Every reptilian instinct in my body wanted to find a way to bad mouth the agency’s work. But their creative, positioning and the execution was brilliant. We couldn’t find fault in the agency’s work.

We dug deeper and asked to look at their new CRM – the foundation for the entire product launch and the basis for all of their prospecting efforts. It fueled their direct mail, email newsletters, catalog mailings and sales outreach.

The problem was immediately obvious. The turd in the proverbial punchbowl was data quality. The client had spared no expense building world class creative and but left the task of data hygiene to a group of marketing interns who would rather mop the floors than scrub data.

In the post mortem, we learned the interns received various Excel files containing old data, questionable lists, incomplete lists and exports from a variety of personal contact management applications. Then, with bubble gum and bailing wire, the master list was normalized, checked for obvious data format requirements and imported verbatim into the million dollar CRM.

In hindsight, the client was incredibly candid. No one wanted to own the data hygiene. It wasn’t sexy and it cost a lot of money to do right.  So, in the hopes of prevent future CRM data quality disasters, here are few tips you can use to get the biggest bang from your CRM dollar:

1)    Data quality is not a one-time event. Your data will get dirty and cleaning it is an ongoing set of activities so it helps to design processes that keep data clean. For example, after an email blast, a single individual should be responsible for removing or updating undeliverables. In addition, sales people should also be responsible for keeping data clean. They own the accounts and it is in their best interest to champion the data. Additional quality checks such automation of duplicate record checks also stops problems before they get out of hand.

2)    Duplicates cost you. A single company record should be tied to a set of addresses and contacts. Failure to tie together information about an account to a single company record dilutes the effectiveness of the data – especially in key account selling.

3)    Humans matter. While automation of data clean-up is useful, humans are essential to the process. Computers miss things that are usually obvious to a human such as a division’s relationship to a corporate entity.

4)    Protect your data from good intentions. With CRM, it is far too easy for individuals without an understanding of data hygiene practices to import data from external sources. An equal opportunity automated and a manual review process should always be applied to external data before it is imported.

5)    Find a balance. It is easy to be compulsive about data quality but it is not practical. Your data changes every day, making sure it is always accurate is not financially feasible. That is why it is important to strive for “good enough.”

Good data is the foundation for effective CRM. In B2B it is impossible to build strong marketing unless you know the names of the people most likely to buy from you. Maintaining a clean CRM punchbowl requires more than a summer intern.

NOTE: This article originally appeared on the ZoomInfo blog: http://zoominfoblogger.wordpress.com/tag/ben-bradley/

(This article was a collaboration between Robert Hamilton and myself)

It seems every week we talk to just another IT services shop trying to kick-start their marketing and sales process. We sit down with the founder and ask the same question: “so how are you different from all the other firms out there?”

When we ask that question, we get the same answer: we have a global delivery model, we are client centric, we put people first, we are domain experts and/or we really understand our clients.

Woop do flipping do. Welcome to the club. With those credentials, you are beautiful and unique, just like everyone else.  Your competitors have the same answer. They have a global delivery model, they are client centric, they put people first, they are domain experts and they really understand their clients.

So if you are just another IT services shop, what do you do when it comes to answering the question: “so how are you different from all the other firms out there?”  How do you differentiate yourself in the undifferentiated world of IT Services?

There are really three interrelated ways to answer that question. All three answers build on each other and are critical to each other. But explaining all of them here would take too long and is beyond the scope of this post.

The first answer is “trusted customer relationships.” We believe this answer is most critical, actionable and more important and therefore will be the basis of this article. The second answer falls into the camp of messaging, positioning, and defensible-niche creation. We’ll discuss that answer in the next article.  The third answer comes at the question from the inside-out perspective – company  culture, decision making process, and internal trust. Again, this is a topic for another article.

Trusted Relationships and Hunting Big Accounts –  the founder’s problem of scale

Say the word “trusted customer relationships” and many definitions and meanings come to mind. Each definition has a different context. In this case, we need to be very specific about context and so we want to talk about a very specific scenario.

In our work with professional services firms in the $1 to $5 million/year revenue range, what we generally see is a founder who has left a senior Fortune 500 IT position to start a company. As a first customer, the new entrepreneur lands his account by selling services back to his former employer – a whale (a large farmable account capable of more than $1M annual billings and a well known brand or reputation).

