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суббота, 31 августа 2024 г.

Sales Process Model for Obtaining Major Commitments

 


This article presents a model for executive modeling of sales and how to track the progress. I hope to update it and do the next generation soon.

During the past couple of decades, I have refined my model for making large ‘sales.’ By this, I mean ‘sales’ in the generic sense, which is the act of convincing someone or an organization to give you something of significant value – presumably currency – in return for something offered. I sometimes refer to this as the “Ten Touch Sales Model.”

Examples of ‘sales’ might include:

  • Corporate Sales
    • Products
    • Services
  • Start-Up and Corporate Fund Raising
    • Venture Capital and Equity Placements
    • Debt Instruments
  • Not-for-Profit Philanthropy
    • Scholarships, facilities, and endowments
    • Special designations (patrons, benefactors, …)
    • ‘Goodwill,’ Tax Benefits
  • Government Contracts
    • Military
    • U.S. Government
    • Foreign Governments

These examples are where one party invests significant amounts of their resources – money, time, future compensation – in return for something so valued. These large ‘sales’ do not happen solely because of marketing, such as advertising, websites, brochures, and mailings. The scale of this transaction typically requires person-to-person interactions and an integrated strategic and tactical plan.

Having worked in the private, non-profit, and government sectors, I was initially surprised by how much the ‘sales’ activities are similar across quite diverse sectors. Seeking large donations for philanthropic activities at not-for-profits is nearly identical to fundraising for venture capital in a corporate setting. Convincing a potential customer to make a significant commitment to your products or services in the corporate environment is remarkably analogous to trying to launch new initiatives for government programs.

Typically, these ‘sales’ activities are complex and involve: person-to-person interactions, relationship building, education, removing obstacles, managing politics, and dealing with other parties that might influence the process.

My conviction is that by developing a simple yet robust model of this process, it is easier to manage and motivate ‘sales’ teams, develop action plans, and report on the results.

I initiated a variation of this 10 Touch ‘Sales’ Model when I was a university president and became involved in significant fundraising for the first time. I later refined that model while raising venture capital for Insitu and then again when we transitioned to product and services sales. I worked with my colleague, Steve Nordlund, while at Insitu to infuse some of his sales expertise into the model. Steve spent part of his career within the sales organization at IBM, and I am certain that some IBM concepts leaked into the model.

The model has its genesis from:

Making a Significant ‘Sale’ Requires 10 Touches

  • Touch is defined as a significant, value-added interaction that results in a positive step forward.
  • Each touch generally requires about 10 prior contacts.
  • Every ‘sale’ requires a managed ‘campaign’ for success.

The box above is a simple model that implies that the sales team needs to develop and execute an approach plan for every key ‘sale.’ It is likely to take 10 touches to achieve success, and each touch is likely to take 10 contacts. It’s not an exact science, and the steps don’t happen uniformly. But after every major success, I found, in retrospect, that it takes about 10 touches with about 10 contacts per each touch to be successful.

This model creates a simple mental image and allows us to directly address some conceptual issues in such a ‘sale’:

  • It involves ‘touching’ or human contact. Many sales teams would rather rely on sales collateral, advertising, or websites. This will not work for significant or complex sales, and one might say, “It’s a body contact sport.” Fundamentally, complex sales are accomplished by solving customers’ problems with your products or services. Hence, engaging customers to understand their business or situation is critical.
  • Relationship Building. Beyond the human contact, sustainable relationship building must occur and will pay dividends post-sale. Many factors play into relationship building, so it cannot be computed or forced. Individual chemistry, backgrounds, common skills, areas of understanding, style, and personality all play into establishing and building customer relationships. People like to invest, buy, and donate to people they like.
  • Planning is needed. It is a complicated, multi-step process that requires a strategic and tactical plan. Additionally, major (touches) and minor (contacts) activities need to be cohesively integrated. The timing for engaging with the right content and deliverables for customer interactions – touches and contacts – is the key ingredient of the plan.
  • Teamwork is required. It will be difficult to accomplish 10 touches times 10 contacts with only one person. In fact, it’s preferable to share the load among a variety of players to maximize the probability of success.
  • No Home Runs. It is unlikely that success can be achieved with just 1 touch … the baseball analogy is an out-of-the-park home run on the first pitch. In fact, in my professional career, I don’t recall running into a situation where I, or even a colleague, made the “perfect sales pitch,” and someone wrote a significant check on the spot. It just doesn’t happen. But for some reason, many organize their approach expecting this to be the case.
  • Focus Required. The sales model implies that there are so many activities that the sales organization requires focus. In fact, it reinforces the concept of a sales funnel. That is, the sales process starts out with many leads. At each step in the maturity of the sales pipeline cycle, it is essential to leave some these leads behind, thereby allowing more focus for the remaining potential customers with the always-constrained sales resources. The ideal process, therefore, effectively and efficiently narrows the potential customers down to the final set of those who eventually become customers.

