Are you driving change or cramming on the breaks? It’s time to lead by example and get out of your technology discomfort zone.

There’s a difference between management and leadership. Management maintains the status quo. Leadership drives results. I see this difference every time I work with a homebuilder where the owners or managers are pushing their sales executives to use technology—manage prospect via the CRM, send out video emails, and leverage social networking.

But what happens when they don’t practice what they preach.

They might complain about their new sales executives. “They don’t follow up with their prospects.” or “Why don’t they enter their prospects into our CRM.”

So I suggest we take a look at the information—only to discover that the sales manager doesn’t even know his username or password to get into the system!

One builder told me he was aggressively pushing his sales people to use social media. I asked him about his own Facebook page and he vehemently exclaimed, “Oh no, I don’t want to be on Facebook.”

If you want your team to appreciate the importance and value of these technology power tools, you must use them yourself. Send out a video email update to everyone in the company or congratulating a sales executive on a great sale. Motivate them to use the investment you made in a CRM by checking in on their prospects and giving them ideas and suggestions for improving their conversion rates. If they know you’re looking, they’ll be looking, too. And the more they use the technology that is at their disposal, the better the results.

If you believe these tech-techniques are important to your sales team, make them important to you. If you’re not comfortable with technology, get someone to show you.

It’s time to do more than manage your people; you should lead them into the technology of selling in today’s market.