Author: Mike Lieberman - CEO   Square2

Eight Barriers to Sales Success

What sets successful companies apart is their ability to strategically overcome these 

sales challenges. They have marketing and sales teams who work together, 

and they have shared goals, KPIs and metrics.

Here’s how you can achieve something similar at your company.

1. Finding Qualified Leads

Attracting tons of new leads isn’t always a good thing. It should be about quality over quantity — you want to ensure you attract qualified leads. It doesn’t make sense for a rep to spend time talking to someone who isn’t ready to buy. 

This will help you segment the people who are researching versus those people who are ready to talk to sales. You should be treating those in the early stages of their buyer journey differently than those people in the late stages of their buyer journey. 

It typically works better to put more qualified leads into your sales process when they are deeper in their buyer journey while troduces your company to people who might be early in their buyer journey.

This is especially important when you talk about needing to nurture leads that are early buyer journey leads when compared to leads who are late stage.

Creating proactive lead nurture email campaigns can actually pull prospects through the buyer journey and signal to reps when leads are ready to buy. 

 

2. Getting A Response from Prospects

No matter how you’re communicating with prospects, your message needs to be compelling. To move your prospects to respond, you first need to develop a disruptive, compelling and emotional message.

One single email or phone call won’t be enough to grab their attention. Rather, send out a series of communications that address the challenges your prospects are facing.

According to Top Performance in Sales Prospecting research, it takes an average of eight touches to get an initial meeting (or other conversion) with a new prospect.

Today, many of these can be automated with tools like HubSpot, Conversica and Salesforce. Reps can concentrate on talking with prospects who are ready to buy while the workflow automation sends email and nurtures prospects who are NOT ready in the background. 

Don’t tell them how awesome your company is. Instead, provide your prospects with valuable and relevant information. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time will dramatically increase your response rates.

Having the right content is also important at this point. Marketing needs to know what content sales needs to help prospects feel safe and sign. Delivering content in context to your sales conversations helps shorten the sales cycle and increases close rates. 

3. Standing Apart From Competitors

How can your sales reps help set your company apart from the competition? By building meaningful relationships with prospects and customers. Remember that every customer touchpoint represents your brand. Great customer service will turn your customers into brand evangelists.

Demonstrate your passion to help them by being selfless and offering expert knowledge. If your business isn’t the best solution for them, offer suggestions for better options. While it may seem crazy not to push for that sale, this is a great way to build trust.

A contact may refer someone else to your business based on your honesty. Or if their situation changes in the future, they’ll come back to you.

Showing you have your prospects’ best interests at heart is one of the best ways to stand apart from your competitors.  If you want to formalize this more, and you should, consider a revamped sales process. 

The best way to stand out from your competitors is to give your prospects a more remarkable sales experience. The more you guide them instead of sell them, the more you advise them instead of push them and the more you help them instead of trying to convince them, the more you'll close. 

Also understand, if you have a process and even one person doesn’t follow it, you don’t have a process. If you have a process and it’s not documented, you don’t have a process. If you have a process but you don’t measure against it, you don’t have a process.

For your sales to be scalable, repeatable and predictable--you need a documented, measured and trained sales process that everyone follows, every day. You can read more about that here.

 

4. Asking The Right Questions

Asking prospects the right questions is the best way to understand their wants, needs, and pain points.

While you might be tempted to make a pitch right away, don’t. Rushing the process won’t get you far. Instead, ask insightful questions to determine whether you can help your prospects and in what ways.

To ask the right questions, your sales team needs to be well-prepared. Avoid asking yes or no questions—there’s not much you can do with a one-word response. Don’t ask three questions at the same time without giving your prospect a chance to respond. Be patient and give them time to consider one question at a time.

Don't wing it either. Consider creating a document with all the relevant questions and use them as needed. This is an excellent way to match content to the questions you're asking. 

For example, many people come to us asking about a new website. But after our discussions and thoughtful questions, it's not the website they want but more leads, better leads and more sales-ready leads. 

Now we can help them and we provide even additional content that helps them understand how, why and what we'll do for them.

