And, why am I recording a Change Management series? For those of you familiar with my decision facilitation model, you’ll recognize that it’s basically a change management model that helps buyers (or teams, or patients, or or) navigate through all of the unconscious, behind-the-scenes, private issues they have to decide on, en route to doing something different. After all, anything different means change. And any time we change, we have issues to manage within our status quo, so we don’t create chaos unduly.

ALL DECISIONS ARE CHANGE MANAGEMENT ISSUES

Whether you’re going to change your hairstyle, or buy a house, or adopt a new ERP system in your company, or bring in new staff, anything that will shift the status quo is a change management issue. Because the status quo is happy with whatever rules or relationships or technology already exists (or it would have been changed already), adding anything new upsets the apple-cart, so to speak.

Until now, the change management model has focused on designing the change and managing the resistance. But I believe that resistance isn’t necessary if the change agents first seek buy-in. Interesting, that when a search is done for the term ‘Buy-In’ in the change management field, only one instance came up! Yet every book on change management is about, in large part, managing resistance.

In this series, Nathan and I discuss change from a systems standpoint, and how to achieve buy-in by getting systems to agree to change – before even introducing the change initiative. Is it possible? Listen to the podcasts and let me know. We’ve got a new site dedicated to buy-in, discussions around buy-in, and creating community to help buy-in become a recognized aspect of change management.

The titles for the 6 part series are:

• What is change? And why is it so difficult?
• What are systems, and how do they influence change?
• The historic problems with change management models: bias, resistance, and push
• What is resistance, how do current change management models create it, and how can it be avoided?
• Why is buy-in necessary and how to achieve it.
• Putting it all together: a radical approach to change management and real leadership

STRATEGYDRIVEN

For those interested in change management, have a look at www.StrategyDriven.com. It’s a truly neat site. Here how it is described:

StrategyDriven represent tried and tested business world methods based on years of business planning and execution experience and founded on solid research and academic principles. We provide readers with the best practices needed to create the high level of organizational alignment and accountability characteristic of world-class organizations and introduce warning flag processes and behaviors that signal a retreat from world-class standards. Our framework not only addresses performance of discrete planning and execution functions but also the interrelationships between an organization’s mission and objectives to its executable programs, budgets, and procedures, and finally to its products and services and the market it serves.

At a more granular level, our framework and supporting practices enhance organizational alignment by reinforcing business process interrelationships from strategic planning and resource management to tactical execution and evaluation and control. We also discuss the management and leadership practices needed to bring employees and the system together; all running smoothly and seamlessly with one another. And all of these practices focus on achieving the organization’s vision, values, and mission goals.

Go to www.strategydriven.com. Have a look around. You’ll be filled with new thoughts, find all sorts of articles, and leave the site hungry for more. Enjoy. And, make sure you listen to our Making Change Work series. We’ve worked hard to provide some new thinking.

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Once you finish this podcast, check out part 2 of making change work.

Making Change Work: a change management podcast series with StrategyDriven is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

StrategyDriven Magazine is a really professional ezine that publishes articles about change, leadership, organizational performance, project management, and decision making. They have truly interesting white papers, expert opinions, and editorials.

Everyone on the editorial team works in a company and does some form of change management and strategizing daily, so they are not mere talking heads but smart folks. Take a look. The site is also quite professional, interesting, and timely.

The man who interviewed me for this podcast about Dirty Little Secrets and decision facilitation is Nathan Ives. He works in management at one of the Big Four firms: he understands strategy from the inside out. It’s his job. And he’s real smart.

What should have been a 20 minute interview turned into a very dynamic discussion now in 2 parts. Part 1 is below. It not only discusses Buying Facilitation® but talks about it in terms of change and how organizations change – to buy something, or to implement something, requires the same problems and change issues. A buying decision is a change management problem, after all.

Nathan was a very interesting interviewer. He asked smart questions and made me think. He got the best of me.

Enjoy this interview. I’ll give you Part 2 next week. In the meantime, please send your comments and questions to: sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com. I’ll publish them and discuss then. And take a look at StrategyDriven magazine. You’ll like it.

Part 1:  http://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/SDSE039DirtyLittleSecretsPt1.mp3

And stay tuned for our 6 part series on change management called Making Change Work. We’ve worked hard to make them intriguing and idea-filled.

As you think about the decision facilitation material, try to remember that it can manage any sorts of change – not just getting Buying Decision Teams on board for a purchase, but helping implement technology changes, helping teams work together, helping M&As.