Discussing and Reporting

A major benefit of the 10 Touch ‘Sales’ Model is that it provides an excellent framework for discussing and reporting on the status of the sales effort. My experience is that without such a framework and vocabulary, it’s difficult to discuss the progress on a particular sales approach. A common frame of reference allows a better discussion about the sales process and assures that everyone is on the same page, consistent with the mental model described above.

For example, when a salesperson or other colleague is getting ready to call on a potential customer, one can say, “Good luck! Hope you get to Touch 2.” This reinforces the need to build a relationship but also to maintain patience. Home runs don’t happen, and the harder one pushes for it, in my humble experience, the less likely it will happen.

As the relationship evolves and a series of contacts and touches are utilized, it’s helpful to remind those in the business development, sales & marketing, development & fundraising roles that a lot of activity must be done to accomplish the large ‘sale.’ Every day should be filled with actions to support the contacts to support the touches.

I also find the 10 Touch ‘Sales’ Model a useful way to track and report progress for various stakeholders like other employees and board members. To the right is a hyperlinked picture of a typical chart we used for the board and executive council, meaning the highest ranking VPs reporting to the CEO.

In this chart, we list all the opportunities vertically in rows, and in the middle, one clearly observes the 10 touches status as green horizontal bars. The farther the bar stretches to the right, the higher the touch level. At a glance, it is easy to see the relative maturity of the sales pipeline.

I remember at several board meetings when we reviewed the pipeline chart that some board members remembered the ‘shape’ of these lines from meeting to meeting. One remarked: Line item ‘x’ has been at Touch 5 for a long time, how come it hasn’t matured over the past 3 months? Another comment I remember was something like: Wasn’t line item ‘y’ at a Touch 7 last month, why is it down to a Touch 5?

We had interesting answers for each, but notice how it created an opportunity for a productive conversation. The fundamental understanding of 10 touches along with a pictorial representation made it easy to see the status of the sales pipeline and identify issues at the strategic and tactical levels.

Other columns in this Microsoft Excel chart include the Customer Segment, the Opportunity Name, Customer Activity Status, P-Go, P-Win, Point-of-Contact (POC) or Project Lead, and the Contract Values.

Customer Activity Status is basically a color-coded cell – blue, green, yellow, or red – used to give an overall indication if the trends are going well with the customer and the expected speed of closing a deal. For example: Ahead of Expectations, Proceeding as Expected, Some Warning Signs, or Stalled/In Trouble.

P-Go is the probability that a customer program or project will go forward, meaning the customer secures funding, gets required approvals, and completes the tender process.

P-Win is the probability that if the project goes forward, the customer will select you. So, the expected value of the opportunity is the P-Go times the P-Win times the size of the initial contract.

Under Contract Values, we usually kept columns for the projected size of an initial contract, amount of potential revenue this year, and long-term potential sales for this opportunity.

Statistics teaches us that the expected value of any particular opportunity is not likely to be useful because you never actually receive the expected value of a contract. You either win it, or you don’t. But over a large enough number of opportunities and with sufficiently good estimates for the probabilities, the sum of the expected values will trend toward a meaningful estimate of the expected value of the collection of opportunities.


The second Pipeline chart example was adapted for selling software. This report was actually exported from SalesForce.com into MS Excel with some macros. The first column denotes a new opportunity; the ‘Status’ column has some special purpose, in this case, the gray blocks refer to customers waiting for a new software feature; the ‘Stage’ column is auto-generated by the Milestone/Touch Stage number saved with the opportunity; the up arrow, horizontal arrow, and black dot reflect how many days since a Milestone number has improved with a number alongside; and, the Activities column shows the number of various contacts to that customer in the past 45 days where 1 gets a check and more a star.