In this scenario, other than a trusted relationship, there is very little that on the IT services menu that differentiates the IT services shop from the competition. Aside from marginal differences in talent, culture, expertise and methodology, almost every other $1M to $5M competing IT services firm can do a job as well as any other.

So when we talk about trusted customer relationships, we’re talking about founders who are friends with their new clients. They have leveraged a deep pre-existing relationship to become entrepreneurs. This relationship was built over many years through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency.

Because of the relationship, the founder brings speed and nimbleness to problem solving. This is due to the fact that he or she has an intuitive grasp of the project goal (i.e. benefit to the company) AND the culture’s style of generating support for the goal AND the culture’s preferred style of organizing execution toward the goal.  Together all this means a relationship that is hard to duplicate.

The problem of scaling this kind of relationship begins when the founder wants to find another major whale sized account that is just as profitable and farmable as the first major account.

The entire problem for finding the second whale is creating what was “second nature” with the founder’s former employer.  How do you replicate in the selling and marketing process the relationships that were created over time through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency?

The answer (and the currency by which the trust is established, earned and scaled) is USEFULNESS.

In sales-processes, the conversations, the relationships, the personal network and persuasion have always been the de facto currency. If people buy from people and if a brand is really the sum total of a customer’s interaction with a company, then it follows that in B2B, the personal brand of the founder is really all that matters when it comes to finding the next whale.

And, if you accept the fact that, for IT services firms of this size, the definition of a successful marketing and sales campaign could be the addition of one new whale per year. In this context, the sales and marketing discussion takes on an interesting new perspective.

The web and social media did not create the idea of a personal brand. Leading with value and emphasizing relationship value over a quick-transaction have always been the hallmarks of successful professional services organizations.

The only difference that social media makes is that the technology finally got granular enough and accessible enough and instantiated enough to be useful in facilitating this level of the ageless human dialog of value exchange.

The tendency of people to become known through repeat encounters is as old as walking upright – and establishing a brand of credibility and openness to repeat transaction is earned by being accessible and broadly useful to the challenges prospects face – across the whole lifecycle of the problem solution.

Unfortunately, many founders of professional services organizations somehow got disconnected from this simple truth. You can see this in their marketing departments – day after day churning out me too SharePoint webinars with co-op Microsoft funds. If everyone is using the same campaign materials and selling the same products, then there is no differentiation.

For that and many other reasons, a dedicated emphasis on personal branding may overlap and replace some of the “traditional” tactics in marketing’s tool chest. The highest value of these personal branding activities is how they reach past the product attributes and into the underlying human issues beneath the problem the prospect company is experiencing.

Professional services marketing needs to take the next step to scale personal branding. Marketing’s ability to speak to, or at least package the pitch, to speak to this broad set of human issues feels like the leg up that the sales organization needs in order to stand out, be remembered, and be valued as sources of solid thinking, not just products.  Again, before trusted advisor, before regular meeting, even before someone recognized your name comes USEFULNESS – which we believe is the new universal of finding and growing a business through new sales. 

At first, this approach is not a substitute for the “core” business building activities. Over time, however, it will replace the shopworn marketing tactics that just aren’t working like they used to. Marketing will soon be measured by its ability to reach into the inner recesses of the decision process around every significant buying decision. The way buying decisions are made is so complex within major accounts that nothing other than pure USEFULNESS could penetrate the dialog.

Great sales people have always done this – communicated the solution when it was time, and then spoken in specific about how it could be sold inside by the champion, and how it would be implemented, and described the benefits that would accrue. Equipping the internal champion to carry the message further and generate some kudos for himself in the process is natural.

Tom Searcy, author of “Hunt Big Sales” says “People only buy what they can safely sell to others, or defend if challenged. Our job as whale hunters is to equip and train the buyers to defend themselves from the attacks that will come later.”

It is in such a discussion where you first get to cross over into the advisor role, almost coaching the internal champion on how to make the case succinctly for your solution. Not only is this valuable, but you quickly pick up other cues about the company’s comfort level with the disruption that comes with change, entrenched interests and some of their agendas, priority of the need against other investments the company is making, etc.  These are exactly the kind of things that are “walking around knowledge” for the recently exited employee when he hangs out his shingle and sells services to his former employer.

