How To Get Unstuck: Change Management | HubSpot Admins HUG | February 22, 2023

Here we go. Welcome everybody to this session of the HubSpot Admin talk. We got John here talking about change management. And John, I'll just give it over to you so you can have as much time as possible.

Great, thanks, Kyle. Hi everybody. So today I'll be talking about a lot of the common pitfalls and some of the ways that you can avoid and handle those pitfalls when it comes to change and change management inside of your organization. You know, before I really kick into the substance here though, I'd just like to introduce myself a little bit. I'm the Vice president of Revenue Acceleration here at Instrumental and Group. Revenue Acceleration is just a name that we came up with. Our department, it's really revenue operations and doing a lot of revenue ops for our clients and system configuration stuff. So that's typically what my day to day looks like, which means we get a lot of clients that are in the process of change. So we're an agency that's helping companies that are going through a change accomplish that change in a way that they will be successful and they can take that forward into their organization and have some lasting impact. A couple things I'll drop in the chat here. I'll just drop my LinkedIn profile. So if anybody wants to go ahead and add me on LinkedIn, you can go ahead and do that. Another link that I'm going to drop here is a link that goes back to the Instrumentl website. This goes to a page that kind of talks about some of the stuff work that we do inside of HubSpot. But at the bottom of this page there are several success stories which are basically case studies. And each one of those is an example of how we've taken an organization through change. So if you're, if you, if you're curious to, to find like a case study or see how this is actually works in practice, go check out that page. There's some great resources there for you. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and get into it then. So our agenda today. Well, we're going to first talk a little bit about why change fails in organizations and then we're going to talk about how we can work with a team that's going through change that might be stuck. Then we'll take a look at what success looks like. Then we'll get into what training for change can look like and how you might actually roll out a training plan for change and then how you can use data to track and make sure that the change that you're implementing is actually having an impact in the way that you hoped it would, and that you can have some good data to make future decisions based off of what you've done so far. So why does change fail? Well, there's a couple reasons, and these five reasons come from a book which I'll talk about a little bit later. But basically, the things that you can distill this down to are really come back to a couple of the same themes. So the first one here, unskilled leaders. I mean, I think the fallacy that the trap that people fall into here when it comes to leadership on a team is they look for formal leadership, right? This change can't happen unless there's a formal leader in the initiative driving this change. And that's just. That's not true. It doesn't have to be a formal leader. Somebody that has been an anointed, a manager or director, an executive that pushes the change through. Change can be successful if people that are going through the change step up and act like leaders. And that's where the informal leadership can come in. And so when you have a group of individuals that understand leadership, understand how to get things from A to B, and can kind of step up, that really goes a long way in making sure that change is going to be successful. And having a group of individuals with at least one person that can really own and lead that change, that. That really helps in making sure that whatever initiative you're pushing forward actually goes through and is successful. And then that kind of ties into this next piece, which is the vision, right? So if you don't really have any clear leadership or is anybody leading the change, then you might not really have a lot of clear. There's not really vision to it. People aren't really bought into this change. If you don't really have a vision for why we are changing, then you're not going to be able to pull people along and get them excited about that change. So vision is really important. And not having a vision as to why you're changing, what needs to change really can hamper your ability to implement a new change inside of your organization. The next one I have here, inadequate communication. That also comes back to a lack of leadership and lack of vision as well. So when you don't have people that are really clear on why we're doing this, and you don't have somebody that's kind of owning this transition, then people don't. They kind of ignore it and they don't communicate about it. And when that happens, you end up in a situation where corners are getting cut, people are working in silos. And then it comes back to the fact that there's just no leadership kind of pointing everybody in the right direction there. And so having somebody that can really own the change, being successful and be a leader in that change is extremely important. And it trickles down to all these other reasons that we see here. Next one is lack of alignment. Well, that comes back to vision clearly, right? So that means you're. You're pulling in different directions, right? If you can imagine you're like in a situation where you're. You need to bushwhack through a jungle, it's really, really thick, right? And you've got five people there. If you're all chopping in different directions, you're not going to get very far. But if you got work on the same direction and you kind of alternate who's cutting through that jungle, you're going to get a lot farther, a lot quicker, and you're all going to be pulling in the same direction. And so alignment can be really important for making progress. And lack of alignment can cause people to feel like they're putting in a bunch of work into something and then it just becomes a sunk cost and there's no value from their work. And then they kind of get bitter and they don't really want to buy into the change because they feel like, you know, we're not really working together on it. So lack of alignment is a huge thing. And then all of this ends up with low engagement. And so low engagement means that people aren't bought in. They don't understand why there's nobody really leading this thing. We don't know where we're going with this stuff. You know, Bob's doing one thing, Nancy's doing something else. We're not pulling in the same direction. You know, this seems all seems like a waste of time. And so I'm not really going to engage with this. I have other more important things to do. And again, that lack that low engagement will mean that, you know, change, the change is going to fail. This also means that if you're rolling something out to a group of individuals who feel like it's being kind of thrust upon them and you don't meet these other criteria, they're not going to really engage. They're not going to feel like they have to.

Right.

