Empower Your Champions: Teaching Change Management to Drive Adoption
As we approach 2025, change management is not just a buzzword—it's becoming an essential skill for customer success professionals. In this session, we will uncover why change management is increasingly recognized in CS leadership roles and how it is poised to become a core competency in the field. Attendees will learn fundamental change management principles to enhance adoption at any stage of the customer lifecycle.
All right, so we're going to kick things off now.
I'm Paulina Rodriguez.
The CSM here at Gaincite, and super excited
to introduce you today to Lisa.
Before kicking off with the formal introduction,
just a reminder for housekeeping,
all the questions as you start listening to the presentation,
please write those in Slido in the app for track two.
And if there's others that like questions that you see on there,
just up both them so that we can prioritize those questions
during Q&A. We will be sending the recording and the audio
at the end of polls, so you don't have to take the screenshots,
but you can if you want.
So awesome.
I'm very excited to introduce you to Lisa Champion,
who is a senior director at Brandwatch,
who will be talking about empowering your champions,
teaching change management for driving adoption.
Let's give her a hand of applause, everyone.
[APPLAUSE]
What's up, Wes?
Please.
[APPLAUSE]
Hello.
OK, this is a busy room, so thank you, everyone, for having me.
Yeah, so my name's Lisa.
As it says here, I'm going to talk about how
to empower your champions, teaching change management
to drive adoption.
I didn't rate a hand of view, just in the session,
in the main hall with Sushar from Ever After.
Good.
Really good session, wasn't it?
And for a minute, I was a bit worried we were going to overlap.
But actually, I think that what we've done, accidentally,
is he's talked a lot about the digital side of things.
And I'm going to be touching a lot more
on the more high touch, but scalable principles
to do with this kind of thing.
So a little bit about me.
I've been in SaaS for 13 years, most recently,
seven years at a company called Brandwatch.
Brandwatch does really excellent social listening
and social media management technology.
And throughout my time at Brandwatch,
I've been managing customer success teams.
And then for the last two years or so,
I took on a role doing the kind of strategic side of ops.
So looking at customer programs, looking
at different touch points with that kind of thing
and really trying to make sure that what we do
is as good as possible.
I also recently did a course, a postgraduate course,
in organizational change, the psychology
of organizational change.
So I'm going to be really pleased to share some of my learnings
from that with you all.
And very specifically, the reason I'm here
is because speaking is the only reason I could get to pulse.
And I'm excited about it, but I'm also very nervous.
So thank you for excusing any little crackle in my voice.
Cool, cool.
But enough about me.
Why are we here?
So we know that customer success is a really tough job.
As a lot of other speakers have said,
we need our customers' businesses to change.
They need to get some kind of different outcome
than before they made this investment.
And that's really tough.
And business change really depends on people changing.
Again, like other people have sort of mentioned in their talks.
It's not about pressing a button and changing a business.
You've got to convince a lot of different people
to do things a bit differently.
And that's not easy.
And what's not on our side is that our champions
are very rarely actually change managers or project managers.
And then that coupled with the fact that in CS,
we are all about the business outcomes these days.
We've really got to try and step in and drive our customers
towards those business outcomes.
Means that I've set in the scene, and I'm sure you have as well,
that becoming proficient in change management
is becoming a much more common thing in the industry.
All right, so I'm going to talk through today
just a few different change principles.
I've sort of bucketed these by different parts
of the customer journey.
But you'll find that really a lot of the ideas
are some similarities throughout, and you
can apply them as you go different stages of the journey.
So I'll talk a bit about kick off how
we can empower our customers and plan with them.
I'll talk about a few weeks, a few months in,
at the end of one boarding, asking some really good questions
to really get to the crux of whether they're changing.
And then some principles around resistance.
And then the idea is, I'm not going to talk about renewal,
but the idea is obviously that if we do all these things well,
then that renewal will be in the bag.
Let's get started.
Quick disclaimer, of course, we can
influence our customer's success before the sale gets made.
Be lovely if our AEs were talking about some of these things
of our customers.
Let's just pretend for now that this is our first opportunity
to really influence customers.
Click is not working there.
Cool.
So the first thing is about-- we're
going to talk about empowering people.
And the first insight that I got earlier this year
when I was doing that change course
was in the importance of the difference between change
leadership and change management.