In transferring this knowledge to new whales, over time, the more useful encounters you have with the prospect/customer, the more quickly you can get to equipping them to defend themselves and eventually co-own your goal. Co-owning a goal is not just implementing the solution, but helping your internal champion adequately share and evolve the problem and its solution.

Co-ownership is an exploration of how the whale’s culture generates appropriately widespread concurrence on this problem. How does it get on the priority list of problems to be attacked? How does the company’s culture establish resources for those sufficiently high-priority problems it decides to attack? What is the current decision-maker’s role in those deliberations about priority and resources?

When these questions are answered, THEN, only THEN can the sales machinery begin sketching a proposal that speaks to prospective solutions AND how to help steer consideration of those solutions through the company’s internal machinery, equipping the current decision-maker to advance the dialog, not just show a product list and price sheet from a vendor.

Trying to short-circuit this natural process is much like getting married on a first date. It only happens to a lucky few.

The sales process must itself be value-add if it is to stand out from the competition’s.  As satisfying as it would be to sit in a prospect’s office and take an order, most substantial-dollar transactions cast a 6 to 18 month shadow in front of them. Helping with the decision dynamics of getting your solution chosen is a way to equip your internal champion, to lead with value, and to stand apart from the show-up-and-throw-up types. 

In our experience working with IT services organizations, the one true differentiator that separates one IT services firm from another is the relationship it has with clients. Unfortunately, this aggregate concept is tired, shop worn and not even a memorable cliché.

Yet, if the personal relationships of the firm are the true differentiator, then the co-ownership of problems that keep the project on track, on the priority list (to preserve resource allocation) and interim results appropriately socialized to maintain support.  These dimensions are what is inside the “relationship” concept and the goal of ever more familiarity is ever faster grasp of the goal of co-ownership.

The ideal scenario for finding the next whale begins with discovery of the client’s pain-points, or challenges, or problems – because then the dialog can begin about possible solutions.  All too often, in the rush to “close the deal” we’ve seen too many founders jump straight from this discovery to an internal mapping back to his company’s potential products and services for addressing the prospect’s problems.

Instead of rushing to a solution, co-ownership should begin with fresh perspective about the issues surrounding the problems, the solutions, the challenges, the benefits, untethered to promotional push to sell the products.  It’s the intellectual property that is related to the solution-provider’s area of specialty that can be scattered around like seeds, to find fertile ground wherever they can. 

This really is where the payoff is when it comes time for the customer to source his next solution – it shows when the sales person gets the call telling him of the need, it shows in the degree of involvement in helping shape understanding of the need, perhaps even contributing to the internal defense document to secure funding. 

This is far beyond “will the prospect know whom to call” when he needs something.  In every case, the IT services firm that wins disproportionately is the one that has established trusted relationships with clients, possibly  many years in advance of projects.  

Recurring features of such a relationship include:

SKIN IN THE GAME.  Perhaps this is better framed as alignment. Do you have skin in the game? Are your fees tied to the client achieving their project goals as well as their business goals? How closely is your success tied to the client’s success?

TRANSPARENCY. This is another component of co-ownership. When your profitability is aligned with the client’s goals, there is a level of transparency and trust built into the transaction.

RELATIONSHIPS. Invariably project success will involve interactions beyond just the sales person and the internal champion – to what degree does the sales person have relationships with sources of special knowledge or experience when helping refine a solution?

ACCUMULATED LEARNING.  The essence of repeat-interaction is that no one has to start from a blank sheet to establish a baseline understanding of the challenge, the resources, the culture, the goals.  The sales person with a trusted relationship is this “on steroids.”  Not just having access to previous purchases, but having notes about issues learned while implementing the solution, technical notes, people notes, management hot-buttons, etc that broaden the reach of the internal champion as he navigates the project.

The items listed above, when appropriately investigated, can lead you to the answer of what is different. It can help you help the client mitigate risks (and in some cases share risk) as well as understand your critical thinking abilities.

If product specs, delivery times, rates, and service level guarantees are all very close and can be put on the IT “menu,” where can the differentiation come from?  As all veteran sales stars know, the differentiation happens when youhuman beings finally make sense of chaos –  when data becomes information, specs are aligned with goals, project timeline get fleshed out and dollars are allocated.

The IT Menu of services can be neat, clinical and rational; the messy part is in the eating. No one ever gets nourished consuming the menu.