Assessing Step Levels

I personally view scaling to the touch level steps to be relative to a level of effort toward closing a deal. Touch 1 is when a prospect is qualified, and Touch 10 is when the contract has been awarded and signed and the opportunity is virtually certain of turning into revenue. One can think of reporting on the touches as being a linear progression toward an assessment of percent to complete. However, common steps are required in each sector of the 10-touch process, as depicted in the hyperlinked chart at the right.

The first band of touches (1 through 3) is typically for qualifying the prospect, defining the customer problem or pain. And then, validate that you have a valid solution and that the customer is likely to find funds for such a solution. The second range (4 through 6) is generally where the hard work is done to shape the customer. The decision-makers are validated, relationships are built with key influencers, and technical obstacles/issues/unknowns are removed or mitigated. Finally, the third zone (7 through 10) is where we drive toward closure. Funding is secured, commitment is gained, and the contracting approach is finalized.


In the early steps, it’s important to assess this particular opportunity. One of the worst things is to believe a customer has the potential to close a deal, expend incredible amounts of effort trying to get to closure, and then discover that a deal isn’t going to happen and that this was a knowable outcome early on. It would be a horrendous waste of time, but the opportunity cost is likely to be even larger. That is, the wasted time prevents spending time pursuing leads/prospects that have a higher probability of closure.

Best Practices

During my many years of leading sales, development/fundraising, and financing teams, I encountered many best practices. Here is a summary:

  • Building Strategic and Tactical Plans. Every significant ‘sales’ opportunity requires a well-thought-out battle plan. The biggest opportunities are entitled to a full-fledged ‘war room’ with postings on the wall, full-time staff support, daily 8 am status updates, and team members flowing in and out as necessary. Smaller opportunities still need a planning cycle, and it’s up to the leadership to determine the level of effort for each opportunity. Some of the key aspects of these plans include:
    • Identifying all of the ‘touch’ points, ‘contacts’ interfaces, and key influencers.
    • Developing relationship maps for each of the key people within the influence chain.
    • Laying out any supporting activities that are needed, such as marketing, trade shows, and white papers.
  • Secure Funding for the Customer. Many times when making a ‘sale’ to an organization, the key person on the other side would like to buy your product or service but isn’t able to obtain the funds. The reasons could be an organizational priority, lack of visibility of the particular problem being solved, organizational log jambs, need for government approvals, or sometimes even that your particular customer contact doesn’t know how to get the money or exert influence within his/her organization. A sales team must solve all these issues and even help educate the customer on steps that need to be taken on his/her side.
  • Touch People Matching. One necessary trick in the bag is to determine who should make each contact/touch based on the plans above, the relationship maps, the hierarchies, and relationship impedance matching. Every sales process requires this to be carefully tuned and orchestrated.
    • For example, when involved in fundraising for the university, I was generally involved in the ‘heavy lifting’ at about Touch 4 and Touch 9. This gave the development team the opportunity to ‘build up’ the meeting with me so that it could be significant. If I made every call, contact, and touch, it wouldn’t be as special. It means when I help make ‘the ask,’ it can also be impactful.
    • In contrast, when doing fundraising for venture capital, the expectation is that I, as the CEO, am involved in most of the touches, contacts, and calls.
  • Relationship Impedance Matching. This concept is mentioned above and is where we try to match personalities and dynamics between the participants in a particular touch opportunity.
    • Occasionally, sales teams and organizations rely too heavily on personnel titles and hierarchy to determine who makes particular calls and touches. For example, I am ‘good’ in sales calls, but I just do not sync with certain people. It would be better to not use me in situations where I could aggravate the sales process. So even though I was the CEO, I made it clear that we should always use the best person for each ‘touch’ interaction.
    • This is really hard to do in big companies because org charts rule the day. One could argue it’s harder in engineering-type companies where IQs are usually more dominant than EQs. This should be underscored for both large and small companies. And, as we know, it’s more than just aligning the right technical-to-technical contacts, having the CEO make a touch at the right time, etc. … it’s also the non-business chemistry. Our experience at Insitu was alma maters, college football, hometowns, and the like.