The psychologist called Caldwell, what
have I put there, 2003, did a big review of change literature,
and argued for this importance of these two distinct roles.
In this world, in this framework, the change leader
is the senior leader.
They've got the vision.
They probably instigate it or sponsor it.
And the change manager is the functional specialist
or the manager who actually has to make it happen.
And it's quite easy to see how that stacks up
with our different customers and the execs sponsor role
and the champion role and so on.
But I don't think I've ever seen customers come to us
and say, this is what we are and what kind of roles
we're going to fail.
So after having this insight and after the light bulbs going
off in my brain, I headed over to our kickoff call deck.
I was pretty convinced by this idea, this idea, sorry.
And I wanted to just sort of see what we were doing at the moment
and see whether there's an opportunity to improve things.
There definitely was.
What we had was a slide that was very functional,
where we were talking to customers about those three
different roles that we talk about all the time
and having some interesting enough conversations
about what that means for them and what we're hoping they will do
as they work with us.
But I listened to some calls and it was interesting enough,
but it wasn't really moving anything along.
So what we did is grabbed a few of our most trusted CSMs
and piloted just this change.
So talking to people instead about being the change leader,
like, hey, Mr. Byer, if you're on the call,
you're now the change leader and this is what that means.
Champion is the change manager and then maybe
there's power users around talking to them
about workflow changes and what that means.
The impact of that was that immediately we found way more
interesting and useful conversations were being sparked.
Often customers would be a bit like, oh, change management,
that sounds a bit scary.
I'm not quite sure what to do.
And we were able to then start positioning ways
we could help them and ways the CSMs could jump in and support.
And obviously, as a CSM, that's what you want your customer
to do is to know you can help beyond the technology
or the service you're selling.
And we'll get back to that idea of change leaders
and change managers in a minute.
But I just wanted to briefly touch on the planning side of things.
I'm such a-- I was a teenager in the '90s,
so this pulse theme is perfect for me.
You tell by my dot margins.
And I love planning.
It really gives me that sense of control
in a world full of chaos.
And of course, in the customer success,
we talk about success plans and to quote Shaha from before.
If you're not doing success plans, you probably should.
Is that Shaha or Lloyd?
I can't remember.
But planning is great, but having a plan
doesn't necessarily mean that things are going to go exactly
where you're going to go.
So it's good because it will force analysis.
It will help us get expectations down on paper,
roles, and responsibilities.
But yeah, it can love you into a full sense of security.
Organizations are not machines.
It's another big learning I've had from my course.
They're really hard to control and predict.
So I think we've all had those times
where we've had a business reviewer kick off
and you have this amazing plan.
It might just be an email or a fully fled success plan.
You're like, oh, done.
It's all fine.
And then you speak to the customer
and month or whatever it is later and nothing has happened.
So what we want to do instead is use a planning framework
that's based on the realities of driving change
in people and organizations.
And to do that, I'm going to talk to you
about this ad car framework.
It was introduced, I think he's a psychologist,
high at late '90s.
It is a framework for planning all change.
And it's now the foundation of the prosci.com
planning methodology.
So if you're interested in this sort of thing
and he wants a really actionable learnings
and things like that, check them out.
And the benefit of ad cars, it really
does attempt to address the realities of changing behavior.
They focus on outcomes and they focus on understanding
and overcoming resistance.
So we'll talk about that in a minute.
I'm sorry, my contact lenses can't quite see my slides.
And it's really simple.
So that means it's really easy to teach a customer.
Because of course, that's what we're talking about today,
is empowering customers, trying to teach them things
that they can use in their organization when you're not there.
So really simple framework.
We've got the awareness side of things.
Do our customers actually understand what's changing?
Desire, do they want it?
Do all these people that need to change,
whether they've got to adopt your technology or change
something else in their workflow, do they actually--
well, they motivate it to do this?
Knowledge, do people know what they have to do to change?
Ability, one of my most favorite ones, it's so important.
Not only have they had training, but have they
had sufficient time to master these new skills?
And reinforcement.
There's nothing like a change, a big announcement.
Everything's going to change and no one ever mentions it again.
I'm sure we've all had that before.
Oops, sorry.
And then on this one, I'm not going to--
oh, no, sorry.
Back to the change leaders and change managers,
what's really convenient is that these change leaders
and change managers fit fairly neatly into this framework
as well.
