Do as I say, or do as I do?

I often find myself most challenged when an issue comes out of left field. I was at a networking breakfast (such an early start!) and got talking to a lady who installs and instills process improvement practices in companies  and organisations that want to be able to do things better.  She has long since recognised that effective implementation always requires buy -in across the organisation and that building buy-in requires an effective selling process.  How rare is this! Too often new processes are not so much implemented as inflicted on unwilling and resentful teams such that the promised improvements are never adequately realised. We discussed how we as individuals practiced what we preached; how did we approach sales and influencing opportunities? Were we able to demonstrate the benefits of a sales management process by our own example? Of course, my immediate response was that I walked the walk, I talked the talk, but when you get right down to it, the theory of any procedure are often very different from the practicalities. As Field General Helmuth von Moltke so famously stated "No plan survives contact with the enemy". His theory was that a campaign had to be seen as a series of options, since only that very first contact was plannable. Notice how much emphasis that places on getting the pitch right and, first and foremost, gathering intelligence. Watching and listening then planning, so that you come up with the most appropriate first step. As in war so in sales.

All too often new process improvements are made with the very best of intentions, but they are made from the top down, without giving adequate consideration to the real needs of those who could well have most to gain from the improvements. Take a sales process management package. Managers manage, and they are convinced that a CRM package is going to make their lives so much easier at the monthly business review that they overlook the fact that the regional sales managers etc are actually going to have to populate the system and make sure it stays relevant and valid. They forget to consider the WIIFM for a sales guy out on their patch updating his prospects online in his hotel room before heading down for a pint of barely adequate beer and a systems catered pizza! Yet there really is so much for for that jaded road warrior to gain from such a system. It just has to be sold to them, better yet, it has to be bought by them, not quite the same. 

So, why do the majority of all these process improvements fail to adequately deliver? Because the internal selling process has to be managed before the implementation - not during it. That means that as sales consultants and trainers, process improvers and change makers, we have to walk the walk, we have to lead by example and we have to make sure our clients have been inclusive in their research and have generated a real desire for managed change.

You can lead a horse to water, but there is no power on earth that will make an unwilling "victim" want to be part of something that is being done too him not done with him (or her!). I am going to have to give a lot more thought to my own processes.

(WIIFM? You don't know?! : What's In It For Me - The only real motivator)