Founding Partner at Vantage Point, the world's leading sales management training firm.
I’ve spent my entire career helping companies affect change. As a consultant and trainer to global sales forces, I’ve attempted every type of change imaginable inside a sales force: implementing sales processes, mapping sales territories, deploying CRM, upskilling talent, designing compensation plans, launching new products, entering new markets, merging sales forces ... you name it, I’ve tried it.
But that’s not to say every effort has been a smashing success. As an outside advisor, I’ve had to exert influence over the change — not manage it. Consequently, I’ve been involved in a range of successes from home runs to strikeouts. And during that time, I’ve come to recognize that there are two very common management mistakes that have always, in my experience, led to failure. To help you avoid the strikeouts, I've described them below.
When senior leadership commits to making a meaningful change, there’s a seemingly natural tendency to go big. Therefore, the scope of the change effort becomes too large. Or sometimes the change starts small but grows in scope as more and more stakeholders are engaged. It’s like buying a house with input from the entire family. What begins as "we should buy a house closer to the city" becomes a house closer to the city with a bathroom for each kid, an office for each parent, a garage for each car, a bedroom for guests, a playroom for friends, a pool for relatives, a yard for the dog, a shed for the mower and a deck for the grill. You get the idea.
Here is a true story that perfectly demonstrates this phenomenon. I was once hired to help design and implement a CRM tool for a telecommunications company. The departure point was "we need to replace our current system because the legacy databases are too slow and costly." In effect, they wanted a replacement for their current CRM with the same functionality but better performance. But then it occurred to them that they could include a pricing module, a product configuration engine, links to other enterprise systems and a half-dozen other things that would have been incredibly useful … if they’d ever gotten to use it.
The company ultimately spent (I’m not making this up) tens of millions of dollars on software and services to build this tool, yet no salesperson ever used it. I think it’s fair to characterize change efforts like these as strikeouts.
The moral of the story is that it’s okay to think small. If my client had begun by simply updating the technology underlying the existing functionality, the sales team would have celebrated a home run. Then they could have layered a pricing module on top of that. And a configuration engine beside that. And they probably could have done it with less time and money than they effectively donated to the consulting industry.
When it comes to change, think small and win big. Limit the scope of change efforts. Break big projects into small projects. Celebrate quick wins and move on to the next challenge. By doing so, you can build forward momentum and create a culture of success.
Equally as important as biting off change small enough to chew is accepting the reality that meaningful change is tough meat — it requires a lot of effort to chew and digest. Yet, again and again, I’ve seen executives try to change ingrained organizational behaviors with nothing more than a single email to employees. "Effective immediately, please make every effort to keep your desks organized." Yeah, good luck with that.
Jokes aside, I've found that leadership often underestimates the level of persistence required to change the knowledge, skills, and behaviors of its people. We were once contacted by a company who had attempted — and failed — to improve the coaching abilities of its frontline sales managers. When we asked what they had done to date, they responded that they’d distributed our book to the management team and then conducted a series of conference calls to discuss its key concepts. The change had not taken hold.
This highlights the distinction between notifying someone of a change and driving that change to a successful end. We advised the company to clearly define the desired outcomes, design a change process, customize a training program, alter management reports, preview the change with participants, provide online prework, conduct face-to-face workshops, launch online reinforcement, coach senior leaders, educate frontline sellers, facilitate follow-up meetings, survey the team, measure progress, and double down in areas where the change was falling short. The outcome they desired (doubling their deal win rates) was not realized for almost 18 months of persistent reinforcement and personal accountability. During this time, there was no other substantial change foisted onto the sales team — this was the change they were committed to bringing home. No distractions, no excuses and no outs.
The morals of this story are that change is always harder than you think it will be and that sustainable change requires intense commitment. The effort doesn’t end when the work plan is complete. It ends when the change becomes business as usual. And what you think is the finish line is probably just a checkpoint. Keep running hard until there’s nowhere left to go.
As you sit there reading this, there’s a good chance that you’re in the middle of a change effort inside your own organization. Perhaps you’re even leading it. Is it as small in scope as it could possibly be while still accomplishing your primary objective? Is your team fully committed to making it stick, even at the expense of other competing initiatives? If so, then you’ll probably hit a home run. If not, strike three may be coming sooner than you think.