So again, the buyer, the sponsor, they fulfill
that awareness and desire side of things very well.
And the knowledge and ability is normally with the champion.
They've got the hard day to day trying to make everything
happen side of things.
And what I like about this, again,
if you're talking about this on the kickoff call,
or in those early stages where everyone's excited and motivated,
then that success plan can have tasks that are for the buyer
as well.
And we all know how hard it is to keep buyers engaged
about the life cycle.
But by giving them this job to be done,
it's a really nice way of doing that.
I won't go through all of these.
Here's just some examples of the sorts of things
you might find on a success plan that
speak to these five elements.
I will talk about a couple.
Awareness, informing people of the change.
I could probably talk about this one for 20 minutes,
but I won't.
Just the-- there's a lot of different research out there
that tells you the effectiveness of certain change
messages based on the medium and on the person who sent it.
So for example, really big company news.
You shouldn't hear from your first-line manager.
You should hear about that from your leader.
Maybe that's an obvious one, but there's
a lot more nuances out there too.
And again, in the awareness section,
one thing I've seen really well when
we're talking about customer programs
is that by-- with our customers who are maybe struggling
to get people interested in their program,
by giving that program a name and by having a marketing
plan for it internally has really made the difference
for them in terms of getting people excited and aware.
And then like I said on ability, how many times
have you had training on something new,
and then no time to put that training into practice?
What I found works really well is that when
we give our customers time to practice the skills
in a kind of safe environment where they can't mess anything
up or they can't feel like they're going to mess anything up,
it's a better way to get them from A to B
rather than just here's the training.
Now you've got to do this thing by your deadline,
and it's a lot of pressure.
One quick example about something that happened to me,
which is showing a bit of a before and after,
or this happened, this should have happened,
was a couple of years ago I was happily leading CS teams,
popped into my diary, these three invites
for 45 minutes of training on a bit of tech
that our company had procured.
I joined the training, and it was good.
There was a CSM doing the training,
they knew what they were doing, but there wasn't anyone
from my organization telling me why I was there really.
After a few minutes, one of my peers jumped in and said,
"Ah, how are we here?"
And the poor old CSM had to try and explain it,
and they did a good job, they explained their value
proposition, but what would have been even better
would have been, this is for you as individuals
or for your teams, much more of a specific
kind of use case outcome conversation.
So yeah, what I would rather have had was some comms saying,
"This is what's happening, this is what I think
"we should use it for, this is why it's good for you,
"as well as why it's good for the business.
"Here's some amount of time we think
"you're gonna invest in this."
And this is how important it is,
is it a mandate or a nice to have?
And in this instance as well, there was no follow up.
I joined a couple of these sessions,
didn't join the last one, and then no one ever mentioned it
again, other teams adopted it,
but no one asked me if I had, which is just bizarre.
All right, so that's the kickoff.
These are the things that we're talking about
from the sort of start of the journey.
I'm gonna jump in now to a few weeks into the,
a few weeks, few months into the customer journey,
maybe it's go live, maybe it's end of onboarding.
And now we're gonna talk about the downsides of planning.
So,
oops sorry, lost a slide somewhere.
Like I said, those plans are great,
plans don't always happen, do they?
So when we get to that point, a few weeks in,
it's important not to make assumptions,
and to ask lots of really good questions,
to make sure our customers being successful.
An example of this from my recent past was that,
few months ago, I was asked to review the end
of onboarding call that we were holding.
It was the time when the onboarding specialist
would hand the relationship effectively over to the CSM,
with the customers on the call,
and the previous version, it wasn't great,
it was all about us, mostly.
We were asking customers, how was onboarding?
You know, fine.
It's a good to have an open question,
but it means the customers can take that question
and go in any direction they like,
and we're not really getting down to the weeds
of are they successful.
So what we did instead was,
ask way more specific questions,
and we equipped our CSMs with cheat sheets and training,
to make sure that they could then follow up
on these questions, because if those customers
had a hesitation or a no, then the CSMs were able
to jump in and dig a lot deeper,
as we gave them more questions they could ask
to sort of diagnose further and work out
what is actually going on,
why there's a no to this question,
and then of course, recommendations they can make
for the success plan to help overcome
whatever blocker is there.