And if you guys have any questions or anything, feel free to drop any questions in the chat. I believe my colleague Amanda is on here and will be able to, you know, answer any questions that might come Up. She's also very familiar with a lot of the curriculum. I'm going over here today, and if I see a question, I'll also try to attend it. Awesome. All right, let's continue. So how to work with stuck teams? Well, you got to meet them where they are. I mean, teams can get stuck all the time. I mean, if there's one thing that's true, it's that change is perpetual. Things are always changing. Even when you're trying to think, you know, maintain a state of stability, you're always noticing a little thing here, something there, something that needs to change, things that could be better. And usually what ends up happening is you get into a. You get a critical mass of issues that you need to resolve that. And so a change initiative. Initiative happens. Right? And then you got the teams that are getting impacted by that change. And then as we just saw, if you're not following some of the. If you're not using some best practices there, you can fall into a pitfall where the team doesn't really engage with the change, and that's where things get stuck, and that's when things don't move forward. You got. When. When you're dealing with all those problems that we just went through, people pulling in different directions, people not being aligned. And it really sucks to be in that situation when you're on a team and when you're an organization that's looking for the benefits of that change.

Right.

You can imagine a company, you know, investing thousands of dollars into new software and setting up that software and taking time out of people's day to configure that software only to have it fail because people don't engage with the software once it's been rolled out. You know, what a waste of time and a waste of money and what a missed opportunity. Right, right. And so that all comes back to how you actually roll out that change. And it. And it comes back to how. Well, you actually roll that change out to individual teams and make sure that they understand what you're doing and that you meet them where they are. So here's some. Like, here's an example, right? So here's an example of, like, a marketing team, and here's some of the things that they can. That, you know, that they have in their background. So they. They've worked in the past with. With this soft. With some software. So you got to keep. Make sure that you understand what they've done in the past and what has worked for them and what hasn't.

Right?

Let's Say they've, they've got a set of goals, they've got things that they want to do. Well, you got to make sure that whatever change you're implementing that's going to be impacting what they're doing is aligning with those goals. And that means you got to be able to be strategic with them. You got to make sure that you can offer up a solution that takes them a step past where they were currently. So they're going to have a status quo. And, and their, their status quo clearly isn't doing good enough, which is why they're going after the change. So you got to be able to show them that, hey, this change is not only going to get you to where you are today, but taking less time, it's going to get you past where you are today. And so really I, you know, painting that picture for them in this case. Right. Got to look for win, win situations, make sure that we can get the results that the way that they like, make sure that there's a simpler process. And so, for example, this example which I pulled from a real client of ours, we were implementing HubSpot. And so these were all kind of bullets that were really important things to consider as we dug into how we were going to roll out the change for them. And then you got to set those expectations. The thing isn't going to do everything. It's not a magic bullet. It's not an easy button. Right, right. Change is hard, change is messy. It takes work. And so you got to make sure you're setting the expectations around that things might get worse before they get better. But the point of this change is to get better in the long run and get past where we are today. And today we're stuck, and we're stuck because of X, Y and Z. And so this change is going to make sure that we fix those things. And so when rolling out a change to a team, like a marketing team here, it's pretty important to understand their paradigm and where they're coming from. And so like in the, in this case, this example, like, like I said, the team had worked in HubSpot before. They had already tried to change, they'd already tried to adopt it, and they had struggled to. So we had to use that context to understand where they had fallen on their face in the past to make sure we avoid those pitfalls and also to let them know that we're aware of those struggles and that we are trying, that we're going to be adapting our plan here to get around those Things that caused the, the, you know, the, them to fail in the past. Another example here we have a sales team, fairly similar, also getting into HubSpot. But the difference is this sales team has never been inside of the software before, right? So you got to make sure that you understand why the software would help them. You got to understand what their most important sales targets are today. You got to understand the status quo so you know how to take them past that. And you can create a plan that will show them that you can get past the status quo. You got to find out what the, what their goals are and what we can, what we can help them to do. You know, part of a lot of times this is there's a couple things that you're trying to do when you're rolling out a change. You're either trying to gain efficiency, increase results, or automate something that wasn't automated in the past, or you're trying to implement a new process to make things simpler for your team so there's better compliance and you're not, you know, going coloring outside the lines as much. You know, there's a lot. There's can be several reasons like that that might be impacting why change is coming. And usually for like a sales team, it really comes down to how much time are you spending selling versus how many times, how much time are you spending not selling.

Right?