My colleague, Steve Nordlund, has a cute anecdote: “I remember my meeting with a key admiral that ultimately championed us onto a certain class of ship in the US Navy. We were scheduled for 30 minutes, but the meeting actually went for an hour and a half. For all but 15 minutes, we talked about Apple computers after he saw my Mac laptop. Turned out, he was a closet Apple guy inside the DOD. He told me at the end of the meeting, he would get us on DDGs, and he did just that.” {Editor’s Note: This was Touch 3, and it still took us a full 10 touches, but the momentum was established.}

  • Advisory Councils. I have used advisory councils to great effect. These are talented, experienced people with diverse backgrounds who can monitor the pulse of customer segments, give advice on positioning, arrange for meetings for the sales team, determine if customer communications are sufficient, and in the event of a problem, possibly intervene with the customer.
  • Collecting Data Prior to Meetings. Prior to a major ‘touch,’ we try to use the opportunity’s relationship map and all our resources to determine the touch points and issues. It’s amazing how successful a meeting can be if the issues are successfully predicted and the materials are prepared that exactly address those concerns.
  • Vocabulary. Although I have learned and adapted this approach using the terminology of ‘Touches’ and ‘Contacts,’ I have since evolved for my latest business endeavor and call them ‘Milestones’ and ‘Activities’ to increase clarity. The second pipeline example chart above reflects this update.
  • Getting to a Quick No. It is important to trim down the opportunities to the one that is likely to close as soon as possible. Ten touches times 10 contacts per touch is a lot of activity that has to be organized. Disaster would be to get to the end and discover there is no match.

I remember when I was raising venture capital, and one friendly venture capital firm kept having me come back, make presentations, supply due diligence data, interface with colleagues, and channel my team to their issues. In the end, they said they didn’t want to make an investment because they don’t invest in that sector. Ouch! We wasted so much time. I asked them why they just didn’t tell me that at the start. They said, in effect, that they liked us and didn’t want to hurt our feelings. As can be imagined, their response was not appreciated.

Summary

Every organization in every sector needs to collect resources to execute its purpose. We have used the term ‘sales’ as the generic process for the collection of those resources. Herein a simple model is proposed and illustrated for discussing, reporting, organizing, and managing the ‘sales’ process.

https://tinyurl.com/bddhvr2f


Updated Sales Model with Seeq Process

This article is an addendum to the previous most popular posts on my site, The 10 Touch Sales Model. I modernized it to include my methodology as it has been adapted to my current venture, which is a SaaS software company with a hybrid Enterprise Sales and Product-Led Growth sales model

Updated Model

Initially, I used the term “touch” because the philanthropy field, where I first devised this model, used it, and the word reinforces the need for personal interactions. But I found the term didn’t encompass the business aspect, so I refined The 10 Touch Sales Model over the years. My latest update came as the CEO at Seeq, a software company that works with clients in large process industries like super-major oil companies, specialty manufacturing, and pharma & biotech. Although I’ve also used the terms stages and steps instead of touches in previous years, my current preference is the term milestone, which is more motivating to sales teams and more professional for business settings. It is also a better way to explain that moving from one milestone to the next is moving the ball to the next stage.

Another major change that I made was to start at Milestone 0 instead of 1. Think of M00 as the holding bin, the potential users. No contact has been made, but they remain possibilities. After M09, the client moves off the list because we received the purchase order.


During M00 to M02, the relationships are in the hands of marketing to qualify the leads. A sales exec picks up these accounts in M02 to further qualify the lead and decide if and when there is enough value to take the contract forward. To move to M03, however, the sales exec must receive approval because, at this point, the customer needs more assessment, and Seeq must invest engineering resources to support the initial decision-making process on the customer’s part. The accounts are further developed in M04 to M06. At M07, the RFP or acquisition process begins. The contract moves off the list once payment is made.

As I’ve stated numerous times, this model must be adapted to each company. For example, at Seeq, our software is state-of-art, and as such, we have little competition. So, our process is streamlined, but we still have to go through each step and create the touches and pass each milestone. Other companies may need to spend more time countering what the competition can do.

Account Tracking


At Seeq, we use the above spreadsheet to track the progress of each account over the previous 30 days. We use this internally to track contracts daily, but we also share it with our Board every month, which provides transparency and an outside perspective. The green flag to the left identifies new accounts. In the Stage column, we have a green progress bar with a number that indicates the current milestone for that account. The symbols in the Duration column provide a visual indicator of the progress. A green vertical arrow indicates the account is moving forward, a yellow horizontal arrow shows a stalled process, and a black dot means that little to no activity has been made in the last 60 days for that account. The Activities column shows the number of contacts made toward the next milestone. The green checkmark signals that at least one contact was made in the past 30 days, and the gold star represents that more than one contact was made. The Amount column represents the initial commitment from the customer. The final right column contains the source of the contact if known.  