And what we found is that we wanted to give the CSM
more airtime on that call,
because the onboarding specialists
are still kind of running the show,
but obviously at that point in the journey,
we want the CSM to start showing their value.
We were most more importantly,
giving the customer a lot more airtime,
by asking lots more questions and digging deeper,
we could get to know them a lot better.
And then we were surfacing way more risk factors
and opportunities than we were doing before,
and overall kind of elevating that conversation.
One thing that I spotted when I was listening
to Go on Cool's after we were piloting this was that,
the CSMs were finding new opportunities as well,
to get deeper with the customers.
So customers would often say to that sort of time-based
question, or like something like,
well, I thought that these teams would want
to use the platform, so they've had their training,
but they haven't really used it, but you know what?
They're just busy, this is an us problem, you're great,
but just let us deal with that.
And the CSMs were actually now able to jump in and say,
hey, let me help you with that,
let me help you find ways to make these people want
to spend some more time on this.
And again, it's just another way to start getting in deeper.
So jumping on now, two resistance.
Resistance in this context is often gonna present
as adoption challenges, right?
And again, that might be problems with getting people
to adopt the technology, or making any other type of change
that they need to make during their,
now they've got this new program on board.
And yeah, resistance sucks.
You see your customers all the time,
and I'm sure we've all had that as well,
where you work really hard at a program or a project,
and you're so bought into it, that you just kind of assume
everybody else will be too, and you announce it,
and nothing happens, and then it kind of feels personal, right?
If other people aren't doing the things
that you were so excited about them doing,
it can just not feel good.
So what we're gonna do, if this happens to our customers,
because it does, is we're gonna help them get more curious
about this resistance, and we're gonna help them reframe it.
So rather than thinking, why don't people do this thing,
we're gonna try and help them go,
why don't people do this thing, you know?
Let me just be interested and try and work it out.
And we're gonna do it through these three steps.
First thing is, trying to recognize the type of resistance
that we've got going on here.
So I've put it in this framework.
Most people are familiar with the kind of fight,
flight, form, freeze, as the kind of natural response
that we all have to threats or challenges in our lives.
And the way this might come through in the resistance,
in the adoption side of things,
is the fight responses that are active, you know?
They might get on the training session,
but they're really difficult, and I'm sure CSMs
and onboarding people and trainers in the removity
and that as well.
The flight is sort of leaving, maybe not leaving their business,
but just being so annoyed about this change
that they just don't do it.
It's a bit different to the freeze where they do nothing,
but in this one they might just kind of,
I don't really wanna do this, use this tech anymore,
I'm just gonna go off and get interested in a new project.
And with the form, that's where people would negotiate
or politics, so they might start trying to talk their way
out of this change, talk to their manager,
talk to the change leader, the champion about,
actually I think we should do something different,
go back to the old way, or maybe do this other thing
altogether.
And then yeah, freeze, do nothing, just ignore it
and hope it goes away.
We see that a lot more than I would ever have thought.
So now we've started to understand what type of resistance
we might be seeing, gonna talk a bit about why.
And one big reason that people don't do the things
we want them to do, and they resist,
is because there's a feeling of conscious
or unconscious threat happening.
So maybe we can use this scarf model
proposed by Rourke in 2001, and sit down with our customers
to say, hey, we take this person or this group of people
who are not adopting, and think about which of these
is in play.
Are we kind of threatening their status,
or their certainty, their sense of autonomy,
or their relatedness, connectedness in the business,
or their sense of justice and fairness,
'cause that's obviously a big one as well.
And finally, one of my favorite things I've seen
work really well when our team members have taken these ideas
and started to use them is trying to reframe it all.
So when our customers, when we're talking to them
about adoption challenges, rather than talking about
they have adopted or they haven't adopted,
start talking about readiness.
So how ready are they to adopt this thing?
I'm gonna go through some more specific examples
in a minute, and it's just way more useful
to think of it as a kind of diagnostic and a spectrum
than a more binary guess or no approach.
So yeah, a little example, in fact two examples
that have both been situations I've been involved
in throughout my career.
So they were very, very similar.
They were both customers who had been onboarding
with brand watch, big enterprise global businesses,
where they wanted to train lots of people
in multiple markets on the product
and get them obviously then adopting it.
In both instances, the program was completely new.
So we weren't just a new vendor for a previous program.
Everything about this was new.
