CRM Implementation Fails at the Owner, Not the Software

Three months of build work go into a new CRM implementation. Then Mariah Gates and her team open the first live training, and somebody on staff asks the question that tells you exactly how this is going to go.

"What's this training for?"

Mariah is the founder of Accelerated Automation, a firm that helps insurance agencies set up and run their CRM. She described the scene on Finding Peak without much drama, because she has lived it: "We have built out CRMs and systems and come on to the first live training. And this is the first time the staff is learning that this agency was even considering this change."

Nobody in that room did anything wrong with the software. The rollout was already in trouble, and the trouble had an owner's name on it.

I said it on the show and I'll stand on it here. Most of what gets written about systems is about which tool to buy. And "if you don't have the process in place to get your people to actually use the tool," it doesn't matter which one you picked.

They won't use it.

A CRM implementation is a people decision first

I asked Mariah what goes wrong when a company that has never run a CRM decides to start. She didn't name a feature or a vendor. "The most common one is not talking to the employees who will use this tool early on."

She learned the fix the hard way, years before she was building systems for agencies. In her early twenties she managed people at a bank, JPMorgan Chase, and her district manager told her to "build the why, build the belief." Her instinct at the time, in her words: "I'm just going to tell them what to do because this is their job."

That instinct hasn't gone anywhere. Mariah's point is that it costs more now than it did then. "With automation and AI, people are legitimately afraid for their jobs." So the message has to land before the training, and it has to be specific: we are doing this "because I want you to do these activities instead, not because I'm trying to replace your job." Then you give people time. Her phrase was to let their brains spiral. They will spiral either way. The only choice is whether they do it before launch with the facts, or after launch with rumors.

None of this is hard to understand, which is why I pushed her on it. If telling people early is so obvious, why do owners skip it?

Her answer: "We are really worried about upsetting people." And underneath that, "a lot of times we lack conviction." She has a client on retainer for 18 months who stalls the same way: "as soon as his team pushes back, he's like, oh, I don't want to rock the boat."

I have a name for the culture that produces that owner. It's the agency that tells you, "We're a family." I've never trusted that line, and I said why on the show: "what that is code for is we don't communicate very well." A family can dodge the hard conversation for twenty years and still sit down together at Thanksgiving. A business that dodges it pays for software nobody uses.

One loud person is steering the ship

When a rollout stalls after launch, Mariah says the pushback rarely comes from the whole team. "It's usually one, maybe two people who are very loud in the business. They're pushing against the change." She described them as "steering the ship in the opposite direction that the business owner wants to go. And the business owner avoids it like the plague."

The loud one is often the person who has been there forever. Mariah described that employee as feeling irreplaceable. The owner, afraid of losing them, gives ground. Her diagnosis is blunt: "Most of the business owners will kind of cave to that, allow it, enable that behavior, and that's the cancer."

Then she said the line that gave this episode its title. "I don't care how much you think someone on your team is irreplaceable. Everybody's replaceable. The business owner is replaceable."

Earlier in the conversation, Mariah told a different story that turns out to be the same story. An agent called her furious after an automated follow-up campaign. "Automation doesn't work. My customers are pissed." She asked how many. "Well, we got this one email." How many emails went out? "600."

Her rule for that agent: find "the actual sample size of the negative and then make your decision."

Put those two stories side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. One angry customer and one loud tenured employee both get a vote they never earned, because the owner treats volume as signal. When that happens, a sample size of one is running the company.

I've seen the slow version of this too, and I named it on the show. Insurance agencies that have been 12 people for 10 years. A producer "who hasn't grown their book in two years but is a nice guy and knows people around town." After enough years, every internal decision turns into, as I put it, "prioritizing giving people jobs because you like them." That isn't kindness. It's a tax the rest of the team pays every day the owner avoids the conversation.

The best messenger might not be you

The default belief says the owner has to deliver every hard message personally or it doesn't count. Mariah doesn't buy it. Working with a husband-and-wife agency, she asked them a question that had nothing to do with software: "Who is the parent where the rules are kind of malleable?" And "who is the parent where like the rules are the rules?"

It was the wife. So Mariah told them the wife would carry the change. "She is going to roll out your messaging. Not you, Mr. Agency Principal." Her reason was fit: "This isn't how you are built."

Her broader read is that "if people were a little more honest with themselves, they would understand that maybe they need to delegate some of these things out."

I'd draw one line through that story. Conviction belongs to the owner. Delivery doesn't have to. The owner can't hand off the decision that the old way is ending. The owner can hand off the voice that says it, and should, when someone else in the building treats the rules as the rules and he doesn't.

Owner or best producer?

That fit question opens a bigger one, and it's the one that got me in trouble early in my speaking career. I had a segment in my keynote about the difference between owning an agency and running a business. Are you a trainer, or do you own a gym? Are you a technologist, or are you building a software company?

In insurance, the question gets personal fast. Is this person "the best producer in their business and just happened to own the most equity? Or are they looking to grow a business?" In my experience the best salesman who owns the most equity "is going to really struggle with follow through, with consistency, with conviction, because they don't want to deal with the business." Two agencies can look identical on paper. One grows. The other stays stuck, because nobody inside it thinks like an owner.

Mariah reached for The E-Myth here, Michael Gerber's story of a great baker who opens a bakery. "They have to learn a lot of things to run a bakery, not be a baker." She has asked owners straight out: "Have you thought about just being a producer?" One prospect she described had spent 16 years in the business without a vacation. Her advice was to go be a producer inside an agency and get that life back.

Her rule for the owner who hates running the business: "If you know you don't want to do these things, stop fighting it. You will just be miserable."

This is the center of the book I'm writing. I call the work that fights your wiring Hard Mode, and I said on the show that "there is no reason for us to operate in our hard mode." The leader's job is "to find the easy mode, the thing that an individual does that looks like cheating to everyone else and put them in that position as often as possible."

We get this backward in public. I've watched owners post about closing out their books in QuickBooks on a Sunday night like that's what entrepreneurship looks like. There are seasons, especially for a solo operator, when you do it yourself. It shouldn't be worn as a badge of honor. The badge of honor, to me, "is how much time you spend in your easy mode." For some owners, that means handing the rollout message to the stern parent. For others, it means promoting the operator who is already on the team, or going back to selling full time.

If this made you question whether your calendar is built around your edge or against it, get on the Easy Mode waiting list for book resources and updates: https://ryanhanley.com/easy-mode

Two names before the next contract

Before you sign the next software contract, write two names on a sheet of paper.

The first is the person who will tell the team what is changing and why. Put a date next to it, and make the date land before the first training. If that name is yours by default, and you know you fold when people push back, cross it out. Write the name of the person in your building who treats the rules as the rules.

The second name is the person most likely to fight it. Decide now, while you're calm, what happens if the fighting doesn't stop. Mariah's version of this step is to make the decision and be consistent, because the loud one is counting on you not to.

If you can't fill in either line, you aren't ready to buy software. You're ready to have a conversation.

I'll close where we closed the episode, on ego, because that's what both names test. I have a large one. I have to manage it. Back in my Agency Nation days, the question I had to keep asking myself was "would I rather we won or would I rather I was right?" Now I tell every team I start working with: "I don't care who's right. I care that we get it right."

The skills that made you the best producer in the building got you here. They are not the skills that will carry the next system through the door.

Listen to the full conversation with Mariah Gates on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/everybodys-replaceable-even-the-owner-mariah-gates/id1480262657?i=1000797918469

Or on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0YvAi5p3tlgqskCHZeG67K

Watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_tXNokHu7-E