I hope you get excited by the possibilities now available for helping congruent, integrous, change happen. There hasn’t been a model that works with the unspoken, hidden, inside activities around change and buy-in before. Now that it’s possible, there is a whole world of possibilities now open to us.

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Want to learn Buying Facilitation®? Try out my new modules.

StrategyDriven Magazine Interview is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Without buy-in, nothing changes. If the group or person deemed change necessary, it would have happened already. So whatever state the status quo is in is the preferred state: no matter what you think is wrong, or how your wonderful solution would make it better, it ain’t going to happen unless the status quo is willing to change. And change means change management is necessary.

As sellers, we forget that buyers must do some sort of change management before they’ll make a purchase. Their ‘problem’ is being resolved somehow and rules and relationships are holding the work-around in place. And these rules and relationships have to buy-in to shifting or they will resist change.

It’s frustrating when you just know your solution will help your prospect enormously. I hear from sales managers daily who bemoan the length of the sales cycle, and the inferior solutions prospects sometimes choose. But the solution is never the issue. Never, never, never.

INSURANCE USES AN OLD SALES MODEL THAT LOVES IT’S INEFFECTIVE STATUS QUO

Years ago – maybe 18 years – I taught Buying Facilitation® to the CEO of a mid-sized, public insurance company specializing in corporate insurance – large policies for lots of people. He became very very successful using the model to help him open some very large accounts. He kept in touch with me occasionally over the years to fill me in on his success. Last year he called with a problem.

JOE: My folks are having even more trouble than usual. The economy sucks, and companies are canceling insurance. It’s getting harder and harder for us to get our appointments, and almost impossible to close. I’m losing good people to other job opportunities. Can you help?

SDM: Sure. You know my stuff. What has stopped you from training your folks before now?

JOE: We were doing well-enough – just above industry standard (Note: with Buying Facilitation® the numbers are much, much higher, so obviously Joe wasn’t interested in closing a lot more business, OR his revenue concerns took a lower priority than something else in his system as we’ll see.). I guess I didn’t want to rock the boat. But now things are so bad that I must do something different.

SDM: If you were going to learn the model, there would be disruption and a few weeks of learning and integration. How would you and your decision team know that bringing in Buying Facilitation® would be worth the risks?

JOE: I know your stuff is great and it works. I’d just have to convince them. But you’re right: we can’t tolerate too much change.

SDM: That’s a hard one. You say that what you’re doing isn’t working, but you don’t want change. How can we change without changing?

JOE: You like to use the phone to start prospecting. I know it works the way you teach it – get buy-in for my solution on my first call, and when I get there all of the decision makers are there and they are ready to sign. I did it myself. I saw the numbers. I saw the difference in the success rate, and how quickly buyers were buying.  But I don’t know if I can sell it to my guys. They still call to get an appointment, and hate the phone. But now they are not getting the appointments, so I can see how using Buying Facilitation® from the start of the call would work. Nothing else is working. And I’m dyin’ here. Not to mention losing some really good folks.

SDM: So I’m hearing that there may be resistance, but you think it would be necessary. What would you need to know about me working with your folks to know that it would be possible to get buy-in before we began, and pick up resistance along the way, to ensure you’d get the results you’d want?

JOE: I know you’d get us where we’d need to be. But I’d have to speak with a couple of my managers to find out what buy-in would have to look like. Let me call you back.

Joe never called me back. A month later I called him.

SDM: What happened? I never heard back.

JOE: The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much resistance I’d get, so I took no action. And I’m letting people go because of our situation. I’m going to have to keep the lights on until the economy turns around.

MAKES NO SENSE

This makes absolutely no sense. None. People were being let go or quitting, the revenue was horrid, no new sales were coming in (and in insurance, this has a long term consequence). But Joe was not willing to risk change. Willing to risk his business, but not change. And what was even more perplexing was that Joe knew my material and enjoyed working with me. He loved me, my solution, and knew it worked. But it went against the status quo. As I say repeatedly in my new book Dirty Little Secrets, the system is sacrosanct, and all else will be sacrificed if the system doesn’t know how to change without major disruption.

Think about this next time you think your solution is perfect for a prospect. And remember: the need would have been resolved already if they knew how to fix it. The problem is change. Help buyers manage change before you try to sell anything.

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Note: we still have a contest going on. I’d love more participation. Click here and win a copy of Dirty Little Secrets.