And you, you understand that equation, you can go back to the sales team and say, hey, look, we're going to do X, Y and Z. That's going to get you these benefits and that's going to put this time back in your pocket so you can spend more time selling and you can draw a line to those benefits for the sales team or for whatever team that you're working with and show how it's going to benefit them as a team and as individuals. You're going to have a much higher engagement, a much higher chance of that change. And you've also got gone a long way to painting the vision as to why this change is needed in the first place. And understanding the team's paradigm that you're bringing through the change is really important for the communication that you're having with that team so that they can tie whatever you're asking to do. Because like I said, it's going to get worse before it gets better. It's going to be an inconvenience to them. And in order to go through that inconvenience, they really got to see that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The Light at the end of the tunnel, if you will. So what does it take to be successful? You know, this all sounds pretty hard, right? I mean, there's a lot of ways that going through change in an organization can fail. Well, you need, you need to work together. You know, this is. Not a single person is going to come in and just like a tornado and whirlwind through, you got to work together to implement change, right? And the way you do that is by making sure you've got the right people taking part in the process from beginning to end. So stakeholders, those are really important. So what kind of stakeholders can we have here? Well, a champion is really, really important. Remember I talked about how lack of leadership is one of the reasons why change fails? Well, a lot of times that can be either the lack of leadership from the team that's either consulting or helping with the change, or it can be lack of leadership on the team that needs to go through and implement the change. But in general, what really helps is to make sure that whichever team is being impacted by this change, that there's a champion that can really understand the entire process, know what's coming and prep the team, and also be a very important resource for understanding what type of messaging, what type of communication you should use with that team. Right? And so that's what a champion will help you do. So you're going to definitely want to make sure that before you knight somebody into that, into that role, that they have good communication and good alignment with the team that's being impacted. Then you also want to take a look at impacted leadership. So a lot of times when you're rolling through change, there are going to be people in formal leadership positions that are also going to be impacted by that change. And those people can either be some of your greatest allies or some of your greatest friction points, really, depending on how well you approach them and include them in this process. You go to a manager and tell them, hey, we're completely changing the software you're using to track your sales and we're going to build you a brand new dashboard. But we're not giving you any say as to what information's on that dashboard. You're going to have somebody that's frustrated and not want to participate in this process. Whereas if you come at them saying, hey, we're going to be building, we're adopting a new software that's going to make your team a lot leaner and meaner and in sales and we're going to be building some great reports for you to Track all that. What I would like to help you need help from you with is what your key performance indicators are to make sure that we get those reports built in a way that you can use them well. Now you've got a collaborator. Right. So you can really tailor the way that you include those people in a fashion that helps them, make them feel like they're part of the solution rather than a solution just being thrust upon them. And when you do that, it really goes a long way to getting buy in from those types of people. And when you get buy in from the managers, that can also really help getting buy in from individual contributors on a team. So these might be members that really have their process getting uprooted with whatever change is coming. So having some individual contributors take part in the planning process and the rollout plan for the change can also go really a long way in providing their perspective about how it's going to impact their day to day. And they might bring in insights like, you know what, rolling this change out like the third week of the month is a really bad idea because that's when all. Where you know, that's when we have to reconcile all of our sales and make sure accounting has all the new sales numbers and it. And it takes up everybody's time that entire week and everyone's trying to get that done. So I don't think that'd be a good week to roll out any training for change. That's the kind of insight that a manager, an individual contributor would be able to give you that if you don't include those people, you're not going to get and then you're going to roll out change and then you're just layering on work on a team that's already stretched in a week. Yeah, you're not going to get great engagement if you're not taking those kinds of things into account. So the types of individual contributors that you're going to want to bring into your change management plan are team members that are a bit more, I mean, if it's just a software, you're going to want team members that are a bit more tech savvy, which is why I put that in here. But if you're not changing with the software, just people that are a little bit more savvy with problem solving, that are quick to adapt to new processes, that always look to contribute and add positive contributions to whatever you're working on, and quick learners, very familiar with operational day to day and their role, have a little bit of respect among their peers. Is Also really good. These are people that are going to help you and roll out the change when you roll it out to the rest of the team. And they can also be people that will be high adopters that you can also pair with people that maybe are struggling with the change and get some peer to peer mentorship going on as well, which is a strategy that can really go a long way to bringing everybody along with the change. Because inevitably there's going to be some people that are going to kind of limp along on the back end there that aren't really adopting it as quick as some other people. And, and to get them back up and compliant like everybody else, it really helps to have internal team members work with them and get them there because then they're seeing, oh, if somebody else on my team is doing it and this is the way they're doing it, makes it a lot easier for them to accept that they can do it as well. Awesome. All right, Discovery. Now this is really important. I kind of touched on a little bit in the last slide, but, you know, it's really important that when you are starting to roll out a change or build a change plan that you really understand what needs to be changed and what doesn't. A lot of times when you start getting into this, like, you know, you're rolling out a change initiative, installing new software, whatever it is, things can start to snowball and you're like, well, if we're changing that, why don't we change this? Well, if we change that, then we should change this. Well, if we change that, then we have to change this over here. And it starts just become a Rube Goldberg machine of like, you know, a boot kicks down a thing and knocks over a domino and it just like, it just cascades into this situation where all of a sudden you're changing everything and you only need to change really one small thing to get the design the, the biggest impact right. And so really understanding what the team needs and where they're at can really help make sure that you don't overdo it. If I go back to my sales slide here, one of the things that was particular about this team is they had never been in HubSpot before. They weren't completely sold on that HubSpot was really going to make a big difference to them. So one of the things we were going to do is run a pilot program. Let's prove it. Let's prove the case first. Let's take the change, let's implement it in a small scale, prove that it's going to have an impact that is worth the larger investment to change the rest of the organization. Right. And then if it didn't work well, it's a lot easier to make a couple tweaks and try a new pilot than to try to unwind a really big change that you just rolled out to the organization and then have and then walk it all back. Right. So doing things like pilot programs can really go a long way into making sure that you have a plan that's going to actually drive an impact in the long run. Okay. So coming up to the idea that understanding what the change is and what the mission is around that change and what the vision is for it and why we're making that change all can be figured out through a series of conversations with the main stakeholders who I just mentioned, and then also really understanding the benefit they're looking to get. There's been several times where I've been on the phone with clients and we've been going through a discovery process and we come. We come across something where it's part of their process today. It's really cumbersome and they really want to try to get the software to do something that it wasn't designed to do. But that's because they want to maintain this piece in their process. And then I'll ask them, well, why do we need to maintain this piece in the process? And they'll say, well, because we've always done it that way.