5. Staying Motivated

Your sales reps’ motivation affects their productivity, your company culture, and your bottom line. To effectively motivate your reps, you first need to know what drives them.

Salespeople aren’t all the same; every person requires different incentives and motivational tactics. Work with each individual sales rep to determine what will work best for them. Set tangible goals that your reps can work to accomplish. Without goals, they won’t know what success looks like. Then, celebrate your team’s wins to boost morale.

Another important way to keep your team motivated is to invest in sales coaching. When you empower sales managers to be better coaches, you’ll help boost motivation and sales performance for the entire team.

6. Spending Too Much Time On Administrative Tasks

Today’s sales reps spend less than 36% of their time selling. Administrative tasks like inputting data and generating reports eat up most of your sales reps’ precious time.

Fortunately, sales enablement tools and sales technology can automate most non-revenue-generating tasks. With the right tools at their disposal, your reps will have more time to devote to core sales activities.

Meetings scheduler tools, for example, allow prospects to instantly book time in your reps’ calendars and avoid long email chains.

Email templates will also save your reps time. While they’ll still need to tailor their messages, having a template to work with for following up, recapping calls, and more will help boost efficiency.

Today, if traveling to see prospects is problematic using video tools like Zoom allows for the face-to-face interactions reps and customer love. If you need help taking your face-to-face reps to video, let us know.

We can get you set you up on Zoom in a single day, train your reps and get them talking to prospects within days, not weeks or months.  

7. Maintaining Customer Relationships Post-Sale

The deal might be signed, but that doesn’t mean your sales rep’s job is over. Once your prospect becomes a customer, your salespeople still have to work on maintaining and building their trust. Otherwise, they risk losing their hard-won business.

Regularly check in with your customers to discuss their experiences so far and to ensure they’re happy. Take advantage of marketing automation to keep track of your customers’ engagement levels, and send them personalized emails.

Nurturing your current clients will keep them invested in your brand. And it’s a lot easier to upsell a happy client. Upselling can actually bring in more revenue than signing new customers—and with less effort.

Don’t leave money on the table—maintain strong relationships with all your current customers.

8. How To Effectively Team Sell

The sales process works best as a team sport. Working as a team helps you develop innovative solutions to obstacles and allows everyone to benefit from each other’s knowledge and experience.

But an effective team is not just made up of strong individuals. Your sales reps are probably used to being lone wolves and will need help to develop their team selling skills. To support team selling, you need to foster a culture of collaboration.

Regular communication is crucial to avoid a disjointed selling process. Define each individual person’s role and decide on one central person to lead.

 

 

Start Today Tip - Sales is changing just as quickly as marketing. What had been an art, is now a science and technology is making it easier and easier to engage with prospects, qualify them, take them through a content rich process, score them and turn them into new customers faster and more efficiently than ever before. You'll want to start with your sales process. Document it, train it and measure it. Then you'll quickly see where the areas of improvement are and how it will help your company close more new business. 

 Defining Sales Engagement

July 27, 2017

The notion of sales engagement is still emerging across sales organizations. According to Forrester, less than just 10% of sales leaders are truly confident in their sales activity data.

Sales teams want and deserve better data.

The vast majority (70%) of companies leading the charge in implementing and optimizing sales engagement platforms (SEPs) are seeing higher win rates and more streamlined processes.

What is Sales Engagement?

Sales engagement can be defined as the interactions that take place between a buyer and seller, and can be measured in time and touch points. For example, a buyer’s view time on a presentation or webinar, or whether he or she viewed or clicked on an email. These are measurements of sales engagement.

A sales engagement platform is a system of engagement that compliments a system of record—like a CRM—and is comprised of five key components: content management, communications, predictive analytics, CRM integration, and partner applications.

A Modern History of Sales Engagement
If we look at the entire history of sales, it would be worthwhile to mention the revolutionary transitions of sales materials from handwritten to printed to digitized, as well as door-to-door selling to emailing, to calling, to screensharing. Nevertheless, modern advances—depicted here—illustrate the major events in recent history that have led us to the current state of sales engagement.