NOTE: *I believe the title of this article can be attributed to economist Paul Romer.

As the economy liquefies in front of your eyes, it is hard to find anything positive in the gooey mess stuck to your shoes.

Cost structures have changed. Some of your customers simply disappeared overnight. The customers that are left now have new preferences and new needs. Their thin margins make your margins thinner. You are sleeping less and drinking more.

In the movie Airplane, Lloyd Bridges summed up the mood of small business perfectly when he said: “Looks like I picked a bad time to stop sniffing glue.”

We’ve been hit over the head so many different ways about the economy and the new reality that we’re all a little punch drunk. Those that aren’t punch drunk are frozen by fear. There is way too much uncertainty. When people are confused, they do not buy.

But, thankfully, there is good news.  There is nothing like the face through the windshield shock of being buried under a giant pile of crap to get your mind focused on digging yourself out.  To maintain or even grow, it is time to revisit, rethink the and even discard some of the basic assumptions that sustained you during boom times.

So where should you focus your soul searching?

Look at the customers you still have. Even more, look at the customers you still have that are strong enough to survive and worth an extra investment from you.

Don’t over over-intellectualize this. This is a simple task that relies mostly on gut instinct and a little supporting data. Make a list of the customer criteria you find most valuable. This could be the most profitable. Fastest to pay. Easiest to work with.  The ones with the lowest cost. Whatever your criteria, write it down.  You have 20 minutes.

Once you have this list of characteristics, go through your current customers and rank them against the list.  Use numbers, use color codes, use a flinch-test, just rank them.  Who exhibits the best characteristics?  Who sort-of does? And who exhibits almost none of them?

Once you have this ranked list, tune the value you offer (products/services), your value-offering mechanism (marketing), your value-delivery practices (execution), and value-support practices (customer service) to serve the ones that fit.

Work hard to fine tune your value so these customers stay customers forever. Make it brain-dead simple for them to become word-of-mouth referrers of your service to others in their circle.

Next step?   Cut the bad customers (or let them cut themselves)

Thin the herd. Find the ones that raise your costs. These are the ones who use your customer service extensively, who constantly shop your bids, jump on your specials, ignore your follow-on promotions, and in general just raise the costs of doing business.

Fire them or even better, raise your rates. Some will leave but some of the bad customers might become good customers if they pay more.

Listen to your employees!

Don’t know how to increase service to those most desirable customers?  Your front-line salespeople do. 

Your employees are your front line; they make or break your organization. Living in the belly of the beast your employees see what’s going on from the inside out. The employees are really what your customers are buying, they make the products, provide the services and give the insight that your customers pay for.

When money is in short supply everyone needs to step up the game.

In fact, there may be evidence that too much money could be a bad thing (no laughing). A study by Booz Allen Hamilton (website registration required) on the 1,000 publicly held companies with the biggest R&D spend suggests that factors other than money may be the most important drivers of innovation. In fact, the study suggests that innovation may be inversely proportional to the size of the budget.

No money and plenty of time gives your employees a chance to really show off their strengths. What looks better on a resume than saying that you helped a company to overcome an economic downturn and stay the course in rough water? Ask them to step up to the challenge.

Now, find new customers that look like your good customers.

Easier said than done. The main point here is that your sales and marketing must be trimmed intelligently.

Take heed to the famous quote attributed to department store merchant John Wannamaker. Wannamaker said: Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

Half your marketing budget is probably not working. The tactics that are hard to measure should probably be eliminated.  The simple and easy to quantify tactics with built in measurement that worked when you started the business – the email newsletters, working your referral network, direct mail, PPC, improving your website, paying attention, speaking, getting intimate with your CRM database, measuring sales activity and conducting lots of testing  – all those tactics worked in the past and it may be time to revisit them.

 Finally, be ready to ACT!

So what if the economy is hitting a rough spot? Once you’ve invested more in your customers, cut off the dead limbs, watered the good ones, and given your employees a chance to really shine your company is going to be stronger.

If you have cash, there are great deals to be had, if you have good credit, banks are still lending. Everybody is willing to negotiate.  It is a buyer’s market.

Warren Buffet said “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” Right now high quality talent is plentiful, there are many exceptional talents looking for work and many that will work at rates favorable to your clients’ new reality. Start the hunt, hire people you couldn’t afford 12 months ago, whether full time, part time or as a contractor.