Ah.

Whenever I get. Well, it's when I don't get a clear answer to the why that that starts to mean that, hey, this might be a candidate for something that we can really zero in on and focus on to change. And maybe that's going to drive a large impact. And so let's see if we can implement it there. Well, let me see this other thing. Okay, well, we've done this this way for a long time and it's not so cumbersome and it works well and we can adapt it really easily and it's. The team is used to it. Okay, maybe we don't need to change that piece. Right. We don't need to reinvent a wheel that's already rolling. You know, we can apply the same process in the new software and train people on how to follow it. We don't need to reinvent that process. Right. So really getting specific about what needs to change and what doesn't need to change when you're actually rolling out something can go a long way for improving adoption. And if you have things that are Working, you don't necessarily need to throw them in the garbage. Maybe you need to put a new shiny coat of paint on them. Maybe you're going to be accomplishing the same thing in a slightly different way, but you don't need to reinvent, reinvent the whole process. Kyle's over there injuring his children. Sure. He'll be back though. Okay, so documentation. So this is where we get into, so what. You know, we've got, we understand who our stakeholders are, we've got a good plan with the discovery, understand everything. This is where we need to kind of document all the pieces that could also go into helping roll out a change. So I give a lot of examples here. These are the types of things that you might get given or that you might produce in a change management process with say like a sales team or a marketing team. So I put a lot of examples in there. But the main thing is that as you're going through your process of change, you, you're going to want to make sure that you have a place to handle any training materials, anything that you are creating that's new, that you have a good centralized place that's easy to access, that's easy for people to jump into, get the information they need and then get back to work. So knowledge base, training materials, all that should be in a central location and should really go towards the specific things that you wanted to impact with your change. So you know the how to do different things, the why we're doing things in a different way, and the where they need to go to follow a new process and whatnot. Another important piece here is that you have a bunch of peripheral information that can really help make sure that the team that is going through the change has a lot of support. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean they need to consume every single piece of documentation that you create or that you roll out to them, but having it accessible and having it where they can access it if they need it, that is kind of a must because they may not need it right away. But if eventually they do go down the path, they're like, oh, well, it's the first time I've. I'm taking a call using this new calling platform. Let me. Where was that documentation that had the information on how to connect my account and do that and get. Okay, it's all here. Great, I'll go ahead and do it. I'll get it done. Where. If you didn't provide that, that documentation and put it in a place where it was easily accessible, then you're basically creating a support ticket or maybe they're just not going to do the call following the new process and then it's not going to get logged and then you're missing data and you know, they're going to just find an alternative way to do things. So making it really easy to stay compliant with whatever your change you're rolling out is pretty important for the long term success of any change rollout. Okay, so what can training for change look like? Well, at our agency, we take a change management methodology and we apply it. The one that we apply is Adkar. And I'm going to get into that in a second. But in general, you should have a methodology behind the madness, right? You should be taking something that, you know, that, that other people have worked on, done, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars of research on. And I've kind of proven that there's, if you follow these steps or you follow this process, you're gonna, there's a pretty good chance you're gonna be successful here. And they didn't, they didn't just invest that money wasting their time spinning their wheels. They really wanted to put together some content that was going to be effective. And the one that our agency was, it rolls out as adkar, but it doesn't have to be Adkar. It could be any kind of change management methodology. The point is, if it makes sense and it's a good method and you can stick to the best practices in that method, chances are your change process is going to go a lot smoother. So I do recommend having some sort of change management methodology being your North Star when planning your change. And then you can really get into making sure that your training sessions are going to be targeted and your training resources are going to be targeted as well. Well, so what is Adkar? Well, Adkar stands for awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement. And so there's a book, I've got a link here and I will share this presentation, the HubSpot team who can then email it out to anybody that's joined here. But there's a book on, on that, that you can, that you can read that really gets into this methodology. And, and this is where we, you know, Amanda, who's in the chat, read this book, she gave it to me, I read it and then we decided, you know what, this, there's no reason why we shouldn't be applying this for our clients. And then we went ahead and created a methodology to apply this to our clients. So what each of these stand for, so awareness. This is all about making sure that the people that are going to be impacted by change are aware that it's coming. You don't want to blindside people with saying, hey, next week we're going to be changing your whole software suite and you have to learn a whole new thing. They're going to be planning around this change. They need to make sure that they are all set to maybe be a little bit less productive as they go through the change. They want to know why this change is coming. So awareness is really important and letting people know early that there is going to be a change coming and that we're going to be rolling it out between these dates and this is how it may impact you. And then you can start to get into the D part here, which is desire. So in your communication, once you've driven that awareness, you can start to plant the seeds for the desire for that change. And you can say, why are we doing this change? Right? So as you're raising that awareness, you can say, we're doing this because this problem here, we're solving this issue here. We're hoping that by adopting this software, doing this thing, we're going to improve efficiency. It's going to make us leaner and faster to get to our goals. It's going to enable us to automate things that we had to do manually before. But whatever it is, really spell out why you're doing that change and then target your communication towards the team that's being changed. So I gave the example of the marketing team and the sales team earlier. So you probably want to set up two sets of communication for each of those teams. If you had two different teams that were going to be getting rolled into a new piece of like, you know, CRM and marketing management software. And so making sure that you know what each team cares about and what benefit that this new change is going to give to them and articulating it in a way that they can understand it and they're kind of hungry for it. That really goes a long way to getting people excited about change and can really change them and really helps the mentality going into any kind of change management initiative. Once you've done those two things, the next thing is to really give them the knowledge and this is what is changing and how they need to adapt. And that really comes down to making sure that you've got, I've already mentioned training and materials. So you've got those things really well dialed in and you're setting up sessions and you're setting up a curriculum that allows you to roll out this change and teach whoever needs to be impacted by this change what they're going to need to do differently and how they can be successful in this new model. Right. And so that's really where you're imparting that knowledge and, and giving them the resources to impact this change. With that comes the ability to actually roll it forward. So that also means, like, as simple as, let's say you're rolling out a new software and you want everybody on Monday to start using the new software. Well, that means everybody needs to have access to it. You need to have created their user profiles. They maybe needed to get invite emails, maybe that you need to go through a couple training sessions. First, they needed to follow a instruction sheet that taught them how to connect different accounts and set up their working environment. Whatever those are, you need to make sure that those are all in place. So by the time you're actually asking people to start to implement the change that they have the ability to do so that they're not. Aren't. There aren't any major blockers that are like, okay, we're rolling this out today. And everybody goes, I can't log into my account. And then you're just, everybody's just emailing you saying they can't log into the account. And you realize, though, we had to go and activate a thing inside of the software to make sure that everybody's users were activated. And we have to go and do that one by one, and that's going to take the rest of the day. All right, so now we've got, we've already got to push the launch to tomorrow. Well, you've already started off on a bad foot with everybody that's trying to get this change. They've already hit frustration when they were trying to roll out. Maybe they had the desire and they had the knowledge and they were hungry for this. But then they hit a roadblock, and this roadblock has kind of left a foul taste in their mouth and they're going to be just less enthusiastic going forward.