Sales engagement started as just the name of function and has now become its own technology sector. As selling and buying cycles became more complicated, this function was ripe for the introduction of software to help alleviate the complexity. With the introduction of technology vendors around 2009, a new sector of tools was born. As sales engagement platforms gain exposure and traction, they’ll continue to revolutionize the sales process as we know it.

Sales Engagement vs Sales Enablement

The genesis of sales enablement was founded on the idea that sales professionals need to be appropriately equipped with certain resources in order to effectively do their jobs. Thus, there have always been two distinct areas of focus when it comes to sales enablement: internally empowering the sales force and externally engaging with prospects.

The problem is, that while most sales enablement technologies are designed to facilitate the creation and management of necessary materials and processes for sales, they forget about the most important part— measuring the efficacy of those materials and processes during prospect and customer interactions. This is the key difference between sales enablement and sales engagement, and where sales engagement technology comes in.

As Aragon Research puts it:

“While Sales Enablement is the current buzzword in the sales space, the Sales Engagement Platform (SEP), a new Digital Selling Platform that integrates with CRM, is the key to empowering sales professionals in the digital era.”

The Impact of Sales Engagement on the Sales Force

How Sales Engagement Improves Coaching & Onboarding
According to CSO Insights, over 70% of companies take six months or longer to ramp new sales reps to productivity—with the opportunity to reach proficiency at about 9 months. And with an average annual sales turnover of 25–30% across industries as reported by the Harvard Business Review, sales leaders must be sure to hire and train wisely during the six to nine month ramp up time.

Many sales leaders may think they are dedicating the appropriate amount of time and resources to onboarding and coaching their new sales reps, but industry data suggests otherwise. CSO Insights reports that only 24% of firms claim to have a formal process for sharing best practices. These trends are negatively impacting sales teams, as SiriusDecisions states that 64% of high-performing sales professionals cite a lack of on-going training as impactful on their decision to leave their jobs.

A sales engagement platform can help create better onboarding and coaching by:

• Identifying which activities, content, and tactics drive successful customer interactions
• Establishing benchmarks for every stage of sales talent management lifecycle
• Monitoring and comparing individual and team results, identifying top performers and struggling reps, and setting performance benchmarks
• Tracking training usage and gaining visibility into how sales reps consume content and training with engagement analytics
• Combining sales and customer usage and engagement analytics to optimize future training and sales effectiveness investments

According to SiriusDecisions, by appropriately training and supporting your sales force with a sales engagement platform, you can potentially increase the tenure of your sales reps by 40%-65%.

How Sales Engagement Optimizes Content Management
The rollercoaster relationship between sales and marketing is full of its ups and downs. Sales enablement can help to bridge gaps among the two departments, but often there are still holes to be filled. In fact, the CMO Council reports that 56% of sales and marketing professionals claim their companies don’t have prescriptive processes to align the two. One of the business aspects that suffers the most in these situations is content.

Content has always been a struggle for sales, and for that reason, it is a primary function of sales engagement. Still, sales reps spend on average 440 hours per year, or 22% of their time, searching for the right content according to the Aberdeen Group. In many cases, marketing is providing sales with most of the content they need, but CSO Insights reports that only 35% of content created by marketing meets the expectations of sales.

A sales engagement platform can greatly improve the quantity and quality of content by:

• Housing sales content, marketing collateral, tools, and customer-facing materials in a single place that supports all file types
• Creating and recommending marketing collateral by sales stage, customer-facing role, or industry
• Recommending content based on engagement analytics to guide reps to the appropriate next step
• Updating and controlling content access to ensure that customer facing content is always accurate and up to date

How Sales Engagement Powers Email Campaigns
Though communication channels have expanded, the Harvard Business Review reports that 60% of customers still prefer to interact with sales reps by email. Sales engagement goes beyond tracking open and click rates to providing granular visibility into how prospects and customers actually interact with the content that sales and marketing distribute.