Now is the time to act. Now is the time to look at new possibilities. Now is the time to reinvent your business. 

Good luck!

ABOUT THE WRITERS

Ben Bradley is the managing director of Macon Raine, Inc. (www.maconraine.com).  He can be reached at ben@maconraine.com.

Robert Hamilton is the manager of Macon Raine’s interim marketing executive practice.

Macon Raine helps clients find new customers with agile sales, marketing and lead generation campaigns. Unlike advertising agencies, Macon Raine invests in each client’s success and even puts skin in the game to reduce cost and risk.  Want to learn how your lead generation efforts compare? Take the survey and find out.

A few weeks back, I emailed Pete Burgeson at Crowdspring and asked him to share his thoughts about what the agency of the future would look like. As background, CrowdSpring crowd sources graphic design. Companies put graphic design jobs out for bid on Crowdspring then graphic designers submit their ideas. The company picks a favorite, the designer gets paid. As you can imagine, this model threatens the livelyhood of some agencies. But some forward looking agencies are starting to explore crowdsourcing as a possible opportunity to reduce cost, better manage freelancers and possibly reinvent the way they engage with clients.

According to Pete, the agency model is going to be changing in a number of ways.  “One of the more interesting and relevant to us is going to be how I think agencies will interact with clients.  What we’re seeing is more and more shops crop up that have little to no interest in supplying the creative work in-house.  Sure, there will always be those shops – but they’re called creative shops and they’re very different.  The more ‘traditional’ shops are all trying to figure out how they can use more freelancers or (maybe one day) crowdsourcing to come up with ideation phase of the project.  From there, they can sort through the ideas and bring their true expertise to the table – strategy – and then hone in on a winner, perfect it and execute the shit out of it.”

A good friend and former partner at Andersen, Ed Wertzberger, and his firm RevNew Group are conducting a survey to understand the drivers that create client loyalty for professional services firms.  I took the survey and can’t wait to get the results.  All survey participants receive a copy of the results. If you have any interest in creating loyalty for your firm,  take the survey.

Here’s the link:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB228MLT9WUY8

What is SharePoint? For those of you living in a cave, SharePoint allows individuals within an organization to quickly and easily create and manage their own collaboration websites. Once SharePoint is part of your organization, there is no need to ever call IT for support or to set up permissions. Individuals are empowered to define and manage access to specific information. SharePoint is pretty slick and it is often overlooked as a project management tool.

I read the book because I believe most marketing failures can be traced back to failures of project management. I wanted to see how SharePoint could be used to quickly manage marketing projects and help my clients avoid marketing project failure.

Don’t get me wrong. There is no shortage of great project management tools. ProjectCompanion. Microsoft Project Server. Primavera. Basecamp. ProjectTurf.  But many people don’t know that they probably already have SharePoint running somewhere within their organization. When budgets are tight, leveraging technology that you already have can help stretch a strained budget.

I emailed Dux to get a better understanding of some of the essential capabilities marketing managers should look for when evaluating project management tools. His response was succinct:

·         Supports the generation of a project charter, schedule and budget

·         Facilitates communication and feedback

·         Monitors project activities

·         Controls project changes

·         Analyzes and forecasts project performance

·         Disseminates project status to relevant stakeholders

·         Provides real time information essential for initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing a project

In response to my question: “When should a marketing manager start thinking about using a project management tool,” he responded:

1)      No standardized systems for integrating project goals: project schedule, cost and quality objectives are individual silos. For example, financial information in Excel is not automatically recalculated anytime the project schedule is adjusted. Making manual updates takes time away from other project activities.

2)      Inefficient document management: project documents are not stored in a central location. Tracking, undoing changes, and the ability to roll-back to prior versions are limited. Additionally, varying levels of access permissions are unavailable. IT/IS can only do so much in supporting information access requirements.

3)      Lack of appropriate tools to facilitate team collaboration: Project information is not accessible anytime, anywhere. In addition, the team is incapable of developing or working with information at the same time.

4)      Inability to report accurate and timely status of the project: project status information is only available whenever the project manager makes it available. How do you deal with project sponsors who want to view real time project status information?