And the first time I was a senior CSM,
I joined the business and I got involved
in this customer post on boarding.
A load of people are doing training sessions, great.
Then there wasn't very much adoption.
And there were some signs there that the value proposition
just wasn't really clear to the customers,
to the end users.
And the client in that time,
they were absolutely adamant that the solution
was more training and being fairly new to the business,
much earlier in my career, I just went along with it.
And we did loads more training and invested tons of time
and there was basically no change.
So nothing really happened.
And then we move on to a few years later,
this year actually, and I got involved
in a very similar client situation.
Another big group of business, lots of different markets,
and again, not too much adoption.
I was brought in to help by the customer success manager
because they knew that I'd been doing all these pilots
and things across the business to do with change.
And the first thing the customer said to me is,
we think the solution is more training.
And I said, okay, but maybe we should have
a different meeting and talk about change first.
And they said, yes, which was nice.
And what we did in those workshops was we started off
by talking quite generally about change in their organization,
talking about how it normally goes,
like who is good at making change happen?
When does it fail?
What's important to different people
and how do we motivate people?
We introduced the ad-car framework
and some other change management concepts.
And then we started walking through
this readiness assessment, again,
using the ad-car as the basis.
I'm not gonna go through all the points on this.
It was a similar but different sort of framework
as we've got here.
And what we did was we just took different stakeholders.
First of all, we actually did a group of people
who were adopting and tried to think about
what made them special.
And then we looked at all the groups of people,
a few of the groups of people that weren't.
And during that session,
I could just see them having those amazing moments
of understanding where they were beginning to empathize
with those other people and teams
and start to realize where things were going wrong.
I knew things were going well
because they said we could stay for an extra hour.
This customer was so time sensitive.
They were one of those ones where you,
you know, you book your meeting for two hours
and you get half an hour, that kind of thing.
But they asked us to stay for longer.
And they were saying throughout the meeting
that they wanted to engage lots more people
in their organization with similar sessions.
And again, thinking about the point of this talk,
which is about empowering our champions,
they were feeling that they were beginning to be equipped
to do that without us in the room.
And once we'd done some assessing and diagnosis,
we then went through some actions, obviously.
So we came prepared and we thought of a few more
within the meeting over different things we could do
to actually start to improve that readiness
with these different groups.
So by the end of the session, they had the beginnings
of a very sort of people positive plan
to achieve the programme goals that they'd set out with
in the beginning.
They did those more sessions internally
and they started going through some interventions.
And what we started to see that in some of these key markets,
the adoption and just general engagement with the ideas
in the programme, were shooting up.
And that customer's now still got some work to do,
but they're much happier, they're getting much more value
and return on their investment.
So there's been a whistle-stop sort of tour
through a lot of concepts and things.
And obviously happy to jump in and ask answer questions.
So this is your reminder to start putting any questions
you have in the slide, eh?
Now I'll just do a bit of a recap.
So what have I talked about?
The kickoff.
I talked about the importance of empowering our customers,
helping them understand their roles,
giving them active roles to play, with jobs to do,
and to make a plan that's sensitive to the challenges
of changing behaviour, not just that sort of pine that's
going to be great, kind of plan.
Towards the end of the onboarding,
talked about the importance of not making assumptions,
having that reality check, how we actually doing right now.
And then really any time in the customer journey,
we can address adoption issues using that ad-car framework
to try and work out what the blockers are
and to work out what to do about it.
I took out a couple of slides because I'm doing okay for time.
I'm just going to give you a little final thought that I had
because I was just asked that question before I even started,
which is how do we persuade people internally to change?
And what I was thinking was, obviously,
you can do the same thing here.
So whether it's ideas you've had from this session
or other sessions today, you're going to have to go back
to your organisations and persuade your colleagues,
your boss, your customers to do something a bit differently.
So maybe it's an opportunity to start practising this ad-car
and other frameworks to be more persuasive,
apply that wizardry, kind of get your own way.
And with that, I will thank you.
(Applause)
Amazing! Lisa!
All right, we're going to do some Q&A.
I'm going to facilitate.
And please upvote any questions that you do want to hear about.
So we'll go ahead and showcase the Q&A on this slide here.
Perfect. So I'll start with the first one.
I've got a lot of upvotes for this one.
Lisa, how would you follow up a training with a customer
for adopting the new future?