All Decisions Involve Change Management: an insurance case study is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Here are my guesses as to why the ‘new’ focus: because there is nowhere to hide anymore (errors get tweeted and blogged and commented); because buyers have all of the data that made sellers necessary and sellers are looking for a new way to promote themselves; because buyers have so many choices and now sellers will have a way to differentiate; because the allure of a great personality and relationship with one vendor is matched by all vendors and the next step is to make nice. When we become customer-centric merely to sell product, we are being manipulative…. not to mention missing the larger point.

With all of the ‘customer-centricity’ I have a huge curiosity: why is it that the results for sales remain the same through time – approximately 7% across the board, regardless of industry or size of the sale or how well-defined their customer-centric activities? Maybe it’s because the sales effort doesn’t drive a sale close, and that the sales model is only useful during the final portion of the buying decision. After all, making customers the center of a sales method only serves to gather better data (hopefully) or build a better relationship.

The problem isn’t that your solution or desire to be customer-centric is bad, or unnecessary. The problem is that the data and the relationship are secondary to what buyers need to manage internally, privately, and behind-the-scenes: First ensure that essential internal relationships and politics and rules are good-to-go with a purchase; Second make a solution/vendor choice.

BUYING FACILITATION® IS A CHANGE MANAGEMENT METHOD

Every purchase that a buyer makes is a change management activity. It’s just not possible to add anything, even a necessary problem fix, to an existing system without the system experiencing negative repercussions. Sales doesn’t do change management, but does a fine job with needs analysis and solution placement. A new set of skills is necessary to lead folks through change management.

Buyers have to do this anyway. It’s just not possible to ignore the system. Can you decide to move without handling issues involving schools, transportation, shopping, neighborhoods, banks, selling your own house, moving issues, calendar issues for kids, hours to the office – it’s not about the house. And a realtor generally doesn’t teach the buyer how to manage all of their internal decisions: How will you both know when one neighborhood will be best for your kids over another? What needs to happen for you to influence your bank manager to give you a larger mortgage given what happened to your payment schedules over the past year?

Sales doesn’t handle this, as it’s off-line and not open to outsiders. But Buying Facilitation® does. If you want to be truly customer-centric, make sales a one-two activity. First be a neutral navigator to your buyer – not to sell, but to have them peruse, recognize, manage, address, all of the internal systems issues they need to manage to get buy-in for change.

To be truly customer-centric, add Buying Facilitation®. Start by focusing on the internal system that you understand so well (I understand the sales training system; you may understand the web design system, or the project management system.). Help the buyer recognize all that needs to happen before they’ll be ready to make a purchase. Get a hold of my newest book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it and it will explain all. Otherwise, spend some time reading some of my blog posts.

The model is not sales, and requires a different mind set. But it’s learnable – and makes a huge difference in the timing of a sales cycle and differentiating from competition. Then, you’ll truly be serving your clients and be customer-centric from the first moment you connect – serving them in a way they truly need help.

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What is Customer-Centric? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

We had around 75 eager, excited people attending. I handed out a list of 11 tasks necessary for a successful implementation, and asked the participants to order them, assuming they’d focus on getting the announcement data and initiative data correct, rather than starting with people- buy-in. Three lucky folks won a copy of Dirty Little Secrets because they began where I suggest: briefly discuss the proposed change to get folks thinking and begin eliciting new ideas and feedback.

In fact, my entire presentation was based on change management. How does the status quo accept and welcome change? How do we get the sort of buy-in that will

• welcome creativity and leadership from all users, not just the top tier,
• quell fears,
• manage problems before they get large (and hopefully dispel them at the start),
• recognize what success and failure should look like each step of the way,
• maintain a workable, flexible change environment,
• manage resisters respectfully and use their issues to create new possibilities for the proposed change.

During my presentation (see slides below) I spent quite a bit of time explaining exactly why Information does not teach people how to make a decision: so many of our change initiatives begin with the assumption that with rational, accurate, appropriate data, presented in the right way, that folks are supposed to buy-in.

And we all know what happens: at least 80% of our change initiatives have a large unsuccessful component.  Why? Because people have their own way of interpreting change, or managing their own unconscious belief issues, or deciding on steps they want to take regardless of what they are being told, or hearing what is being said.

We have not had the tools or skills to help people get on board before we begin the initiative.

My presentation, as shown below on my slides, explains how to enlist buy-in from the ground up. I’ve included a worksheet to enumerate for yourself: print it off, and rank each of the 11 tasks in the order you do them. Then ask yourself the Facilitative Questions on slide 2. After the slide show, there is my hierarchy of tasks. Take a look at the order I placed the tasks in, and see how they differ from yours.

