Clay Blanchard: The Secret to Seamless Change Management

Business. Business. Business. Business.

Welcome to Go to Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go to Market is sponsored by Fulcast, the go-to-market cloud, My name is Dr. Amy Osman Cook, and I have in the studio today with me Clay Blanchard, a veteran in the RevOps industry. Now, Clay and I had the opportunity to connect on a podcast earlier and had so much fun, and there was so much more to say. I begged him to come back and talk a little bit more. So, Clay, thanks again for coming back.

You're welcome. Great to be here, Amy.

Yeah, it's so much fun. We, we started talking about something on our last podcast and we weren't able to get to it, and that is about change. And change is so hard for companies, and you had so many great perspectives. I wanted to just dive right in. And for those of you who didn't listen to the first one, Clay is an incredible veteran in the RevOps industry, Salesforce. LinkedIn, Calibra, and has so much insight and so much experience on how to really strategically create an effective go-to-market.

Yeah, I'm happy to talk about managing through change, and I may, as a part of this discussion, point people to a few resources that could be helpful. But my starting point is that RevOps leaders and sales leaders, go-to-market leaders more broadly, just need to build an awareness of how much disruption will result from change initiatives and programs that they have underway. Change is important. You know, we always want to continue to improve and refine our coverage model, improve and refine the way we go to market. So change is good. Change is positive. But I think often we overestimate the amount of change that an organization can digest at at any given moment. And a lot of change initiatives fail, not because the idea was bad, but because we tried to do it alongside, you know, 6 other major change initiatives. And so they all ended up falling down because we got a little too ambitious. Our eyes were bigger than our stomach with respect to change. So that's my starting point and just a point of awareness and I think caution for any, and not just ops leaders, but certainly go-to-market and sales leaders?

Well, so I'm going to just be totally transparent and say I am literally the worst culprit when it comes to this. I want to do things fast. I'm marketing. I've got to get stuff in the pipe, and I'm literally the worst. So I'm just going to start there and say, I'm the one that is like, hey, how can we get this done? I got to get more stuff in the pipe. And I'm doing my job. But then here you are, right? And you're like, I have 10 other departments that want to have all of these things done. And they all think that theirs is just as urgent as Amy does. And so how do you manage something like that? How do you decide like this one is important, this one is not as important?

Yeah, well, I mean, the short answer is it's not easy. It takes a lot of cross-functional dialogue to bring alignment. On these topics. And sometimes if it's really controversial, you need the senior-most leader to ultimately make a call. But it starts with awareness. It starts with that open dialogue. And my ops side will come out here. I mean, we like to start with data and we like to, as much as possible, quantify things. And so, you know, a framework we certainly used a lot at LinkedIn is the Eisenhower Matrix. I'm sure you've probably seen it where you You know, you're just, it's a simple framework where on one axis you have, let's call it feasibility, and on the other axis you have impact.

I see.

And starting with a simple visualization like that, taking all of the ideas that you have and trying as much as you can to quantify both the impact and the feasibility of a program or initiative is a great way to lay out the choices. That you have as an organization in front of you. It's not the only frame. There's, there's loads of decision-making frameworks that are equally good, but that's one among many. And it's a great starting point again, to open that dialogue, to make sure that you're building the alignment so that when you finally do get to a list of prioritized initiatives, that you really feel like you've had a good discussion about it. And one other thing I'd say is that before you go into the dialogue, I think you need to have with your leadership team, especially in the go-to-market space, you need to build some consensus around how much can we digest at any given time. Have that discussion before you start talking about the actual ideas themselves so that you kind of build up. So for example, one controversial topic is how many hours of training can a sales rep digest in any given quarter? That's a great way. It's one way to bring this topic to a very specific head to say, hey, we're all gonna agree that anything more than, you know, 10 to 12 hours a quarter is gonna be a bridge too far. And then that gives you kind of the playing field. Then you know how much room you have to try to fit new behaviors, new learnings in, in a given period.

