Our Team Won’t Adapt New Technology

Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.

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Dear Bev,

Some of our advisors ran a project to implement a new CRM that talks to our existing systems and offers a streamlined approach to communication and sharing of information. It was truly a group effort. Four primary people were on the search team and a larger pool of staff gave their opinions.

It was an expensive endeavor. We now have the program installed, but no one is using it. I’m old enough to remember software that stayed sitting in a box in the storeroom and was never opened. Of course, this CRM is not a tangible product, but that’s how it feels. We do all this work, get everyone engaged, there is agreement on what we should do and yet it is still “sitting in the box.”

Do people lie about what they need? What am I missing to help move everyone to embracing the next step? Lately you have written about firms evolving and changing. This is a great example of how we have to keep moving forward. If we do it in a collaborative way, why is there resistance and pushback?

G.E.