‍From Russia with Plans

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Albert Einstein is famously quoted as having said “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions to it.” Why? Because preparation is the key to success. 

(He is also quoted as having said that compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world - another topic close to my heart, but certainly a conversation for another time.)

To accompany and guide us throughout this article series, the primary metaphor we’ll be using to drive this series forward has nothing to do with MI6 agents or British men in suits. Instead (primarily because I’m a nerd and have had a recent obsession with ancient empires, and secondarily because the metaphor actually is suitable) we’ll look to Alexander the Great, the Macedon Greek king and commander famous for his reversal of Greek fortunes and his destruction of the Achaemenid Persian empire in the 4th century BCE. 

Even if preparation is the foundation of success, laying great plans is typically not what we remember people for. When thinking about Alexander the Great and his military campaigns, the breakneck speed with which he carved through Asia is what usually comes to mind. However, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle, learned warcraft from his father Philip II (also considered a great military leader of his time), and without Alexander’s extensive military strategic planning underlying it all (including detailed reconnaissance, innovative tactics, and efficient supply chains and use of local resources), he would likely not be remembered as more than a footnote in history today.

Preparing for war is one thing - but how does one prepare an organization for change? This article will cover the first three steps one needs to take to successfully drive change management around acquisition and adoption of demo automation software in an organization, namely, how to prepare for one - Creating a Sense of Urgency, Forming a Powerful Coalition, and Creating a Vision for Change.

Creating a Sense of Urgency

The question we’re essentially answering here is “so what, who cares”. We need to get people to understand that war (in this case, on inefficient sales processes) is coming. We’ll need to identify:

1. Who are the people with real “political power” (ie. people who are actually able to influence others) we need to win over
2. What do they care about
3. Given 2), how do we get them to understand how Demo Automation can help them 

For 1), in the context of Demo Automation being deployed in the revenue-generating part of an organization, your go-to will almost always be the revenue leader(s) (CRO, the CRO’s COO, Sales/Solutions/Marketing/Sales Programs/Sales Enablement leaders, etc.). But you’ll also want to make sure you can identify some forward-leaning middle-managers and individual contributors, too - you should aim to have champions across teams, functions, and levels of seniority. In my own experience I’ve found that, while top-down sticks work better than bottom-up carrots, having both are crucial for long-term, pervasive success.

For 2), the answer usually comes down to some kind of revenue-adjacent metric. For Sales, it might be annual recurring revenue or quarterly Sales targets. For Solutions, as well as for Sales Programs and Enablement, it might be how often, how much, and how efficiently they’re attaching themselves to and helping drive that revenue. For Marketing, it might be sales pipeline generation. Or, it might be a combination of some or all of them. No matter what’s the case in your organization, you should try to understand how these people’s performance is measured and what KPIs are tied to their compensation. Those are the ones that are most likely to help you get a strong reaction to your “so what” pitch.

And that is the core to 3) - what’s in it for me? Why should I care? In my first article, I mentioned that one of the great things about working with Demo Automation is that everyone in revenue-generating organizations stand to benefit from it - they might just not know it yet. Your job is to paint a clear picture of how. Helping create scale in high-volume sales teams and create multi-threaded opportunities in lower-volume, higher-complexity ones, while simultaneously helping drive a strong, clear, consistent value proposition towards your buyers (which drives Sales and gets Sales leaders paid). Helping Solution Engineers right-size their investment in opportunities, combine the “give” (product showcase) and the “get” (customer discovery) early-stage, and drive higher close rates & faster sales cycles with a higher degree of efficiency (which gets Solutions leaders paid). Helping Marketing scale pipegen efforts and add additional relevance to their materials (which gets Marketing leaders paid). And so on. And of course, you’ll want to try to quantify these and make it all as tangible as possible, using both qualitative and qualitative data. If you can reference case studies or success stories, either from your own company or from a competitor/similar company, do so as well - humans are storytellers by nature and a compelling story will resonate with anyone (more about this in the next article).