Here are some descriptions for the pipeline chart:



We also provide another tracking mechanism for the Board:

By looking at the past 6 months, 30 days, and the current accounts, we track progress over time. To ensure transparency, we provide as much information as possible.

Summary

Converting sales opportunities into actual customers, especially for large accounts, requires time, commitment, and a dedicated plan. No solution fits every situation, so use my model as the basis for a customized plan for your business. Read Managing and Growing Customer Accounts for my recommendations on maintaining and nurturing the relationship.


https://tinyurl.com/4knppttz

вторник, 16 июня 2020 г.

10 Critical Best Practices for Your Sales Force in This Crisis


Posted by Dave Kurlan


We are in week 6 of lockdown, week 8 of voluntary work-from-home, while adapting, guiding and directing companies who still need to sell their products and services to generate revenue.  At this point sales is about so much more than generating revenue for profit or to keep employees working.  For most companies, sales is now about generating revenue to survive, as we stare down a whole new way of doing business.  Forget uncertainty!  Where we are right now is downright scary.  But if the past 6 weeks have taught us anything, it's that with the right tools, strategies, mindset and tactics, we can adapt and even thrive.  For those who may read this after May 1, 2020, the following best practices are based on where we are as I write this on April 27, 2020. 

Everyone Has a Remote Sales Team - It's not just the geographically distributed sales teams anymore; it's everyone, and we need to consider the biggest challenges of leading remote sales teams:
  • Not everyone is tech savvy, especially in some old-school industries like building products, industrial distribution, and historical face-to-face selling environments.  You must set proper expectations about using phone and video, require all meetings to be virtual instead of phone, and provide proper training on using video technology.
  • Not everyone is well-suited for working from home.  I'm not talking about the ability to focus without distraction.  I'm talking about whether your salespeople have the DNA for working from home, independent of their team, and without supervision; whether they are self-starters and have the necessary time and organizational skills to work on their own for an extended period of time.  Working from home is not temporary.  This will continue even after the lockdown is in the rear view mirror because as long as kids are at home (no school, no summer camp), parents will be at home too and customers may not be ready to have outsiders visiting their offices and plants.  Also consider that some salespeople aren't able to handle the emotional disconnect from being isolated from friends, co-workers, families and customers.
  • Daily Huddles - Despite years of yelling from the rooftops that sales leaders must lead a quick daily huddle with their teams, it didn't happen.  It just wasn't convenient - for the leaders!  And despite the proven benefits of such huddles, most resisted while some compromised and ran weekly huddles.  The resistance and compromises must end.  You must huddle with your team twice per day to keep them connected, share success stories and demonstrate that we are in this together.
  • Coverage - salespeople will be able to cover their territories more efficiently than ever before.
  • Cost - Having your salespeople sell remotely is much more cost-effective.
Motivation - Your salespeople are scared.  They are looking to you for reassurance, positivity, motivation, success stories, support, guidance, direction and hope.  They are afraid:
  • Will they be able to make calls without offending people?
  • Will they be able to schedule virtual meetings?
  • Will they be able to sell over video/phone?
  • Will they be able to close anything in the short term?
  • Will they be able to keep their jobs?
Call Reports - I can't think of a single reason why you would waste salespeople's time by having them complete call reports.  Consider:
  • They use same piece of hardware for virtual meetings and emails as they do to access your CRM application.  Gone are the days where they were on the road, on site with a customer, on sales calls, in a hotel or airport or home too late without enough time to update CRM.  No more excuse making.
  • They must update CRM in real time,  as they complete each conversation, virtual meeting and call.  
  • You must make real time updates a condition of continued employment.  In the current environment of 15% unemployment, this requirement has teeth.
  • It's like spaghetti sauce - it's in there.  Everything you could possible ask for in a call report will be in the dashboard and/or reporting section of your CRM application.  Ditch the call reports.
Pipeline -  The one thing that every salesperson can do right now is build pipeline.  My conversations with CEOs reveal two problems:  Delayed closes and insufficient pipelines to compensate so:
  • Go on offense! Every salesperson - even account managers and farmers, should be all in, all hands on deck pipeline building mode right now.  If they won't do it you don't need them!  25 million people have already filed for unemployment in the US so 2.5 million are probably salespeople.  Unlike just three months ago when your salespeople were in the driver's seat, your salespeople can be replaced!