5)      Not achieving organizational strategic goals: lacking a standardized tool to facilitate consistent project management processes throughout an organization can limit the ability to effectively support strategic goals.

Any marketing manager should quickly realize that these five issues alone more than justify the need for investment in reliable project management tools.  Dux’s book gives a deep dive for any marketing manager investigating how to use SharePoint to better manage his or her department. Pick it up at Amazon.

Your goal as an organization is to deliver on your commitments reliably and predictably. By doing so, you build the trust needed to sustain a healthy relationship with your customer for many years. The sum of these healthy relationships is a strong brand. In professional services, a strong brand is evidenced by happy customers.

At Macon Raine, we put skin in the game and invest in our client’s sales, marketing and business development process. If we are going to put our money where out mouth is with the promise of revenue, and if we are going to bet on the successful outcome and consistently meet client expectations, we can’t sign-up for bad deals. In fact, if we sense that the client can’t deliver on their side of the agreement, we need to back off fast.

Good deals put you and your customer on the same page. They are structured as win/wins. Bad deals cost too much. No matter who is at fault, bad revenue costs everyone dearly in reputation and pain. 

By copying one of our clients, we have implemented our own “No Stupid Deals” policy. It makes a lot of sense.  No one wants to be in a “stupid deal.”   Very quickly, the “No Stupid Deals” policy has yielded immediate benefits for our clients and for our business.

In fact, our quality of life improved because we were no longer spending too much time putting out fires. When we are aligned with the customer, customer satisfaction goes up.  Our ability to manage expectations and deliver on our promises grew rapidly. 

Clients don’t want stupid deals either. Step into the client’s shoes. Imagine you are picking a new vendor. A new vendor is a big time investment. Finding the right vendor is a big deal. Finding a vendor that can help move the needle is a big deal. Your clients want long-term, trusted relationships as much as you do. If they don’t, they are probably not worth the investment.

But it takes a leap of faith to say no. It is hard to walk away from dollars. In this economy, why would anyone turn down a deal? But if you can’t establish a dialogue with the client and modify the project into a win/win, it is probably not worth doing.

It is a worthwhile read. This article quotes the Aberdeen Group – one of their latest research reports, called Sales 2.0 — Social Media for Knowledge Management and Sales Collaboration, discusses how social media solutions help improve knowledge management within an company and thus improves sales.

The research included surveys with over 210 companies during the August and September time period. The focus was on how these companies used social media solutions to shorten sales cycles and increase productivity among sales teams.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.cmocouncil.org/programs/current/close/ejournal/november.html#feature

Yet agencies are not set up to do this. In fact, clients aren’t set up for this either. Agencies earn their fees by trading time for dollars and some earn commissions on media spend or printing. Marketing departments manage their vendors as cost centers. There is nothing wrong with this age old model, it just means that an agency is motivated to do what it does.

Likewise, clients have learned to manage the agency as a cost center. So it makes sense due to the inherent inefficiency of the agency model, that you have high client turn-over and pressure to reduce price on work that is essentially a commodity

What would you call an agency with no graphic or interactive designers on staff? An agency that is proud of the fact that it has never produced a brochure. What kind of agency would this be? How does an agency explain how simple tweaks that integrate interactive with the sales process and measuring engagement instead of exposure and building branded content that supports informed decision-making are the killer competencies that clients should buy?

So what does an agency do? So what should an agency become?

In my company, there is the growing realization that reinvention will happen. Agencies must become an accountable piece of the sales process. The problem we’ve had growing this approach is that most large clients are not prepared to address real performance based compensation plans. There are too many complicating factors that make program measurement too complex.

On the other hand, the inevitable convergence of sales and marketing drives the realization that one-to-one communication is becoming more important than mass marketing messages, especially in B2B. Our ability to impact the sales pipeline is truly our core competency. The question is how do we reframe our business model so we are massively rewarded for helping our clients meet their sales goals?

Change agents are those natural individuals who thrive on making change happen. Selected from within various levels of the organization, based on their individual skills and capabilities, the onus of guiding the organization forward rests on the shoulders of these individuals.

Considering the critical nature of this role, the careful selection and mentoring of change agents is vital to the success or failure of the change process. This article will focus on some practical tips for mentoring change — contributed by managers that have seen all sides of the change process.