HOWEVER - these people are constantly being bombarded with proposals and propositions from different people, and the higher up the org chart you go, the more important it gets to have clear, actionable recommendations that tie back to the so what. My tip to help you set yourself apart from the pack here is to leverage prospect theory - legendary behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for demonstrating that, among other things, people feel the pain of a (potential) loss up to twice as strongly as they feel the pleasure of a (potential) equally-sized win. If you can craft your pitch around what these people stand to lose by not leveraging demo automation, you’re statistically going to feel up to twice as relevant to them. And if you can help position Demo Automation as a way to turn things around and leverage a current crisis, then you’re almost guaranteed attention. The most obvious example probably being that whoever you’re talking to is in danger of missing one or all of their Sales targets (irrespective of their level in the organization), and you can help them sell more, sell better, sell faster, and sell bigger, and that this is something they can’t afford to miss.

Forming A Powerful Coalition

You’ve stirred the people - now you need to start aligning the key players to raise your army and ensure it is sufficiently prepared for war. Key actions include:

1. Identifying your key players
2. Building the coalition
3. Leveraging the coalition’s influence

For 1), you’ll probably have done a lot of the work already at this stage. Certainly, you should have identified your key decision makers and executives, but you may not have been able to recruit forward-leaning middle managers and individual contributors yet. Nor may you have found strong cross-functional partners who can help you address various perspectives and concerns, nor project/program manager(s) who can own & drive execution of the whole initiative.

In my experience, I’ve found that the following are important to get onboard as soon as possible:

• Strong executive sponsors
• High-performing and forward-leaning middle managers
• High-performing and forward-leaning first-line managers
• Early adopter-type (and ideally high performing) individual contributors
• Someone to enable end users on how to use the demo automation tool
• Someone to create an initial “critical mass” of content for the tool
• Someone to contextualize that content towards end users and make it easy to use (think: Sales Programs or Field Marketing)
• Someone to help set up a strong data/reporting infrastructure so you can monitor usage, inform decisions around corrective steps needed during rollout, and demonstrate the benefits your tool is creating
• Someone to project manage deployment and rollout, and ideally also program manage/administrate the tool

Make sure to spend time identifying who the best fit for these roles might be, and then use the tips from Step 1 to get their buy-in (if still needed). Having most or all of these as part of your coalition will set you up for success in the next steps. If you work for a smaller organization, some of these roles might be combined into one, or even not exist at all. That’s perfectly fine, because the difficulty of making change happen grows exponentially with the number of people the change affects. 

For 2), successfully recruiting and engaging coalition members requires clear communication and a shared vision. Establish clear expectations, roles and responsibilities, and deadlines within the coalition to ensure everyone knows what is expected of them and that they are held accountable. Regular meetings and updates can help keep the coalition focused and aligned. Be proactive and actually hold people accountable.

Finally, for 3), after the coalition has been created, use it to drive buy-in and support across the organization. This might involve organizing workshops, creating enablement/informational materials, or setting up small pilots (also covered in the next article) to demonstrate the value of demo automation. Successful coalition-driven initiatives can serve as powerful examples and help build momentum for the change, and provide you with powerful case studies/success stories to use as social proof down the line.

Creating A Vision for Change

You’ve got the key people involved and have won them over to your cause - before marching to war, it’s time to ensure you have the blessing of your citizens (ie. all the people in your organization). And the key to that is strong, “so what” oriented communication around what the new normal should look like and why you should care. That involves doing the following:

1. (Consider) formulating a compelling vision statement
2. Communicating the vision
3. Translating vision into action

For 1), most guides will tell you to start by “formulating a compelling vision statement” that can “inspire while aligning with wider company goals and values” or such and such. While I think this can act as a powerful way of creating excitement and motivation, my experience is that in revenue-generating orgs the personal “so what” is much more compelling than the collective company “so what”. You are also (usually) not doing CEO-style turnarounds here, so you’ll need to be a bit pragmatic. 