  • Phones - They're being used as talking devices again!  We haven't witnessed this kind of reconnection with the phone since administrative assistants were replaced by automated voicemail systems.  Executives are taking and returning calls and you should not allow your salespeople to hide behind their monitors using emails to reach out when people are answering their cell phones!
  • Viability - You need a comprehensive viability analysis of your pipeline to determine how much is high quality, how much is properly staged, and how much you will realistically win.  Without the viability analysis your forecast is a complete fabrication.
Coaching - Forget 50% of your time coaching!  It needs to be 75% of your time.  You have the time, even if you are responsible for personal accounts.  Every salesperson, every day, for a minimum of 30-minutes of one-on-one coaching to:
  • Coach them up
  • Coach them through opportunities
  • Debrief completed calls
  • Join them on calls (easier than ever)
KPI's -  It's time to rethink your KPI's:
  • Focus on Pipeline Building KPI's!  Dials, Conversations and Virtual Meetings Scheduled. 
  • Add KPI's for opportunities that advanced to the next stage, opportunities that were pushed back to a prior stage, and opportunities that are no longer valid.  Counting only the good stuff is head-in-the-sand leadership.
Targeting - It's more important than ever! 
  • You may have lost entire Verticals (like travel/tourism), Segments (small specialty retail is a segment of retail) or Audiences (sales enablement and learning and development have been casualties). 
  • Target the verticals, segments and audiences that you can sell to now, that are continuing to do business.
  • Consider selling something different than what you usually sell to existing customers and seeking new customers for what you typically sell.
  • Your competition may not have been affected in the same way that you were, especially if they have other channels, verticals, products and services than what you offer.  Will they be concentrating more or less of their efforts on your target market?
  • Hard to Reach Opportunities are no longer hard to reach for territory salespeople.  They can reach them virtually!
Critical Skills - I can't be more clear about this and you have no option but to do something about this. If your salespeople continue to take a present/demo/quote/proposal-based approach to selling they will fail and the only business you will get will be low-margin business.  Only 15% of all salespeople have all four of the critical skills below as a strength: 
  • Consultative approach, based on listening and asking questions, is the only way to differentiate your salespeople from your competitors
  • Value-Based selling, where your salespeople are the value, is the only way to maintain margins.  If you attempt to be competitive your only revenue will be low to no margin revenue and you will fail.  This is not talking about value; this is being the value.
  • Thorough qualifying.  You can't afford for your salespeople to be wasting time on opportunities that are no longer viable; but they will if you don't require thorough qualifying and justification for pursuit, and add verification and accountability.
  • Staged, milestone-centric, customer-focused sales process that supports the consultative, value-based, approach.
Right-Sizing - I'm sorry but you can't put this off.  There is no way around this.  You must do this today, unless you got PPP funding, in which case you must do this at 60 days post-funding!  You must be able to generate more revenue with fewer salespeople
  • Consider factors other than revenue and performance. 
  • Also consider overhead (sales expenses other than commissions)
  • Suitability for the role they are in (half of all salespeople are not well-suited for the roles they are in
  • Suitability for working from home (see remote sales team above - 41% of all salespeople are not well-suited for working from home)
  • Pipeline viability (see Pipeline above - 43% of all salespeople lack viable pipelines right now) 
  • Critical skills for selling in this environment - (See critical skills above - 85% of all salespeople are lacking these skills)
  • OMG's SmartSizing tool allows you to run a complete viability analysis on your sales organization to right-size it today.
Hire Salespeople - If you have the cash flow to hire salespeople, do it now.  This is the first time in about five years that good candidates are available and actively looking for their next home.  Just make sure:
  • Don't make any mistakes in your rush to hire
  • Use OMG's trusted, accurate, customizable (for the role) and predictive sales candidate assessment.
  • Rework your sales recruiting process for the current times.  You need to get every aspect right from the ad you post to your onboarding.
Get Help!  Sure you want to be a superhero but Kryptonite brought Superman to his knees and the enemy we are fighting today is our version of Kryptonite. Don't be embarrassed to ask an expert for help.

Image copyright 123RF

https://bit.ly/37Baw9f

воскресенье, 9 июня 2019 г.

