That line is from a real document. A private equity operating partner, kicking off a CRM consolidation across a multi-division manufacturer, sat down with every division sales leader before the project started and scored each one on how skeptical they were. The leader who scored a perfect 5 runs about 34% of the company's revenue.
Most projects treat a person like that as an obstacle. Route around him, get the friendly divisions live first, let momentum do the convincing. This sponsor did the opposite, and it's the best client-side move I've seen in years: he treated the skepticism as design input.
Here's the uncomfortable part. This leader's stated reason for skepticism was that he'd heard vendors and partners say "yes, that's possible" too many times without proving it. He has a division that works today, a team that hits its number, and no personal upside in change. On his own terms, he's not wrong. He's the guy the project has to earn, not the guy it gets to ignore.
Prospects ask us directly in almost every deal: why do projects like this fail? The honest answer has nothing to do with APIs or data models. They fail on change management. Internal misalignment and poor end-user adoption kill more CRM projects than every technical problem combined. The implementation is the easy half.
Once you accept that, the rollout design changes. A few things this project got right that I'd now argue for everywhere. Name one point of contact per division, and have them all roll up to a single executive sponsor, so disagreements get resolved instead of festering. Interview actual reps before building training, because the training that works is the one written in their vocabulary. And for the skeptic specifically: make the new process look as close as possible to the tool his team already uses, then demo it working with his data, early. Show, don't promise. Every unproven claim spends credibility you'll need later.
The sponsor also reframed the goal in a way I keep quoting back to people: the goal isn't to implement a sales platform. The goal is to grow sales. Adoption first, data quality second, reporting third. A CRM your skeptical division actually uses beats a beautifully architected one they quietly abandon.
If you're heading into a rollout right now: have you scored your division leaders? Not formally, necessarily. But if you can't name your 5-out-of-5 and say what would convince them, the project plan isn't done. I'd love to hear how others have won over their hardest holdout.