1.            Selecting a change agent

Should the change agent be someone with considerable managerial experience i.e. from the top management or should individuals from the lower rungs be trained and equipped to induce change?

Staci H. Zake, program director in Northwestern University’s Master of Science in Communication (MSC) program (www.msc.northwestern.edu), an interdisciplinary one-year professional master’s program designed to address organizational and technological factors shaping managerial decision-making, understands the importance of bottom-up innovation where there is often greater ownership related to the success of the initiative.

“Only managers living with the organization change can truly understand how well innovation is working and where further adjustments need to be made. Forcing change from the top can have negative consequences when senior management doesn’t fully understand the nuances of change or the human impact,” Zake says.

Coley Perry, sales and marketing manager with Naperville, IL-based Solution Partners, a technology staff augmentation firm, and a student in the MSC program, points out leadership characteristics to watch for when evaluating the potential for good change leaders.

“If you are looking for a change agent or how to mentor them you need to look for the following: climbers within the organization, politically savvy individuals within your organization, charismatic individuals, and people who understand and embrace evolutionary (not revolutionary) change,” says Perry.

Change agents from within the organization are likely to posses a deeper understanding of internal issues, politics and challenges. This knowledge places them in a better position to garner support from across the ranks.

J.R. Samples, president of Accountability Partners,  a Chicago-based management consultancy dedicated to assisting technology businesses, urges organizations to identify “undercover” change agents.  “Find the grass root change agents. These are people on your staff working in a full-time role who are savvy enough to find a market opportunity or a method of improving a process to increase productivity and customer satisfaction,” Samples says.

2.            Educate them on the need for change

It is up to the organization to identify potential change agents, understand their capabilities and mentor them to achieve their full potential. Change agents have to influence organizational behavior. They have to challenge existing practices including the accepted culture and introduce changes in the process followed by the organization.

To ensure this, the manager/mentor needs to first provide them with a broad understanding of the need for change. The change agent has to understand the goal of the change process, and its short term and long term impact. The mentor should focus on aligning the change agent with the overall organizational goal before authorizing them to effect change in others.

Dana Sacks, Vice President of Human Resources for PepsiAmericas, emphasizes the importance of defining the desired change rationally.   According to Sacks, this helps put reasonable goals in place and ensures the change agent has the right tools to make the change happen.

“One of the most important things that change agents need to do up front is make sure that the nature and scope of the project is very clear so that expectations can be set,” said Sacks. “Some of the areas to focus on are whether the project involves strategy and design or just assistance with implementation.  Also, determining whether behavioral changes will be important – as changing behavior is very complicated.”

Lyn Bulman, EVP Global Human Resources at Fellowes, agrees with Sacks. She feels it is necessary to understand the critical success factors in order to effectively cultivate a change agent.

“Enthusiasm and support are easy to provide. The challenge is to ensure that the change is effective, by ensuring that the change-agent knows how their work fits with the overall direction of the company. It’s important to start with a vision of what success will look like and how it can be measured. That way, everyone can identify the benefits,” adds Bulman.

3.            Encourage a learning culture

To gain the necessary skills the change agent or the mentee should have a learning attitude. Change is a learning process and no one ever knows it all right from the start. In change, nothing ever goes exactly according to plan so change agents must be able to identify issues as they arise, learn new ways to cope and effectively implement new plans.

The most successful change agents will not only be open to new ideas but they will actively pursue them – within and outside of the organization.  

David Chun, CEO of Equilar, (www.equilar.com), an executive compensation benchmarking organization, believes the mentor should tap the mentees’ inherent desire to learn and succeed. Chun points out that analyzing success factors is not always complicated. It can be as simple as noting whether or not someone is built to be a change agent. According to Chun, in general, people will fall into one of two camps — ones that thrive on change and ones that don’t.  He feels there is no sense investing time and resources in the latter group. “Before you even begin to mentor someone, make sure change is wired in their DNA,” said Chun  

4.            Patiently walk in your target’s shoes

Patience and empathy are essential for implementing a change strategy, and especially important to setting expectations and project scope. 

Kelly Manthey, practice leader for Solstice Consulting’s (www.solstice-consulting.com) change management practice says “mentors shouldn’t expect to inspire a change with one conversation.  It can be a slow process and each individual absorbs things at different rates. Patience and looking for teachable moments are key success factors.”

