Your people aren’t lazy, stubborn, or process-averse. They are just averse to complicated processes that don’t make sense to them, weren’t explained properly, or don’t help them. In fact, they love intuitive processes and tools that help them sell more. So, this thing you want your salespeople to do, is it something that will truly help them, or is it more of an administration function for your own benefit? The latter is okay, but you need to explain why it is important to the salespeople before they will buy in. Use the word “because” a lot in your communications. Salespeople are all very busy, with all kinds of demands competing for their attention, so they instinctively prioritize their time. Unless the tool or idea given to them is intuitive, they’ll dismiss spending the mental time and energy to figure it out, and aren’t most of us the same way? Engage Their Help To Better Serve Your People First, start learning how to earn, rather than demand, their attention. Instead of trying to push mandates or arbitrary programs onto salespeople, try a different approach: consider how you market to customers. You earn the business and attention of customers. What if you tried thinking of salespeople as customers or users, and your tools, sales environment, and programs are the “products”? Can you force your customers to do things? No. You have to design a product or service that they appreciate and that improves their business. In doing so, you earn the business and attention of your customers. The same can be done for your internal “customer”—your salespeople. Consider what could happen if you made your sales organization “salesperson- centric”? By the way, if you’re having customer and marketing problems, part of it could be a reflection of what’s not working with your internal marketing and servicing of your own employees.