If customer is saying he sees the value of it
but didn't implement it after a couple of weeks?
Yes, good question.
There's a few different things that I've seen work well.
One thing I briefly touched and I think was helping,
again, working with your champion,
hopefully the champions on board,
and they know what they're doing, whether they are not,
and finding a way to practice the skills in a kind of safe and fun environment.
So maybe something we started doing at Bramwatch was we were talking about in
our, this is one way to sort of scale this as well,
putting in our welcome journeys.
So my ideas of how people could try things out by setting up,
doing some setups and things like that that were just silly.
So in Bramwatch you have to learn to write Boolean to search the web.
I won't go into that, but finding a way to do it where it's fun
or where you can't break things because when we talk into our customers about
why they haven't done something, one of the big reasons is
I'm worried I'm going to mess it up for somebody else.
I think also just, again, depends how much time you have.
If you've got time, just talk to them.
Again, it's like, why, why?
Like, what do you, what's got in the way?
What did you intend to do by now?
Why didn't you do it? All that kind of stuff.
I love that.
I love that you also put in examples because sometimes people don't know
where to start.
Yeah, exactly.
That's awesome.
So the next question we have here, tips to deal with an
unresponsive point of contact.
Or one who doesn't have a lot of authority to implement or make people
listen to them or use the tool.
So any tips that you have that you can share?
Yes, good question.
So I guess with the second part of the question, when the point of
contact doesn't have a lot of authority, I think we think about that
change leader, change manager thing again.
My advice would be to go back to the buyer or whoever's now kind of
owns the budget, maybe even the procurement team, depending on how
involved they are in all these decisions.
And find a, you know, again, people positive way to raise the fact
that things aren't quite going as needed.
We need to find someone who's got the ability to make things happen,
I suppose.
And then how do you deal with an unresponsive point of
contact?
I guess maybe kind of the other side of things, which would be what can
we do with our scaled motions to get similar messages out to the end
users, so to go around the main point of contact.
So, you know, if you've got an automated email program, maybe there's
something we can do with that, set up to me in my journeys that can sort of
address some of the similar things that you were wanting to do through
the main point of contact.
Well, the next one is actually, I think like a lot of us have that
problem.
Yeah.
When the change leader has the desire, but not the manager.
I mean, we see this all the time, right?
Someone buys a tool or the service, and then they hand everything over
to somebody who wasn't involved, doesn't really understand what's in it
for them.
I think, again, you know, I won't repeat myself, but obviously going
back to that change leader and asking them to persuade them.
And then talking to the change manager to try and find that what's in it
for me, because obviously we're all motivated by different things.
So trying to suss out what does motivate them and what's getting in
the way, and then hopefully finding a way through it.
What's in it for me?
I think that's the key.
Yeah, it is.
All right.
The next one from Tommy, a big part of ADKR is focusing on the
individual person going through the change.
What are your best practices on realizing this aspect in large-scale
collaborations?
Yes.
So we talked about that one quite a lot, because Bramwatch is an enterprise
tool, so it works again with these global businesses.
So you can't sit down with everybody and ask them, like, those six questions
from the end of onboarding, you can't sit down on a call and ask
everybody those questions.
So what we did after trying it out, when we started trying out with these
bigger accounts, was talk to the champions and went through those
questions with them, and then asked them, who else do we need to ask
these questions to?
And then when I was last time I was involved in this, I stepped away
from the project, but there was conversations about doing surveys
right for the end users, so asking them similar but different questions.
And I think, again, part of this idea that we're trying to, as a CSM,
we're not having to be responsible for everything.
We want our champions to be able to go ahead and do a lot of this without
us.
I think really trying to teach the champions some of these principles
and some other customer success principles.
In that, I keep almost saying the client name, and I'm not
loud.
In that second example I gave earlier, we actually were joking because
they were the things that they started saying as our main points of
contact, they were talking like a CSM.
Again, another good sign that things were going well.
And that's what we want really, as far as our internal champions to be
like CSMs, right?
>> I love that.
So when we're thinking about skills, what are the most critical core
skills to be successful in change management?
How do you start building them if you don't have them?
>> I don't know if I'm enough of an expert to give an expert answer to
this question, but I do think that the best change managers I know are
the people with the most open minds and growth mindsets.