The Four Building Blocks of Transformation

Illustration by Miguel Montaner


How to lead the disruption of your own enterprise



If you are a business leader, you are probably thinking about radical change. New industrial platforms, geopolitical shifts, global competition, and changing consumer demand are reshaping your world. You face upstart competitors with high valuations encroaching on your business, and activist investors looking for targets. Meanwhile, you have your own aspirations for your company: to be a profitable innovator, to seize opportunities, to lead and dominate your industry, to attract highly committed talent, and to carve out a socially responsible role in which your organization makes a difference. You also probably want to clear away the deadwood in your legacy system: practices, structures, technologies, and cultural habits that hold your company back.



The conventional response is a transformation initiative — a top-down restructuring, accompanied by across-the-board cost cutting, a technological reboot, and some reengineering. Maybe you’ve been through a few such initiatives. If so, you know firsthand how difficult it is for them to succeed. These efforts tend to come in late and over budget, leaving the organization fatigued, demoralized, and not much changed. They don’t take into account the fundamentally new kinds of leverage available to businesses that have emerged in the last 10 years: new networks, new data gathering and analysis resources, and new ways of codifying knowledge (see “Leading a Bionic Transformation,” by Miles Everson, John Sviokla, and Kelly Barnes).
Successful transformations may be relatively rare, but they do exist — and yours can succeed as well. A transformation, in this context, is a major shift in an organization’s capabilities and identity so that it can deliver valuable results, relevant to its purpose, that it couldn’t master before. It doesn’t necessarily involve a single major initiative (though it could); but the company develops an ongoing mastery of change, in which adaptability feels natural to leaders and employees.

An effort of this sort can take place on a large or small scale; it can involve the front, middle, or back office; it can be conducted by any type of enterprise, from a startup to a global enterprise; and it will affect every aspect of the organization’s structure, including such functions as innovation, finance, marketing, sales, human resources, and operations. At any scale, it requires a cultural shift and highly engaged leaders, who take control of the organization’s future in these four ways:
• Create a strategic identity. Articulate a single desirable future for your enterprise and focus all your efforts on achieving it.
• Design for trust. Develop ways to attract and deserve the commitment of everyone related to your enterprise — particularly customers and employees.
• Master the pivot from sprint to scale. Test new practices in an intensive, experimental, startup-style manner. Pick the approaches that work, and rapidly implement them throughout the larger system.
• Treat your legacy as an asset. Save the best of your past, divest the rest for advantage, and use the income to fund the future.

We think of these as the basic building blocks of any successful transformation. They aren’t specific steps, stages, or organizational designs. Those will vary from one enterprise to the next. Rather, they are ways of thinking about influence and change: perspectives on how to shift organizational and individual behavior in a more productive, competitive, and engaging direction.
We identified these elements through a comprehensive research and synthesis project that took place early in 2018. We convened a broad, global group of PwC’s most knowledgeable experts on organizational change, particularly change at the nexus of business strategy, customer experience design, and advanced digital technology. At an extended in-depth session with 35 members of this group, we studied examples of successful transformations and articulated the factors common to them. Then we tested our findings in follow-up research and discussions with other experts, inside and outside PwC, and with clients. Though the cases varied widely — by region, industry, circumstance, and personality — the four building blocks were consistently pivotal to success. The transformation initiatives we studied (described here and included in our library of case studies on the PwC website) have helped companies shake free of their self-imposed shackles, adopt dynamic new business models, and raise their game in a swiftly changing world.