I love this because number one, one of the things I really admire about you is that the collaboration takes such a priority and that conversation between leaders is primary to your analysis. I think that's so important. And then the other thing that I think is so interesting is how you talk about putting a framework in place which basically takes all the emotion out of the strategy. And I think that is so important too With the example I just gave you, there's a tendency for me to take things personally. I'm an emotional marketing leader, right? And if somebody's not doing the thing that I think is really important, then I have a tendency to be emotional about it, right? And I think that's true for many departments. And so by taking the emotionality out of it and putting that framework in place and saying, hey, as a team, let's do this Eisenhower Matrix together. Let's decide we have 10 initiatives. We have 5 that we can do. We have these many resources or whatever, but I love how you think about that strategically and you are able to bring everybody to the table around a set of ideas.

Yeah, I mean, I do think the difference between great teams and average teams is the degree to which everybody is rowing in the same direction. I mean, that is And actually rowing is the great analogy. I mean, if you are rowing in perfect unison, your boat will go faster. It does take extra time. And so it's worth just acknowledging that having a collaborative culture, it has a cost associated with it. And that cost is time and effort. But I would say of all companies I've been at, LinkedIn was maybe the best at this, highly collaborative. And I, that's where I, I built a deeper appreciation for the value of that time and effort because you come out with just more buy-in, more sponsorship, more enrollment on a program. And if the change is significant, if it's hard, it's a hard change, you really need that sponsorship and enrollment from everybody who's going to be involved.

Hmm. That's very interesting. So from your perspective, having worked in some very well-known organizations, very large organizations and also smaller. What's your barometer for how much change is too much change?

Oh wow. I'm not sure there's a one-size-fits-all answer to this. It does depend on the stage of your business, the maturity of your business. People who come into a startup as an example, they are calibrated and they know they come in with the expectation that it's gonna be pure chaos. And there's, in fact, there's gonna be almost nothing that's stable and steady. So it does depend. I don't want to evade the question, but it does depend on where you're at as a business. The businesses that I've been fortunate enough to be a part of, they were all in this kind of scaling stage. So they were all, call it, $200 million in revenues and beyond. They were past product-market fit. They had a mousetrap that worked. And now The opportunity statement was, how do we scale this as quickly as we can? And I say in that stage, you really want to be cautious about trying to do too much. So you need to figure out the initiatives and the programs that you think are going to move the needle the most and really lean into those. At LinkedIn, this was such a hot topic and a controversial topic. We spent a lot of time on it and we had lots of different ways to address it, but Something as simple as we said, hey, in any given quarter, we're going to have one— this is mostly for the sales organization— we're going to have one major and one minor. That's how we ended up describing it. And a major was like a big heavy lift that was going to require a lot of reinforcement, a lot of change management. We would try it for something that was heavy. We would try to do only one of those in a quarter at a time. And then we'd make room for something that was like a little bit lighter lift, still change, but, you know, we thought people could accommodate in their peripheral. And so we would then plan and schedule, hey, what's the major and the minor for each quarter? Now, there are some organizations that just can't afford to only have 2 change initiatives going on at any one time. And I think a lot of senior leaders would say like, wow, that doesn't sound very ambitious. There are going to be small changes at the margin, like hundreds of small changes at the margin you can do. So make no mistake, there's lots of change afoot in the detail, but major change initiatives, I think you need to be cautious and really select a handful if you want them to land well.

That's so important. When you're talking about deciding, who decides what that major change should be? Is it the RevOps team? Is it the CEO? How do you decide what that is going to be?

Well, I think every company has a different dynamic. In the LinkedIn model, the way they were structured, at least when I was there, it was kind of business units and the leader of the business unit was effectively a GM. And so they weren't just a sales leader. They were looking across all the functions. And so they would be the ultimate arbiter, but the culture at LinkedIn, as I had mentioned, was very collaborative. And it was very seldom that a senior leader would force-feed a change that they wanted. It was very much, if not consensus, we really strived to get fairly broad alignment around major initiatives that we wanted to do. Our leadership meetings were spent on these really important debates.

Interesting. So you would do a lot of this collaborative ideation and decision-making in those meetings, in those senior leadership meetings.

We would, and I would say it was where ops played a role. And at LinkedIn, they had sales ops, they had another function called biz ops. They did kind of deeper project type of work, like project-specific work. So they were almost like an internal consulting team. But between biz ops and sales ops, part of our role was to help organize the content. We brought frameworks like the one that I described to just help organize and structure the dialogue so that it could be a productive dialogue so that we could come out on the end with some decisions around what we were going to do. So that was a lot of our role was really arming the group to have a productive discussion. That also meant, and we collaborated with finance on this too, is we wanted to bring as much data to the table as we could. So, you know, I talked about quantifying the impact, quantifying and evaluating feasibility of different things. Some of that legwork were things that the various ops teams at LinkedIn would do to arm that leadership team to be more informed and make better decisions.

