Video Transcript

What’s one of the biggest challenges facing executives today, trying to improve their sales and marketing teams? It’s change management, right?

When you have a vocal, enthusiastic, accountable leader leading your sales and marketing organizations, good news, you’ve got a champion. Bad news. That champion has two miles of bad road to travel down with change management.

Change management is something that hits all organizations, both on the marketing side and the sales side.

When that accountable leader comes in and is trying to enact change at an inflection point in a business, whether that’s mergers and acquisitions, new capital, it could be a new market, new product in the marketplace, whatever those things might be.

When that change needs to happen, we frequently see the best of ideas start to wither on the vine because a champion can only do so much, right? They can only stand atop the organization and try to lead.

But it takes time to go through that change management curve. We’ve all heard that idea of enthusiasm and then the trough of despair and then finally back into adoption.

Where we see this happen a lot is actually in technology changes or in sales practices when it comes to using a new CRM, defining a new lead stage, making sure information gets accurately entered into a technology platform.

Those are the types of things that need constant reinforcement. You know, obviously a carrot or stick approach, you can penalize or you can incentivize.

I’ve seen a lot of success where an organization says, ‘Hey, sales guy, if you want to get your sales incentive, the information is based on what comes out of the CRM platform. So that can help ensure data accuracy.

And why does this all matter? When you’re thinking about change management in this regard, particularly with sales and marketing behavior, where the way it’s always been done is something that’s effective for them, incentivizing this type of positive change is only good for the organization because typically in these cases, we’re talking about data.

Good data in means good data out, chasing the holy Grail of marketing ROI and closed-loop reporting.

So this is why it’s really, really important to consider when you’re making these changes, giving yourself enough time to let the organization warm up to the change, go through it, making sure you have plenty of communication and reinforcement, and like I said, making sure that you’re incentivizing or finding some way to not just talk about the change but actually encourage people to adopt it so that they can move through that change management curve faster, and you can start to get to that good data that lets you know what programs are working and where your marketing dollars are best spent.

So an example of this might look like an organization that’s adopting a new technology as part of their sales process. Say it’s something like a prospecting tool, like ZoomInfo, that lets you identify opportunities that might be looking for the product or service that you sell.

Adding that into a successful sales team’s processes is going to be painstaking at first. One of the things that we’ve seen can provide success is while you’re asking them to disrupt their normal processes and the way it’s always worked potentially is to talk about what are the benefits on the other side of adopting that change.

How is this information going to make your close rate that much better? How is it going to make our conversion rate better, our data? How is it going to help marketing targeting so that the leads that are coming in are higher quality leads, making sure that you’re identifying what are the benefits to the organization and then sharing that as part of the conversations to incentivize can be really crucial to get that adoption.

This is just a technology example, but the same idea extrapolates to whatever change management you might be managing, that idea of why are we asking you to change and the benefit that’s in it for the organization and maybe even what’s the benefit for you?

The individual that’s being asked to make the change can really help that adoption process happen.