A sales engagement platform can transform the way email campaigns are conducted by:

• Customizing templates with integrates content which reps can quickly access for large blasts or 1:1 communication with prospects and customers
• Controlling content by collecting viewer contact information, limiting forwards, restricting downloads, and setting content expirations
• Getting advanced tracking metrics like real-time alerts of email stats (opens, clicks, and forwards) and detailed email content engagement (page-by-page analytics) to prioritize and customize follow-up

Sales teams can now go beyond tedious email practices to leveraging state-of-the-art technology powered by sales engagement platforms to reach a more target audience with personalized content.

How Sales Engagement Saves Reps Time with Autolog
If you were to ask a sales rep if they spend enough time with prospects and customers, if they’re honest, they’d more than likely say no. According to CSO Insights, only 35% of a sales rep’s time is spent interacting with customers. That’s because there are many other administrative tasks that take up their time.

Sales engagement platforms help alleviate the time a sales rep spends logging information back into the CRM by:

• Automatically capturing and logging activity and engagement data across all communication channels
• All rep activity—including emails, online and in-person meetings, content used, and resulting customer engagement—are all auto-logged back to the appropriate records
• Improving CRM data quality so all new activity is clean and up to date

Sales reps will have more time to dedicate to prospecting and moving opportunities further along in the sales cycle, and of course, closing more deals.

How Sales Engagement Provides Valuable Analytics
We know that teams are hungry for good data. Forrester reports that over 90% of sales leaders lack confidence in their activity data and that 77% of marketers rate a lack of analytics to guide their marketing decision-making as a top challenge.

 

4 Ways to Strengthen Sales Analytics

AUTHOR

• Mark Powell and Donnie Williamson

DATE

• February 18, 2022 | MDM | Distribution Intelligence

Companies now are relying on internal and external data collection to improve sales processes, shore up market planning and weather supply chain issues.

The volatility of the past two years has thrown even the best sales and market planning teams into higher blood-pressure mode. For that reason, the value of data analytics has elevated quickly to cut through the fog of mixed signals and pre-COVID-based assumptions. The good news is that you can strengthen your sales analytics with solid methods today that benchmark change effectively. That will put your team in position to make better decisions on where to focus sales resources.

Leveraging analytics can improve distributors’ market planning ability by moving actionable data to the front lines. MDM Analytics’ Bob Jordan and Donnie Williamson recently outlined some keys to extracting more value out of data during an MDM webcast (view on-demand). The key takeaways from their presentation include how to use the analytical building blocks of data quality, segmentation, sweet spot analysis, market share and wallet share to set better quotas and growth goals. Here are four actionable steps from the webcast that distributors can take in 2022 to ensure sales teams and growth plans are directed by smart data collection and analytic processes:

Find a ‘Data Champion’

One of the best opportunities to focus sales teams is to use data to target the highest potential accounts and segments. This includes hiring or empowering someone to champion data efforts and interests. Hiring people who understand data — but also know the distribution business well — can produce qualitative and quantitative data that will prove vital. To know where to focus, distributors need an understanding of where they are currently providing the most value and driving profits. This can only be done with a well-segmented list of their customers and what industries they’re serving, preferably by NAICS or SIC. With an understanding of what type of companies are driving the most profitability, they know they can target the same type of customers that are not currently customers. All good analysis has both qualitative and quantitative components, and it’s critical that the analyst has proficiencies in both. A business-minded data analyst will be able to spot glaring issues in the data before they reach the consumer, and this goes a long way in helping folks trust the data.

Prioritize Data Quality

Whether it’s creating internal data collection processes or reaching out to a third party, quality is king when it comes to analytics. Clean and trusted data is the foundation to any analysis, and the phrase “garbage-in, garbage out” is more than a maxim. Whether a company’s data is currently unmanaged — or they have a “data team” — it’s imperative that they manage their data well and deepen their data journey today. Entrusting a third party to clean and enhance data is a great option for those just starting their analytics journey but building out well-defined data strategy is the target. With each step comes better outcomes, minimizing the short- and long-term effects of less-than-stellar data.