Because again, if we think about all these programs, I'm sure you've
tried to make a change before and had different degrees of acceptance
and action against that change.
I think that the best thing we can do is not just sort of put our
heads down and just keep going down a path.
We have to think more humbly, really, about, okay, people aren't
actually doing what I thought they were going to do.
Why is that?
It's not just all about me and my vision.
I'm not just going to drive through and just make it happen.
I want to be more open to it.
And I think really what I could just recommend to anyone in this
room is just to do some research.
I mean, the pro-sci website is a good place to start and sign up
for their emails.
And you just start to build, just understanding these things and
start building the muscle.
>> I love that.
It sounds like a lot like adaptability, which I love.
>> Exactly.
>> And taking that risk too.
>> Yeah.
>> I'm being willing to just do things differently.
>> Yeah.
Awesome.
So you spoke about resistance.
What if resistance is because of lack of time?
>> Yeah.
I mean, that is, I don't know, this might be a bold thing,
but probably the number one reason any of us don't do things
right.
We wish we could, we don't have time.
I guess it's still, I would tackle that in the same kind of
way.
I would use the ad-car framework and similar things and think,
what we're going to do is sell people the idea of using the
time they do have in the way we want them to.
So think about that time as a commodity and just again start
to sort of diagnose, think about what is using their time and
how we can make this a priority.
>> I love that.
It's like the topic of the year or the past couple of years is
time savings.
>> Exactly.
>> Exactly.
Awesome.
>> So what if change was dropped like a bomb and now we're here
facing a huge resistance and dissatisfaction issue?
What would the remedy be from your perspective?
>> Run away.
>> I mean, we'd bomb.
>> Just don't deal with it anymore.
Again, I think, you know, we've all probably been through huge
changes in the last few years.
I know I've been through, I don't know how many mergers and
acquisition events have been through in seven years with one
company and it is usually dropped like a bomb, right?
And there is huge resistance and dissatisfaction.
I think that kind of change is, you know, when you're, it depends
if you're the one dropping the bomb, I suppose.
If you're the one dropping the bomb, then you should be able
to have some time to plan and even if you have to announce
something out of the blue, you should be thinking about best
practices and not just doing it and actually thinking about
change management as more than just an email that's announcing
a change.
It's about changing hearts and minds and making people excited
and motivated.
But if you're the one, maybe you're leading a team and this
bomb is dropped from somebody else, then, I mean, there's lots
of things you could do.
You need to obviously start to understand the reasons for
the resistance within your team.
You're probably feeling, oh, sorry, feeling resistance too and
having to try and manage yourself through that.
Yeah, there's probably a million things I could say, which is
why I'm struggling to find anything.
Well, you didn't mention earlier in your presentation that
the understanding piece is a big part with customers, so I'm
assuming it could also resonate internally too.
Understanding why?
Exactly.
Yeah.
And honestly, I think there's things that we talk about like the
change curve, a lot of people seeing the change curve.
I think it was, oh, I'll come into the name of the, um,
person who suggested it.
The Kube-La-Ross change curve, probably familiar.
So one thing I've done when I've led teams through these big
changes is talk to people about how it's, again, it's completely
normal to feel threatened by these big changes or to feel just,
you know, any sort of negative emotion and like how it's, and
just have those sort of open conversations about how you're
feeling today, right?
You don't all have to feel brilliant about this straight away.
That's sort of my approach to leadership anyway, is trying to
have real conversations, try to manage my own self as best I can
so I can talk authentically with my team, but not try and pretend
everything's wonderful.
It's a difficult balance to strike, but, um, yeah, I think just
having these real conversations is important to me.
I love that.
All right.
So how do you get your CSM team comfortable with these strategies
to help support the customers?
Yes.
So a lot of my time in the last two years has been on, yeah,
internal change and enablement.
Um, I, I can't remember what I said at the top of the presentation,
but I sort of stepped away from traditional CS leadership a
couple of years ago and I've been working on the sort of
strategic side of operations which has involved, yeah, touchpoint
redesigns, bringing different programs from different acquired
companies together to one sort of best of both, all that kind of
stuff.
So I've had to take a lot of CSM teams through change.
Um, I think the first thing is working with all the different
stakeholders so that you've got a team here, but you've got, um,
different leaders in the business that you're going to want to be
on board and I think showing you knighted front that any change
you're making is strategic and it's for a reason, it's the first
place to start.