Note: this is the same hierarchy of tasks that need to be addressed during any change management initiative.

Let’s start a dialogue on Buy-In. I look forward to discussing this with you. Hear me discuss this on a live webinar on Linked In Group: Corporate Planning and Global Industry Segmentation group, that will take place at 1:30 ET.

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ProductCamp, Buy-In, and Change Management is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

To be fair, Jeff is one of the few folks in the sales field who has always, consistently, believed that sales could be so-much-more, and became a fierce fan of my Buying Facilitation® approach to the front end of the sales process. Jeff has been quite vocal that sales is an inadequate model that doesn’t quite manage the buyer’s decision making. He’s been one of my biggest fans.

Last month I sent him an early copy of my new book Dirty Little Secrets that’s coming out October 1. He called today.

“I have one word to say about the book.”

“So long as it’s a good one, I’m happy,” I said, somewhat scared. I know the book may be seen to be  controversial because it focuses on the behind-the-scenes decisions buyers need to manage to get buy-in for any sort of change or purchase; in a word, it’s not really a sales book but a change management book.

“The word is Disturbing. It’s disturbing to read how sales has only managed the solution end of the sale, and to see that it’s actually possible to help buyers manage the off-line issues they need before they can buy. As sellers we haven’t had the tools to handle this before.

“This book will be disturbing to the industry because you’ve pulled back the veil and we can’t go back to the old way of just selling a solution any more. Your book teaches us how buying decisions are made.  This understanding has been missing from the industry for so long. From this point forward, anyone who talks about sales has to mention this – it’s too big to push under the rug. The book is crystal clear, easy to understand, and right there for anyone to see. The book is sophisticated, but necessary for any serious sales professional. Once sellers read this, they are toast.”

Ah. So all of those bazillion hours writing until my neck hurt and forgetting to eat or work out (don’t ask about my newly flabby arms from foregoing pushups, or my butt from missing my step classes) just maybe paid off.

I can’t wait til you see my new book. I’ll be offering a couple of sample chapters soon. And I look forward to your feedback. Hopefully, you’ll find it disturbing also. In the meantime, go to www.salespractice.com and get onto a forum and play around. You’ll meet some interesting folks, Jeff being one of them.

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A Disturbing Book is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Tery Tenant, a colleague in the change management and leadership industry, is a committed change agent. He teaches, writes about, communicates about, being a Servant Leader – a term I’ve been using for myself for over 20 years so I’ve got a bit of a bias going here. His company, Attainment Inc., is a franchise of  Leadership Mmanagement International, and has been leading change for 21 years with his wife Linda.

Their stuff is really cool: they teach people how to be aware of what they want to change, and then gives them the tools to change. Tery says his job, ultimately, is to ”work ourselves out of a job, as the client grows and can do these things for themselves.” Refreshing!

At the core of their process is facilitating behavior change. They work toward achieving measurable behavior-change results. Attainment says, ”What you are doing differently and the new habits you are forming is as important as what you are learning. We use a two track process. One track provides awareness, ideas and tools. The second track focuses on applying the ideas on the job and achieving small goals weekly.”

CHANGING BEHAVIORS WITH INTEGRITY

Different from my decision facilitation material that goes after change from the level of beliefs, Tery works in interesting ways with behavior change: they have a list of very sophisticated programs to create awareness for change, develop leaders, set goals, and measure performance. Go to: Attainment’s Behavior Change Process and have a look around. Btw, Tery told me to send you to that link, but I prefer this page: Getting Value & ROI from Your People Development Activities. You choose. The site has a lot of great reading material on it as well.

Personally, Tery is a man who can be trusted, and walks his talk – a very rare commodity these days. Both he and Linda are deeply committed to making a difference, and finding and creating leaders to make the world a better place. If you are seeking to enhance your employees skills, and want them to be people who you are proud of, Attainment is the group for you. Good job, folks.

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Together, they lead to measurable behavior changes and goal achievement. Our process includes:

• Identify Specific Goals and Behavior Changes
• Establish Measurement for Each Goal
• Create Communication Triangle with Participant, Participant’s Manager, Attainment Facilitator
• Spaced Repetition of New Ideas (CDs and Reading)
• Participate in Facilitated Classes (a few hours a week over a period of time)
• Set and Achieve Weekly Goals
• Review Goals and Progress Throughout Program

Changing Behaviors With Attainment is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com