Define Data that Moves the Needle

Reliable data is great starting point; but the real power is the ability to generate actionable insights that drive well-informed decisions leading to increased market share. Actionable data allows distributors to determine whether they are selling to the correct customers and leveraging external market intelligence can allow companies to prepare for critical factors such as expected market change and inflationary increases. Many leading businesses with seasoned data strategies have adopted the coupling of both internal and external market data to generate game-changing growth strategies. They have a clear picture of who their customers and the markets they serve. They know the products that provide the most value through their supply chain and can shift and act quickly to unforeseen changes. Having a clear picture of how a business is doing in comparison to the rest of the market will provide the information needed to better accomplish goals.

Build a Data-Driven Sales Process

Here’s a shocker: Sales people don’t always know what the total opportunity is at either a specific account or a territory. It’s a process to move from data-free to data-driven discussions on where a salesperson should spend time. It’s possible to build a model using historic transaction data to bring data to the table. And for most market verticals, there are sources of external market data to strengthen the way your team can model market and account opportunity. Whether a distributor home grows the process or contracts out, it will open a path toward enhanced focus during turbulent market times. It’s a proven formula. Companies that improve their use of data analytics give their sales teams a competitive edge to increase revenues by targeting and growing the highest-potential accounts.

 

 

Confidentiality

By: Gary D. Seale - MBA

Trucon Communications

February 19, 2022

Google Blog

 

During World War II one of the slogans urging confidentiality was, “loose lips sink ships.”   This saying pertained to the shipyard workers, as well as the soldiers and sailors who shipped out on the vessels.  Discussions about technical aspects of the shipbuilding and destinations were strictly forbidden topics.

 

In the 21^st century where a technological edge can mean capturing an entire market, confidentiality remains a critical issue.  This area of trust is especially important for the research and development team and anyone privileged enough to have access to a new product development idea.

 

Even after product introduction, some aspects of the capabilities may need to remain secret.  This helps guard against technical theft and promotes a longer product life cycle.  And ultimately, it protects the profitability of the company.

 

The confidential aspects of a product can become a tug of war between the consumer and the sales team of the manufacturer.  The sales force must be made aware of the risk and consequences of revealing too much about a product.

 

Because of competitor’s expertise in similar industries, even casual comments regarding product capabilities, business strategies, management styles and business conditions can reveal a significant level of information to an experienced, perceptive competitor.  

 

Just as product innovations must be closely guarded, so should many aspects of dealing with employees. An area of intense curiosity and one having extremely negative repercussions is employee incomes.   It is very difficult to have an associate salary revealed and not have some emotional response.  Whether it is satisfaction, gloating, anger, or bitterness; eventually it leads to unhealthy comparisons between the employees. You can be assured that some level of lost productivity will be experienced. 

 

Other aspects of employee relations must also be kept confidential for the sake of the associate and the trust required maintaining a viable working atmosphere.  Most aspects of employee reviews and all details involved in a reprimand should remain confidential.

 

The list of potentially confidential issues could be extended to many other aspects of running a business.  All businesses and industries will not have the same concerns as others.  Profit margins, operating costs, pending acquisitions, sales strategies and restructuring efforts are just a few of the items that may be deemed confidential by senior management.

 

In a business situation, there is no other aspect that arouses more curiosity than an unexplained termination.  Terminations made due to flagrant disregard for company regulations or violations of governmental laws should remain strictly confidential.  Slandering an individual in public reflects just as poorly on the informant as it does the victim.

 

During the early 1990’s, my employer terminated a young manager for taking advantage of a vendor-client relationship he had power over.  The reasons for the termination were to remain strictly confidential.  But unfortunately, the details were quickly spread among numerous people in the company.  The Regional VP was both angered and embarrassed with the leak.  And the consequences were reputation damaging to both the terminated manager and the Vice President.  Consequently, the young manager was forced to leave the industry and start all over in another field of business.  Obviously, the terminated manager brought the consequences on himself, but the leak was unnecessary and painful to both parties.  

 

Communication is a critical aspect of associate behavior.  If an issue is to be kept confidential, clearly communicate the need for confidentiality and the negative consequences of a leak.