So.

So really making sure that the team has the ability to move through this, to actually adopt the change is extremely important for when you're rolling it out. And then the last piece here is reinforcement. And so this isn't a one and done kind of thing. Like I said, we're always perpetually changing. But on top of that, whenever you're rolling out something new, it's not enough to just say, okay, everybody, you have everything that you need. This is all the stuff that you're going to be doing, I'm going to leave you to it and never come back and check in on you again. Right. That's not really going to foster adoption of the new processes, and it's also not going to foster a culture of accountability around a new process. Right. And so reinforcement is all about coming back to the team with information and data that really shows that people are either adopting in a successful way here, or maybe there needs to be more adoption over here. And you can give people candid feedback about how the change is impacting other metrics and KPIs, and then you can adjust and reinforce in different areas to try to improve some information. So, like, one of the things that we do pretty often when we're bringing on like a sales team into HubSpot is we will build a dashboard that tracks the different important metrics for that sales team. But some of them are, are specifically just adoption metrics. How many calls are you making? How many emails are you logging? How many meetings are you logging? So it's just really comes down to the types of sales activities that they're putting into the system. And we have to make sure they have the ability. So they've connected their, their account, they've got the plugin installed on their Outlook or on Gmail, they've got all the, the tools in place to be successful. Now it's just a matter of running that process. And, and when they run it, we've got metrics to show how successful that process is and how well people are adopting it. And that's where we can identify, you know, okay, there's one or two salespeople that really haven't logged a lot of activity that really aren't adopting it, as well as, say, these other two people that are at the top of the pack. So let's pair those two guys together. I already talked about pairing a little bit, but you can pair people together. Somebody that's really having good success with the change, somebody that might be struggling with the change, get them together to figure out how the person that's struggling can get up into the realm of having success with the change. And again, having those resources easily accessible fosters reinforcement as well. And that's really what helps us get to a situation where the team is actually going to be successful in adopting the change. Here's a graphic that I think is kind of representative of what change really looks like. And this is from the six Critical Practices for Leading a Team. And this is another piece of the curriculum that our agency uses and There's a whole section about leading your team through change and whatnot in this book. But one of the things that really has really stuck with me is how change kind of works on a curve.

Right?