What a vision statement is undeniably helpful for, however, is creating alignment and motivation for your coalition. The more aligned you can be around what you’re trying to do, why you’re doing it, and how you want to do it, the better. A clear, concise, and inspiring vision statement can certainly help from this perspective.

For 2), the primary questions to ask are

• How do I turn our internal coalition’s vision into compelling messaging for my target stakeholders
• Which communication channels do I leverage
• Who do I get to deliver the messaging

For the first bullet point, you’ll want to do what you did for Step 1 and ask how you take the higher-level vision statement and turn it into something that strongly resonates with each group of stakeholders’ “so what” and that you give them a strong sense of what’s in it for them. For example, individual contributors typically care about other things than their leadership does, and different departments/functions have different goals. Try to figure out what drives people’s compensation and performance ratings as well as what keeps them up at night, and tailor your messaging towards that. 

For the second bullet point, you’ll ideally want to create a robust communications plan. There are plenty of examples and templates online (like this one), but make sure to “right-size” it. Again - complexity grows exponentially with the number of people affected. The more stakeholders you have, the more robust a comms plan you will need. The #1 tip I’ll give, however, is - put the comms where people are likely to see and care about them. Is that to hear it in an all-hands call? A public Slack channel? A team-specific Slack channel? From their manager? The goal of the comms should be to make sure everyone understands the change and feels motivated about it (and the easiest way to ensure that is by having a strong “so what”), but people are already bombarded with comms. So make sure yours show up in a forum/medium your target actually pays attention to.

For the third bullet point, this ties back to the answer to the second one. While you’ll always want to get the people who carry the most weight in the organization to spearhead the comms effort (write it up for them and have them send it out), you’ll also want to make sure you’ve got different people at different levels communicating the message. Leverage your champions you built as part of your initial coalition and get them to drive the message informally to complement and supplement formal, “official” comms. The more management levels and the greater the distance between users and senior management, the more important these supplemental “bottom-up” comms become to complement the formal, “top-down” communications.

Now finally, for 3), this is the final step before the real fun can begin. What short-term and long-term goals and KPIs need to be defined to help you determine if you’re succeeding, and how do you get people to do the right things? I’ll elaborate more on the second part of that question in my next article, but for the first one, this should be relatively easy for you to formulate at this stage if you’ve done all the other steps well. You want to define - in measurable terms - how you’re driving the value you pitched to your coalition in Step 1, as well as how your tool is helping people across the organization succeed. In short, whatever someone important to you cares about, if you know that your tool can impact it, try to measure it! In most cases, there will already be an established data and reporting infrastructure for the stuff that people care about (probably managed by a Sales Strategy or Business Intelligence team or similar) - work with the people who manage this to get your tool included in the reporting. For instance, if you can find a way to identify every time your tool was used on a sales opportunity or for marketing demand gen (either manually or automatically), you can basically just leverage existing reporting with an added “lens” for your tool. This is awesome because 1) it minimizes the amount of work you need to do, and 2) it’s perfectly aligned to how the people in your organization are already used to reading and consuming data. Word-of-mouth and momentum can get you far, but missing impact data is the killer come contract renewal season!

Summary

This article has covered how you prepare your organization for implementing demo automation software, treating the implementation as a change management effort following the first three steps of Kotter’s 8-step model for change, and with a particularly nerdy metaphor to tie everything together in context (which, have no fear, will absolutely be continued in future articles).

I want to reiterate that it is my strong opinion that preparation is the most crucial step to success. It’s not glamorous (and usually, in my opinion, pretty boring and tedious), but if you fail to get the right people on board and give them a strong sense of what’s in it for them, the impact on adoption and usage are massive. I’ve seen the difference first-hand myself, within the same company, between operating units who got it right and those who didn’t, and the difference is night and day. The majority of software implementation projects fail for a reason, but if you get the “so what” right and the right people involved, the rest will follow - if not automatically, it will at least be significantly easier.

In the next article, I’ll cover how you go about executing change after you’ve rigged your organization to be ready for it. See you there!