 

Application:  

 

Are confidentiality issues being handled properly in your organization?  If not, what structure can you provide to see that they are?

 

 

 

DETERMINATION

 LINK:   Determination Video

Determination is a foundational word. As a word it evokes strong emotions, however it can be used lightly on conversations. At its very root, determination means to make a lasting, firm decision.

The very word itself conjures up deep emotional responses like resolve and commitment.

To be determined begets the driving forces of resolve and persistence. Determination works best when it is coupled with a vision of your future and a purpose for your life. And having a vision demands a mission statement that guides day to day activities.

Too often my determination gets watered down by the frustrations of life that diminish my focus. Too many admin tasks that don’t appear to have much, if any impact on my vision for the future.

If personal determination is to be taken seriously, it demands that I eliminate some trivial pursuits from my activities. Things like television, fiction reading, sports and Facebook videos can consume some of your precious time and energy.

A lack of determination and commitment lead to indecisiveness. And being indecisive kills your personal leadership capabilities.

However, we also know that determination may have a deeper cost to it. Determination means taking a stand for your principles. When you do that people will disagree with you. They will drift away from a relationship or a commitment to you.

Being determined can also have deep, deep personal costs to it.

For example when Texas was fighting its war of independence, 183 volunteers manned an abandoned mission in San Antonio to stop the advancing Mexican army.

 Here’s William Barret Travis’s famous letter from the Alamo.

To the people of Texas and all Americans in the world.

Fellow Citizens and Compatriots –

I am besieged by a thousand or more Mexicans under Santa Anna – I have sustained a continual bombardment and cannonade for 24 hours and have not lost a man – The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise the garrison are to be put to the sword, If the fort is taken. I have answered the demand with a cannon shot and our flag still waves proudly from the walls – I shall never surrender or retreat.

Then I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid with all dispatch – The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily and no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country.

Victory or Death

William Barret Travis

That level of determination cost Travis and 182 fellow volunteers their lives.

 

Being determined helps become a person of character and strength. We become aware of the cost and have the determination to carry on.

I recently read a story about the Coast Guard boat that was headed out into the ocean in very stormy seas to attempt a rescue mission. One of the young sailors looked at the captain, and said aren’t you afraid that we will never get back? And the Captain replied, Our job is to get out there, not to get back.

Being a person with a deep sense of determination allows you to avoid the emotional roller coaster that happens when there is no determination and decisiveness in your life. I would much personally stand on that steady ground than to slide off into the slimy pit called indecisiveness.

Based on these observations from history and personal character, I urge you to think deeply about your personal determination. It will pay dividends the rest of your life.

 

 Forgiveness Versus Pardon

 

Even though our basic human nature shouts out for revenge when we are offended or mistreated, as a principle we are called to forgive others.  There is great wisdom in that philosophy because often times the biggest harm is the one we are doing ourselves.  

 

However, what are we to do when an employee or associate broaches a major trust or commits a termination level offense?  Yes, once again we are called on to forgive that person.  But the term forgiveness should be defined to satisfy the concept of justice that must exist to have our institutions function properly.

 

Forgiveness is a concept of the mind, will and emotions.  To forgive is to not hold a grudge that drags us down into the quagmire of plotting reprisals, bitterness, anger, and depression that accompany a lack of forgiveness.  Forgiving frees your mind and emotions to care about others and be positive.

 

Forgiveness does not mean that the individual or institution does not have to suffer the consequences of their actions.  However, to receive a pardon allows the offender to escape the deserved punishment.  The contrast between the two terms is highly significant.

 

Perhaps a simple illustration will add clarity to the definitions.  If you run a business and hire an accountant to manage your finances, this individual has been placed in a position of trust.  If the accountant is caught defrauding the company of cash, then the proper course of action is termination and some form of repayment or possibly criminal charges.  It is possible to forgive that individual and still have some level of friendship or communication with them.  However, this forgiveness does not mean the accountant gets their old job back.  Nor does it mean they are freed from civil or criminal penalties.