And I, I really believe when you do training is not throwing a
load of information out there, when I do enablement with teams
it's very much kind of workshop style.
So getting people to come up with the ideas themselves is a
hugely important way to get them to actually action those ideas.
And most of the time they'll come up with exactly the ideas that,
that you would have tried to train them one anyway.
And then again reinforcement, thinking about that, you go through
the whole thing, you know, reinforcing things.
Again, CSM teams who've been through a lot of change will often
do the, do the, um, freeze, not just not do anything because it's
like this, something else will change next week and I wouldn't
have to do any of this.
So really just saying like this is here to stay, this is why,
here's why it's good for you, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I love that.
So the next question we have here is what differences do you
typically see between changes that have been carried out by
using this approach and changes that have been imposed or forced
on by management and leadership to the teams?
That's a good question, it's interesting.
Yeah.
I'm trying to think of client examples rather than internal
examples.
Um, I guess, yeah, like when we, when we've made these changes,
I mentioned the kick of call, I mentioned the end of one
boarding, we've implemented like incremental changes here and
there using some of these ideas and other ideas.
Um, and when I, I do a lot of follow up trying to measure the
outcomes is difficult in a quantifiable way, but I do a lot
of gong listening, things like that.
And I think that the differences are, then the depth of
conversation and the level of conversation that we're able to
have.
So I think as, as we've talked about in, in all sorts of ways
today, the more you know about your customer, the less
surprises you're going to have.
Um, so, yeah, I think that sort of the main difference is just
seeing that actually we're having way more meaty, more
strategic conversations and that that's a lot more for CSM to go
on, right?
So now you've got that more information about your customer,
you can use that in whatever way you need to.
Yeah, I love that.
Me being a CSM authenticity and clear communication does help
a lot.
And I feel like we couldn't tell when things are not as they
seem.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, and like I mentioned earlier as well, kind of showing that
you are that trusted advisor, you know, the, that you can help
be on the technology.
That's the big shift that I've seen within the teams I ran where
we started doing things like this was taking that, you know,
customer started coming to us with questions that weren't just
about the actual tech that we sold.
And obviously that's a huge win.
Love that.
All right, so we have time for a couple more.
From your perspective, how would you tackle the lack of desire
where the champions are on board but the rest of the organization
isn't?
Mm hmm.
Um, so yeah, I mean, lots of ideas.
So first of all, similar to some of the other things we've said,
bring in that exact sponsor and the champion, go through some of
the ideas I had on here.
So I can't remember what was on the screen now, but, um,
marketing the program, really trying to do empathy exercises
with the people we're trying to convince to understand them so
that we can speak their language, not just our language.
Um, the example I had from that, um, kick off I was invited to
and that training I was invited to was the difference between
the what's in it for the business and the what's in it for me.
It's huge.
You know, the general value prop of the program versus the value
to me is a big one.
Um, yeah, all sorts of things along those lines.
Just, yeah, trying to get to know people to understand them.
Perfect.
All right, last question for today.
How do you recommend leveraging contract owners to drive change
when an individual from within the business has been put into
a product management role on the customer side to drive the
implementation and the contract owner has taken a back seat post-sale?
So that was a lot of words so we can clarify as needed.
How do you recommend leveraging contract owners?
Okay, so is it whoever fight the question tell me if I've got this
wrong?
So the question is how can we bring the contract owner back into
the fold if they disappear off once that sale is made because
that happens all the time?
Um, I mean, obviously it's really hard.
Like, these people are usually, I mean, either in procurement or
senior leadership and they've got other things to do than be
there on the ground helping roll things out.
I think, again, you think about what's speaking their language.
So, trying to talk to them about the reasons, go back to the
reasons they bought the product in the first place, speak to the
A.E., look at sales post notes, try and think about the value that
they thought they were going to get, and then do some sort of
intervention, contact them and sort of, okay, and without throwing
your main points of contacts within the, under the bus, trying to
just say, look, you said you wanted to achieve this by this
point, or customers like you tend to be here by this point.
Not quite seeing that yet with your team.
Let's have a chat about it, like how we're here, we're ready,
we want to help you get back on board.
Amazing.
Thank you so much, Lisa Champion.
Let's give her a round of applause.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.
Enjoy the rest of Pulse.