And so typically what people assume is that, you know, you come down here and then it's just kind of a smooth ride back up. But the truth is, when you're in the process of adopting that change, you're going to have setbacks. You have to plan for setbacks. You have to plan for things not to go according to plan, right? And so when you do that and you set those expectations when, say, a salesperson runs into an issue inside of the software because they can't do something, or they thought it was going to do something differently, they're expecting to run into some difficulties. They know they're in the process of adoption. You've asked them to give you feedback of where it's not working for them. They have a channel to do that. They can send you that feedback. You can go ahead and make a little tweak, then they can go and try it again and, oh, maybe it solved their problem. Sweet. You just move a little bit closer back to the zone of, back to, towards the zone of better performance here, right? And so it's all about getting that feedback loop, getting the team really involved and making sure that the adoption is successful and making sure that they have ownership and that successful adoption as well. And, and that ties to like, you know, what KPIs they're being judged for and what kind of things that they might get in their performance review. So if you're a sales team and you're making phone calls, you know, having that be part of their overall performance as a salesperson and tying that back to say, well, you know, the software that we adopted said you only made five calls. You told them you made 30 calls. Why aren't you logging your calls? Right? And then that all that sort of accountability piece starts to get more ownership and then you start to see adoption be a lot better, starts to get a little bit less messy, and you start working towards that zone of better performance as people work through. And this is not going to, you know, one person could come in here and just blaze through this zone of adoption and get up into the zone of better performance really quickly. Another person might get bogged down in this zone of adoption. Some other people might avoid the zone of disruption and be here still not having adopt anything while they're behind the curve entirely. Right? And so, you know, this, it comes down to, you know, individual performance and being able to track that in a very intelligent way. Change comes from managing the journey more than it comes from announcing the destination. And this, and this is like, this is a quote that I thought really stuck with me because it's really easy to say, hey, we're going there, right? That's one of those easy, say hard do kind of situations. It's important to define where you're going. It's important to begin with the end in mind and really understand that, hey, our destination's over there. But you know what? There might, there might be something obstructing the straight path to that destination. And that's where managing the journey comes in. You know, you think back to like Lewis and Clark crossing the, crossing the continental United States. They probably had a plan for how they were going to get across a lot of stuff. But I'm guarantee you it all came down to, you know, Sacagawea helping them manage the journey that made them be successful to get across the country. Right. And so that's where the knowledge on the ground during the change really becomes important. And that's where participating, participation from everybody going through the change really improves outcomes. It's all about managing that journey. So what does training look like in a change management environment? Well, here's a hypothetical. These are, this is going back to my example with those two, those two teams, the marketing team and the sales team. So, you know, one thing that we would probably do with teams like that is we would set up each team to get, you know, two to four sessions as needed. Sometimes you can combine sessions. So with a sales and marketing team, maybe there's a combined session where it's really about the fill, you know, the philosophy of the change, why it's happening, maybe open question forum. And it's just all about really solidifying that buy in from the teams and then maybe you break out to, okay, sales team. This is how things are changing for you. This is your new process. All right, marketing team. This is how things are changing for you. This is your new process. And they each kind of get training on their own. And the idea here is to be flexible for the needs of the team. Our I've, I've trained teams that are global and they need multiple sessions of the same material because you've got a team that's, you know, in, in, in the south, in Southeast Asia, another team in the United States, and they're just completely on different time zones. And so you've just had to do multiple sessions and you want to try to catch people when they're going to be engaged with the training and be able to absorb that. So that means not doing it at like 5 in the morning for the US team, that also means not doing it at 10pm for the Southeast Asia team. Right. Really means trying to design your plan to hit those people when they're ready to absorb a lot of new information and act on it. You're going to want to make sure that you understand the roles of the people on those teams. So even within a team, even within a marketing team or sales team, you might have sales executives, you might have subject matter experts, you might have sales development reps, you might have sales managers, you might have regional managers. So understanding what each of those roles are and understanding how each of those roles might be impacted by the change, and when you're dealing with a larger team, like a larger sales team that has a lot of those different roles, at least touching on something for each of those roles can really go a long way to make sure that everybody is bought in on that change and that they're really understanding how their role is getting impacted. And so it might be like, hey, so in this new software, this is what the contact card looks like and this is where you find the important information. So if you're a sales manager, this is where you're going to be able to validate if they're a customer, if you're a sales rep, this is where you can see if they're a lead. If you're an sdr, this is where you can see if they've gotten past marketing. And this is their lead score. Right. And like being able to call out each of those roles in your training so they understand how to use whatever software, whatever you're rolling out to them, so they understand how to adopt it based off of their role and their perspective. Typically, like I said, we tend to try to do things that are a little bit more basic and then roll into the advanced and you try to build the knowledge. So when you're building your curriculums, you want to do it in a way where you're not just taking them down the hardest trail on the mountain on their first run, right? You want to first progress. You want to progress up to it. So you take them down, you know, using skiing the green run first, let them get their skills in, then you move them up to a blue run, and now they're starting to do more advanced stuff and then they can go and tackle the black diamond on their own. And they, you've given them the skills to feel brave enough to go ahead and do that. Right. And that's where they take your training and go beyond. Here's what we built for your change to, hey, here's how we take it beyond what you guys thought was possible. And now you guys are contributing to better future results, right? Really, setting people up to progress allows them to continue to progress even after you're done with the training. I've already talked about some resources here, but diving down into what kinds of training resources that our team actually delivers to clients, one of the things we do is we build a dashboard. We build a dashboard inside of HubSpot. We're often bringing people into HubSpot, so that tends to be where we focus all of our material. But we'll build a dashboard inside of HubSpot that uses some of the cool features like embedding links, embedding images, videos, and even reports from other systems if needed, or tables or other information from other systems. And we'll build out a dashboard that has the bulleted information, links out to training material, links out to training videos, has hyperlinks to the important resources for each of the teams. Hey, sales team, here's a link to filtered views that have your leads. Here's a link to your personal dashboard that shows how you're performing. Here's a link to the deal pipeline that you're responsible for and the stages that you need to focus on. And you could build this all into one centralized place so that, you know, for the first couple of weeks they have it, but once they're done and they're really adopted, they're probably not going to come back to it. But when you hire somebody new, you've got a great resource for onboarding new hires. You've got, you've now got a dashboard, you've got everything centralized. They can go through the same training that the rest of the team just went through on the new platform. And you don't have to reinvamp your onboarding process for new hires as well. You've got to, you've kind of gotten to. You got double word score on that one. Right? You know, then other external resources. Like I mentioned, HubSpot Academy is one of the things we link out to quite a bit. So continuing learning information can always go a long way. And so I talked about progression and getting them to the point where they can do the blues confidently. And so then they become brave enough to go and take on the black diamonds. Well, watching a couple HubSpot Academy knowledge, you know, and read Some knowledge base articles can give them the skills to move into the black diamond skill level type stuff inside of HubSpot on their own. And when somebody does that to solve a problem that they feel like they're, that's uniquely helping them and other people on their team, you know, that goes a long way for them being happy with whatever change you rolled out for them. Because now you've given them tools to problem solve going forward. Right where in the past if they were stuck, they probably didn't feel like they could solve anything, they were stuck. So implementing change in a way that it also empowers team members to problem solve and continue that change and continue in that zone of better performance is really important. So you know, this was just kind of some of the examples there and then this is just a quick scroll through of what this actually looks like. Now this is really blurry. It's a gif. But just to give you an idea of like, you know, how we organize bullets and then you know, we can do a 15 day activity report where we're tracking new activity and information on different people. So and then we even like, you know, we can put in some information about what each of these reports is telling people. So this is just an example of what one of these dashboards look like. This is a real dashboard for a client. I made sure the resolution was just blurry enough so you can't read anything in here. But this is just, this is an actual, this is an actual thing that we've done for clients. So this is an example of that. Okay, so these are just some examples of different topics that we tend to cover when we're going through a HubSpot training. So again, I'm just bring giving this to you guys as kind of like a real world example. But you know, if I were training a team like a sales team or marketing team, we'd probably look at contact management, list management, view management, campaign configuration report filtering, email creation, automation, lead capture, lead scoring, website content management. You know, we go through these types of topics and we'd again tailor things to specific teams. So content management for a marketer could mean understanding different lead sources and different segment lists and building those lists for emails and automation where for a sales team, contact management could mean understanding when a sales league becomes sales qualified, making sure that they follow up with them and they have a, you know, a very solid lead response time that they're putting them into the right sales pipeline and providing them with the right sales documentation.