 

The most well-known pardon in recent US history was the pardon of President Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford, the Vice President who inherited the Presidency after Nixon resigned.  Ford spared Nixon the humiliation of public charges and trials.  This allowed Nixon to go into self-exiled isolation and time for the nation to heal its damaged political image.

 

Perhaps that was a wise use of Presidential power given the circumstances.  However, the liberal use of pardons by both governmental authorities and company managers should be avoided.  A failure to police and punish corporate wrongdoers sends the wrong message to others tempted to engage in the same type of conduct.  

 

A failure to provide consequences sets precedence in the workplace that leads to a downward spiral of deceit and blatant cheating in all phases of the business.  Whereas the consistent application and equal enforcement of the rules provides a trust factor in any organization.  This trust factor comes from an understanding that everyone is accountable with no exceptions.  This level of fairness diminishes the temptation to sidestep the rules with compromised activity. 

 

Application: 

 

Are you harboring a bitterness regarding a previous offense?  Is this bitterness affecting your attitude, relationships and productivity?  Clear this malignant form of anger from your system by forgiving that individual or institution and experience the unfettered joy of personal peace. 

 

 CHANGE

 

To capture a cliché concerning today’s marketplace, we continually hear, “The only thing constant is change.”  Businesses are constantly being pressured to adapt to remain competitive and since people normally comprise the most important asset of the company, it is necessary to learn how to affect effective change in our organizations.

 

Many times human nature reflects the law of inertia.  Things at rest tend to stay there or put in plain English “if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.”  The fact is, we tend to practice the same habits until the pain of staying the same exceeds the pain of change.

 

It’s not those employees arrive at work wishing to fail.  Given the right atmosphere for innovation and change, many people willingly accept the changes necessary to remain competitive.

 

Therefore, it is management’s responsibility to institute change in the organization.  Recognize that change requires top management support, constant reinforcement and repetition to achieve the desired destination.

 

Some recommended strategies include:

•        Develop a management change team 

•        Designate responsibility for the change success to the appointed senior manager on that team

•        Develop teams in each department in the organization

•        Appoint a senior management person to serve on each team

•        Launch the change initiative with full workforce meetings 

•        Form sub-teams down to the lowest level with appropriate management participation

•        Launch a media campaign in the organization to support the change required

•        Fully inform all individuals why the change is necessary

•        Invite participation from all the individuals affected 

•        Eliminate outdated procedures and practices that form an impediment to change

•        Establish benchmarks of progress

•        Reward departments and individuals for progress or completion of the assigned changes

•        It may be necessary to replace or demote individuals who refuse to participate in the change process 

•        Remember that constant reinforcement and management participation are the two keys to success

 

 

 

One example very prevalent from the 1980’s was the quest for Total Quality Management.  Previous to that time frame, many service companies, distribution and manufacturing firms were run by simple formulas, experience and gut feel.  For example, my purchasing training in 1976 consisted of determining an A and B supplier, learning how to replenish stock and laborious hours marking printouts.  There was no instruction on the need for inventory turns or formulas to produce efficient purchasing practices.  The job function was treated as a stand alone function, not as an integrated part of the whole company’s successful operation.

 

As profit margins declined and profits were unable to cover lax management practices during the mid-eighties, quality programs became very popular among top management.  A Total Quality Management Program was a way to bolster profitability without investing in new plants, machinery and product development. In addition, it was virtually forced on many suppliers to retain their client base.

 

To ensure the implementation of the quality programs, many aspects of the change process were utilized by my employer at that time.  Senior management was involved, training was performed, teams were formed, measurements were taken, audits were undertaken, and recognition was provided to the high achievers.  Best Way Manuals were written and eventually software was developed to track almost every aspect of customer service.  This change process took approximately two years to fully institute.  However, after that time period the quality aspect of our business became part of the company culture.  

 

Application: 

 

Are your responsible for a business, yet refusing to make the necessary changes to achieve competitiveness?  Involve your personnel and get started!  They may surprise you if you provide the leadership.

Author:

Gary D. Seale - MBA

Trucon Communications

www.truconbd.com