The Sales Curmudgeon - Manage the Grieving Process

The Sales Curmudgeon is a sales management veteran who has suffered countless sales initiatives. He knows why some projects succeed wildly and others fail miserably. Experience has taught him that very few leaders will risk what it takes to make a real difference.

The Force Management Marketing Team wanted The Sales Curmudgeon to share his wisdom, so they painstakingly convinced him to put forth the effort to write this five-part blog series. He has a military background and often equates sales initiatives with military campaigns. Please forgive the brutal tone. We apologize. After countless sales campaigns, he’s too exhausted to mince his words.

This is the third of a five-part series where I essentially predict your future, and give you the top reasons why your sales initiative will blow up. Forewarned is forearmed. 

Today’s blog is about the third reason you will probably fail your mission: you naively believe that a sales initiative is only about implementing new processes, tools and systems. You don’t see it for what it truly is: managing your team through a grieving process.

Reason #3 Your Sales Initiative Will Fail: The Grieving Process

For most of my career, I’ve been involved in one shape or another with the High Tech world. I even did a brief stint implementing IT projects. When I first started developing and deploying apps, I thought the project was all about the technology. In other words, the goal of the project was to implement the system that everyone was clamoring over.

Wrong.

After a couple rough deployments, someone clued me into the fact that I wasn’t really implementing a technology. I was a forcing function on the way people did stuff.

Similar to how sales leaders should be a forcing function during new sales initiatives.

Being the simple, fearful creatures that we humans are, most of us really don’t want to change. Even if we say we do. Unless, of course, the reason for change is highly compelling. Basically, it comes down to the following equation:

Pain of Staying the Same < > Pain of Change

In most cases, people will change only if the "Pain of Staying the Same" is greater than the "Pain of Change". If not, they may temporarily change, but will eventually digress back to business as usual. It’s what social scientists refer to as “operant conditioning extinction”. It’s what I refer to as lack of leadership.

Leadership in what?

Leadership in emotionally rallying your team around a compelling vision, then managing them through the inevitable grief that ensues. As with all grieving processes, the fuss centers around the loss of the familiar, even if the familiar sucks.

Change is difficult because it conjures fear – fear of the unknown. Many of us would rather cling to a familiar bad than risk the promise of an unfamiliar good. It’s true in jobs… it’s true in relationships… it’s true in sales initiatives. People will complain mightily about their CRM or sales process until you try and change it. And then they suddenly have a fond memory. It’s like taking away a threadbare blankie from a toddler.

Go figure. I didn’t invent the rules -- I just understand them.

Think back to the freshman psych class that you probably didn’t attend with much regularity. Here’s the classic, five-step grieving process that you slept through:

The sales ego is especially tuned into Steps #3 and #4.

The leadership challenge is to understand that all this is going on, then to help the team get through it. Sometimes this involves a pat on the back, sometimes it involves a kick somewhere else, and often it’s somewhere in-between. It’s situational.

Good leaders know this.

The point is that all this is happening whether you’re aware of it or not. It’s naïve to assume that a few communiques and an opening statement during a sales kickoff meeting are going to change behavior in a sustainable way. That’s not disruptive enough.

Good leaders know this too. They also know that the best way to change the troops is to change the managers. Work your chain-of-command through it first, then leverage them to move the troops. As with all change, you’ll have Early Adopters, Center of Mass, and Laggards. It’s the “normal distribution” that you probably slept through as well.

My advice here is simple. Reward your Early Adopters and ask their help in moving the Center of Mass. Freely share early successes that occur within the Center of Mass. It will give other Center of Mass folk the confidence and conviction to change … and let them know that it’s not just the Early Adopter superstars who can succeed.

What about the Laggards?

Lose them. Just lose them. Sorry, that’s how I feel on the matter. They were probably bogging you down anyway, and this will provide a convenient excuse to get rid of them. Morale will improve. Trust me.