to be able to translate into three things:  

• a decision or action that a rep needs to execute

• a reinforceable, foundational behavior that supports the reps’ ideal outcomes

• a clear, reasonable question leadership needs answered to coach or guide the rep

The details of these translations vary from role to role, but they are structurally required for getting sales reps to adopt an internal process effectively.

When these translations don’t exist, the administration will always be treated as secondary work.

Administration: the administrative tasks required Natural Process: the real steps and decisions sales reps are executing Behavioral Intent: the behaviors and perspectives that support the rep's ideal outcomes 1-on-1 Topics: the questions leadership asks of the deal or sales rep

Administration	Natural Process	Behavioral Intent	1-on-1 Topics
Qualification Structures	Determine whether a deal is worth pursuing.	Avoid investing time in low-quality opportunities	What makes this deal worth having in the pipeline?
Discovery Questions	Identify pain points and position a solution	Help buyers make sense of the product or service	What are the main problems we are solving for the customer?
Deal Stages	Keep track of what needs to happen in a deal	Control deals and timelines by knowing where things stand	What is left on this deal before we get a "yes" or a "no"?

If process requirements can’t be mapped across these columns, it will always be treated as disconnected administration.

If process requirements can be mapped across the columns, the process is adoptable.

What This Looks Like in Real Life

John, the VP of Sales at a SaaS company needs his team to log closed-lost reasons in the CRM. His dashboards are usually over 2 weeks behind, sometimes more. When the executive team asks him for updates, he has to fill in the gaps with improvised context and chase the reps around for information. For the past 3 months, John has constantly asked the team to update the CRM if they lose a deal, and has sent countless emails and slack messages reminding them to do so.

Eric, an Account Executive, is one of the big culprits of the delays. He’s a good producer, so John tries to not be too overbearing with admin work, but Eric doesn’t see the point in doing administration for lost deals. Eric does always ask buyers why they decided not to move forward, in case he runs into a similar situation in the future, but he just keeps a mental note of it and moves on.

Instead of trying to coax Eric into just “doing the admin,” what else can John do?

Eric doesn’t have to “just do the admin,” he has to take advantage of an opportunity to improve his process and get better outcomes.

By simply clicking a button on his CRM, Eric can keep perfect track of what is losing him deals, and make sure he can see those problems coming in the future.

Eric’s Adoption Framework

Administration	Natural Process	Behavioral Intent	1-on-1 Topics
Lost Reason	Figure out why the deal was lost	Prevent problems by seeing them coming.	What are the most frequent reasons you are losing deals?

Instead of outright begging the Account Executive to just click the buttons, John helps Eric see how to turn the administration into an improvement in his behavioral process. Every week, Eric now pulls an overview of his most frequent closed-lost reasons. This allows him to surface those frequent problems earlier in deals, which gives him more control over his outcomes.

Eric doesn’t start marking closed-lost reasons because his VP keeps bugging him about it. Eric starts marking closed-lost reasons because it enables him to run his process better.

This is what adoption creates, compliance doesn’t, and how Stem Sales helps leadership enable their team in high performing sales environments.

Send this to a leader you know who is trying to solve a process adoption problem.

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