Right.

So it can be the, the same subject could have very different approaches depending on the team. And so then the last piece here is I already kind of touched on. So what we can go a little bit quickly, but this is the using data to track. And so, you know, one of the things that you really need to make sure is that you're transparent about how you're grading people on the change and what success looks like. So that means being transparent about if you're going to be grading salespeople on the number of calls they're making, letting them know that, hey, we're going to be tracking this and you need to make sure you're putting it in and tracking every single call. And this is the way that we taught you how to do that. That was much simpler than, than it's ever been in the past. So this is what we're going to be looking for and this is how you're going to be judged.

Right.

So this is an example of that. So it seems like we've got a decent number of questions. So I'm going to go ahead and yield the rest of the time here to questions and we'll just. I was just gave some more examples of different reports that you could use for sales teams. This is in the presentation. These are just some good real world examples if you're dealing with a sales team and you're trying to track their activity.

Awesome. Thank you. Sneakily behind the scenes, Amanda has slid me the URL for your deck. So that will go out to everyone in an email after this event is over. So you can dive into all the bullet points you all want to. So, John, I'm just going to fire these questions at you and we'll get through as many as we can in the eight minutes we have. Could we hear more about the balance of how to make sure people feel heard and involved versus all design decisions by committee, too many cooks in the kitchen, etc.

