How cozy is your comfort zone?

Change is always for the others...right?

leaving the comfort zone is very challenging for many people. Especially if the sense of urgency is not there or not understood. In short, WHY should I change, it is working as it is.

Marc, one of my customers, is a project manager in a B2B environment working on sales enablement, is just about to finalize the CRM roll-out phase.

The last time we talked, he said something that surprised me, as he is being close to the roll-out phase of his project:

"I do not understand why sales do not want to use the CRM that I have just rolled out.".

Though Marc is not the only project leader that has underestimated the impact of the change. 

Learning from past change initiatives can provide a lot of learnings to improve the success of an initiative.

“It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

Bill Gates.

Even being in a well-advanced phase of the project, I recommended talking to his key stakeholders. 

Marc realizes that he didn't involve so far the sales and marketing teams. Now he is worried if the impacted teams will adopt the new way of working and wondering how to catch up to ensure the required cooperation.

What would you if you would be in Marc's situation?

Interesting to see based on the results from #Statista that a stronger focus on change management is present in larger corporations compared to smaller companies.

• This is in line with what I have been experiencing, though interesting to see that still between 30% and 13%, depending on the size of the company, are only sporadically taking care of change management.
• The focus on change management is a key to success for any project and adoption in new ways of working, especially in sales and marketing initiatives.

I wanted to share some of the main pitfalls that I observed during my career and my customers to avoid your projects to fail:

1. underestimating the work
2. overestimating the maturity and capacity of an organization to change
3. not having a clear communication about the expectations and key milestones of an initiative
4. Do not underestimate the impact of change

Let's go deeper into each of those pitfalls:

Underestimating the work: 

While many projects are focusing only on the factual content of the sales & marketing-related initiative, the people aspects are forgotten in a change management initiative. In many cases, the change is focusing on the factual changes and some communications. Unfortunately, the reasoning and motivations of your key stakeholders and users are getting forgotten.

Overestimating the maturity and capacity of an organization to change

It is key to success to well understand where does the organization stands from the current challenge and what are their key needs. Far too often the maturity of the organization and capacity to adapt is underestimated. 

Clear communication about the expectations and key milestones

Regular communication is required, sometimes it feels like over-communicating but do not forget even though you might use many channels such as town halls, regional meetings, intranet, emails, internal social media platforms like chatter or yammer, etc... You will not reach everybody, therefore keep repeating your message. That message should be tailored to the different targeted groups you are communicated to.

Do not underestimate the impact of change...

Change needs to be considered in a very early phase of the project, which can be taking various forms and has to play a major part in your roadmap of any initiative.

Have you experienced one of those pitfalls during your career?

Like Marc, are you struggling currently being in the middle of a change initiative and you do know how to get out of it? 

Reach out to me and we can have an exchange to identify the path forward towards a successful change initiative.

#valuebizbooster #change #leadership #projectmanagement #salesmanagement #salesenablement #CRM