Very interesting. Is there anything else that you can think of from a change management standpoint that either worked really well for you or just was a total disaster? I feel like I'm getting a masterclass on this right now and we're almost out of time. So what is, What is one thing that you would either recommend everyone does or everyone doesn't do?

Well, first I'll do a little plug here. There's a Managing Through Change course on LinkedIn Learning, which is, I think, among the best that I've seen. And it was done by a, a fellow who I had the real honor of working for, a fellow named Mike Derison. So everyone watching this podcast, go look it up. Mike Derison, Managing Through Change. It's a really simple framework that we used. We really applied and used at LinkedIn. And as part of that, he talks about this continuum of support and having this framework to be able to ask people, hey, where are you on whatever program it is? Like, how are you feeling about this program? Are you a strong supporter or do you hate it? Are you somewhere in between? And being able to check in with people and have that open dialogue on, have we brought them along? Are they feeling it or are there areas that we need to shore up in terms of the rationale, in terms of the structure of a particular idea? So anyway, highly recommend go check out that, that course. And then I would say, I think if you've been in corporate America for long enough, I'm sure all of us have been a part of both successful change initiatives and unsuccessful change initiatives. And thematically, I think the ones that I've observed that were not successful were almost always not successful because either A, we didn't get enough enrollment and buy-in upfront, or B, we actually didn't involve the stakeholders and really get them plugged in to what the change meant for them and their teams. And this is why, we talked about this earlier, And having a collaborative approach to change is important, but the change will not stick if you don't engage deeply and calibrate people's expectation to what's coming. And there's a lot that you can do even before a change hits the wires. Generally speaking, in the ops world, surprises are bad. Surprises are bad. And the less you can surprise your stakeholders, the better. Honestly, even if it's a positive surprise, surprise is something that I steer away from. If we're doing our job well as an ops team, people shouldn't be surprised by major initiatives, major changes that we're trying to do. By the time the change hits the wire, people should ideally have their fingerprints on it, but at a minimum, be educated on the why. Why are we doing this? What is the business rationale? Help me understand why this is really important for our organization. That legwork will really go a long way to successful buying and enrollment that I talked about later.

I love this. Well, and it goes right back to what you've always said from the beginning, that collaboration and that negotiation as the foundation of good strategy and RevOps is permeating in all of the discussions that we've been having. And I really appreciate perspective you bring, and I'm sure that everyone that works with you also appreciates that collaboration and that emphasis on community that you bring. So thank you.

Yeah, 100%. Community collaboration. And when I think about the types of things that, the types of changes often that RevOps brings relate to deploying technologies to make your sales organization more effective, it's super important in that context Whether you're deploying a tool like Fulcast, you are deploying other sales efficiency or effectiveness tools, all of these notions around change really apply deeply. You're not going to get adoption of your sales tech toolset without these really fundamental principles of change management.

You know, it reminds me of Jerry Maguire where he had— there's that scene where he says, help me help you. Help me help. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Of course I do, but I'm dating myself. The younger set, I find myself, the movie allusions that I bring to the table now, sometimes my audience is not as fluent as I would prefer. But yes, Jerry Maguire is a classic.

It's a classic. And he says to, as he's the agent to the professional, help me help you. Help me help you. Anyway, but I feel like that's what you're doing, right? You're bringing people in. You're collaborating with them, you are asking them to help you help them, which I think is wonderful and the foundation for all change. So can you tell me one more time the LinkedIn class that we should be listening to that you recommend?

Yeah, and I will just peek and see if I'm getting the name exactly right. It's called Leading Your Team Through Change. So the way to find this is just go into your LinkedIn feed in the search bar, type in Leading Your Team Through Change. There'll be a bunch of different categories at the top and just click on courses and it's right at the top. Leading Your Team Through Change by Mike Derison, an amazing course. Everybody should check it out.

Wonderful. Well, thank you again, Clay. It's always such a pleasure to talk with you. I learn so much every time I do, and I just really appreciate your time.

Yeah, you're very welcome. Business.

Business. Yes, that's business. Business, business, business.