Managers, continues Manthey should embrace being a change agent.  A manager needs to understand what makes his or her people “tick”.  It’s the manager’s responsibility to understand what drives his people so he can speak to them in a way that influences behavior. By understanding where the target is coming from and what the target is bringing to the table a change agent is able to speak them in a way that can influence behavior.   Influence over the behavior of others is ultimately what being a change agent is all about.

5.            Embrace resistance

It is a given that resistance to change will happen.  The mentor needs to gauge whether this resistance is the initial psychological reaction to question the need for change or whether there are other underlying issues. Human nature is selfish and it’s no different in change management. People will resist change when the benefits are not immediately visible. The mentor should overcome the initial resistance by outlining the likely benefits and the expected positive outcome.

Resistance is not an indication of the mentees failure to cooperate. Neither is it a reflection of a poor change strategy. On the contrary, resistance is an indication of the fact that the mentor is making progress.

John Aiello, CEO of The SAVO Group, says resistance should be embraced and viewed as a learning opportunity.  “When trying to be a catalyst for change, remember that it is human nature for people to hear about change and first ask ‘what is in it for me? Rather than take that as a push-back or obstacle, embrace that feeling and let it help you refine not only the ideas but how you communicate them and motivate toward them,” says Aiello.

6.            Have a great communication plan

PepsiAmerica’s Sacks emphasizes strong communication for keeping things and people on task. A well thought out communication plan is critical to the success of the change initiative. Any change initiative is fraught with myriad risks. A communication plan defines the roles and responsibilities of the mentor and the mentee, and provides a plan of action in the event of an emergency.

Regular communication is necessary to ensure the mentor and the mentee continue to remain on the same page. The message of change has to be constantly reiterated till it’s embedded in the DNA of the organization. “There’s nothing worse than pushing a boulder uphill,” says Sacks. “As with everything else, a great communication plan that addresses the different audiences with the right media and message is critical. It makes things go as smoothly as possible.”

7.            Encourage risk, reward results

The mentor should provide the mentee with a risk free environment to make mistakes. Psychological safety is an important factor in successful change management. It encourages the mentee to explore ideas and be creative and innovative. This approach encourages the mentee to look for opportunities for improvement and reward their results.

Accountability Partner’s J.R. Samples says “A simple way to implement suggestions is to make it a point to let your staff know operational recommendations are expected. Your role is to highlight the people bringing ideas to the front.  Make it a point to ask every week, ask different people and to publish the ideas prominently: Survey your people for broken processes – you will likely get a lot of suggestions.  Compile it into a list and ask the staff to force rank them. Take the top 3 and tell your staff over the next 10 days to note anything that supports this reason for this being a broken process. This will actually ferret out the emotional “I just don’t like abc” processes from real ones that need attention. In the second 10 days, ask for recommendations on improving the process. At the end of this process ask your staff to force rank the suggestions. Take the top idea and over the next 10 days implement on a pilot basis.”

8.            Build a support structure

The organization should set up a strong support structure in order to transform the mentees into an effective body of change agents. Even though you’ve carefully designed your communications and training, it’s implausible to expect everyone to understand your message right away.  Having the expectation that everyone will get it the first time around is setting up, not only for failure, but for resistance. Playing the blame game compounds an already murky situation.

Instead, Gerry Mann, Web Development Manager at Unitrin Business Insurance, encourages building a support structure within the change agent team.

Mann feels it requires a tremendous amount of emotional energy to effect change in an organization. “To sustain your elite cadre of change agents, there needs to be a structure for change agent peers to support each other, inside and outside of the organization. In my view, it is important to keep in touch with others doing the same work to share successes, issues and jointly look for answers to difficult problems,” Mann says.

9.            Induce trust

According Sandee Kastrul, founder of I.C.Stars, (www.icstars.org) a Chicago-based non-profit organization that uses full immersion teaching to help future leaders develop skills in business and technology, trust and follow-through go hand in hand when mentoring change leaders.

 “The beauty of mentoring a change agent is that you are walking through change together,” said Kastrul. “If you are mentoring someone to be a change agent and you yourself are not a change agent, they won’t trust your ability to drive change. Trust and follow-through are based in reciprocity – the mentor and the mentee are teaching and learning together. The mentor can only be trusted when he or she shares failure as well as success. The process of sharing and following-through is how trust is established.”