Yeah. So one of the ways that you can do that is through that stakeholder team. Right. And so when I was talking about the stakeholders and I was talking about individual contributors, I was, I mentioned maybe a few people that are a little bit more savvy, that are a little bit more enthusiastic to be representative of that entire group. And one of the things you can encourage them to do is to have a conversation with that group, distill that feedback into a couple actionable points, and then bring that to the larger table. And that way you are, you're not down decision making, but you are allowing them to give a voice and then they're self filtering so you're not sitting there with like 30 bullet points of what needs to be fixed. Well, they've got a couple things that are really important and that's the mandate.

Cool. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So.

Oh, actually before I forgot, we should we have a feedback survey. If you all want to give feedback on this survey, Deanna will drop that into the chat there, click that link, give us feedback. Let us know if there are other sessions you would like to see in the future from the admin tag and let us know what you thought of this one. Okay, next question for John. Are there other common metrics besides tools, documentation used and time saved that are good metrics to prove that the change is successful or reinforce the change? I know it is hard because it depends on what process is being changed and how that process is measured.

Yeah, I read that poorly. You got to think of a couple of examples. Like sometimes it's just lack of information, right. It's like you can't make good strategic decisions because you don't have the right information. In order to get the right information, you need to do a structural change to your organization that starts putting that information in the right place. Right. So sometimes you don't even know what you need to fix because you don't even have the information to start pointing you that in that direction. So yeah, there could be a lot of intangible things. Sometimes it's just, you know, a matter of the, the, you know, you're working on a margin there. So maybe it's like, yeah, we, we've got a process, it works, but it is pretty cumbersome. And you know, we're not sure whether or not we should keep this at all, let alone roll out a change to see if it's better. You know, sometimes you, that's, that's where I would recommend doing like a little bit of a pilot to see what kind of impacts it could have. You can have unforeseen things happen, both good and bad, based off of a change. And sometimes it's hard to know what's going to happen until you test makes sense.

Do you have any tips for handling tensions between what change changes, what changes management wants and what individual contributors want?

Yeah, that, I mean that can come into. That can be an issue quite a bit. I mean, you know, managers a lot of times are looking for accountability measures. Individual contributors are looking for less bureaucracy and less friction. Right. And so, you know, sometimes those are, those are pulling in different directions. So in the end you have to go Back to your bigger goal. Right. Hey, do we have a sales goal here? What contributes to our sales goal? Well, we know that the number of calls we make contributes to that sales goal. Great. We need to start tracking calls. Well, that's what management wants us to do. But the sales team says they're making a lot of calls and those aren't, you know, being as effective. They want automated email. Awesome. Let's understand what they want to do with that automatic and then you try to understand how that can tie back to the bottom line. Maybe you do both, but the point there is that if you can't draw a line back to your bottom line that you're trying to improve, then it's probably not a change worth doing.

Got it. Do you have any tips on holding back individual contributors when it comes to them trying to come up with solutions rather than providing us with the pain points and goals when they don't have the knowledge to understand what's possible and what is not, we quite often have people asking for solutions which don't exist in the world, let alone the software we are using.

Yeah, that's, that's. We run into that quite a bit as an agency where people get into solution mode before they've really even told us what the, the issue is. We'll get people that kind of delete. Hey, I need a, I need a change. Here's the solution. It's like, well, I appreciate you putting in the effort to do the solutioning for us, but we really need to identify this first and we need to discuss it and then we can solve it. Right. And so that's where taking them back to what the problem is that needs to be solved and just, you know, getting back to the why, okay, you gave me this solution. Why? Why is this a good solution? What is it solving? What is the fix? Maybe they gave you a solution that would be perfectly viable, but maybe to your point, it's not even something that exists and it's not something that can be rolled out. But understanding what that pain point is means you can at least address it. Maybe you can move the ball a little bit on it. Right. But knowledge of that, of that issue will at least make them understand that you're listening. And sometimes that's enough.

Nice. And the last question, do you have any examples of how to best outline a sales team's current best practices and processes that you need to better understand in order to onboard them onto a new CRM?

The million dollar question. Yeah, so I kind of walked through a little bit of that. But one of the biggest things that we found when working with sales teams and trying to get them into new platforms is going through a discovery process with them. Now, I've worked with sales teams that they didn't even know there was a change coming until I sat down and said, hey, we're putting you on this new software. I'm here to learn about what your guys needs are. And they're like, wait, what are you talking about? I didn't even know there was software coming. So sometimes it can be difficult, but you really got to sit them down and understand what works well in their current process and what do they like and then where do they feel like they're not getting enough information or they're falling short? I can tell you it's a lot easier to move a sales team that is not hitting their numbers than it is to move a sales team that is hitting the numbers. When the sales team is being successful, they're really scared to rock the boat. And so again, that's where a pilot program really comes into play and helps you prove that you guys can do better if you use this new software in this way. This guy over here.

Nice. All right, with 40 seconds to spare, we made it through all the questions. John, I'm dropping your LinkedIn into the chat again. Sounds like that's the best place for people to find you if they want. Exactly.

You got. Yep, my LinkedIn's good. You can shoot me a message there. I also, on the presentation, have my email, so you can also email me. Perfect. And pull that off the presentation.

Awesome, John, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, everyone for, for coming. Amanda, thanks for all your work behind the scenes and hope you all have a great Wednesday.

Thanks, everybody.