Create a Strategic Identity

Every company today needs to make a distinctive mark. This is a matter of building not just a brand, but a powerful identity, in which the company’s value proposition, core capabilities, customer and employee experience, and culture all reinforce one another. Companies with a fully coherent, differentiated, strategic identity — the likes of Apple, IKEA, Starbucks, and Honda — become iconic. They make an absolute commitment to a single overarching way of doing business, and to a grand vision of the company they need to be. Sean Connolly, president and CEO of Conagra Brands, offered his view about this sort of organizational change in a 2016 interview with the Chicago Tribune: “[It] is not for the faint of heart.”
At the time of that interview, Conagra was still in the early stages of its celebrated transformation — from a diffuse, US$18 billion conglomerate of agricultural and food-related businesses (described in the press as a potential takeover target) to a focused $8 billion purveyor of consumer food brands in North America. Connolly had been hired in April 2015 after serving as the CEO of Hillshire Brands. At Conagra he was charged with refocusing the company’s mission and turning it around. That mandate intensified a few months later, when the activist hedge fund Jana Partners bought a stake in Conagra and gained two seats on its board.
On the most practical level, Conagra’s transformation initiative involved deals and structural moves: selling a private-label business, spinning off a vertically integrated potato business, relocating headquarters, resetting the cost structure, acquiring contemporary brands, realigning its operating model, eliminating unprofitable legacy practices (including the indiscriminate use of discount promotions), and changing the company name from ConAgra Foods to Conagra Brands. At the heart of all this activity was a new concept of the company’s identity: a nimble innovator, with (according to its vision statement) “the most energized, highest-impact culture” in the food industry. Conagra’s brands would now be required to be the first or second in their sector, and to be known for attracting highly loyal followers (for example, Hunt’s, Peter Pan, Orville Redenbacher’s, Reddi-wip, Slim Jim), defining a prepared food niche (Bertolli, Hebrew National, Marie Callender’s), or emphasizing quality ingredients and health (Alexia, Blake’s, Frontera, Healthy Choice). “This is a totally new era,” Connolly told stock analysts in October 2016. “We are not the ag business that we started as almost 100 years ago. We are certainly not the global conglomerate that we’ve been for decades. For the first time in our history, we will be a branded CPG pure play.”
The related new body of operations practices, dubbed the “Conagra Way,” was modeled after smaller, more flexible companies. The new IT system, built on a cloud-based infrastructure, was oriented toward rapid innovation and communication across internal silos. “Where there is friction [in the digital infrastructure], there is opportunity,” CIO Mindy Simon told CIO Magazine. “How can we use analytics to help our chefs develop new products? How can we use sensors to improve our distribution?”
The results include more than $300 million in annual savings and quick growth in financial metrics, including more than 40 percent growth in total shareholder return between May 2015 and May 2017. Employees and retailers describe Conagra Brands as an entirely different company. And its 2018 acquisition (for $10.9 billion) of Pinnacle Foods (with brands such as Birds Eye, Gardein, EVOL, and Smart Balance) makes Conagra the second-largest frozen food company in the U.S., after Nestlé. The Conagra story shows how a well-considered shift in identity can take hold in even the largest and most established companies.
As you take on the mind-set of an upstart, and articulate a bold new vision to establish your company’s new identity, keep these precepts in mind:
Tell a good story. All too often, the leaders of a transforming company use dry, technocratic language to explain the change and its rationale. But in a successful effort, the business leader sets the tone by translating the company’s new strategic identity into vivid, everyday language — so that everyone can see how their jobs contribute, and why each part of the change matters.
This may well mean articulating a company purpose that goes beyond making money. Employees and customers understand that enterprises are powerful, and that they exist to achieve something with that power — connecting people, producing wealth, creating products and services, or bringing new forms of value to society. When there is a clear, evocative statement of how the company creates value, not just for the shareholders and owners but for the greater world around it, employees feel a connection with the new identity. They understand how it will help them prosper and make them proud to be associated with it.
Use symbolic gestures to represent this clarity of purpose and bring the identity to life. For example, Conagra consolidated all its Chicago-area suburban offices into one downtown building to attract talent, create a high-energy collaborative environment, and accelerate decision making. Connolly explained it this way: “[We can] see each other in the hallway, and get business done in five minutes, rather than on a conference call five days later. Everything [is] recharged.”
Link your strategic identity to your most distinctive capabilities and skills. If you take a hard look at your core business, you’ll probably find it’s not a core at all. Rather, it’s a portfolio of non-synergistic offerings, often requiring very different capabilities. This transformation is your opportunity to focus on what you’re really good at, and cut back the rest. Everything you do afterward, including your digitization, cost management, and product and service line development, should relate directly to these distinctive strengths. For example, Bosch Rexroth, a global electronics and engineering company based in Germany, is creating a new identity as the hub of an Industrial Internet platform. Grounded in its sensor and Internet of Things businesses, the identity is aimed at “smart city” projects and middle-market companies. The company is demonstrating its value by using its expertise in sensors and analytics to trim its own operational expenses. Company leaders talk of saving €1 billion (US$1.2 billion) internally by 2020 and thus building a company that can uniquely offer comparable savings to its customers.
Stretch your aspirations. When explaining the need for transformation, don’t just talk about threats or “burning platforms.” Fear paralyzes and distracts people. It creates a toxicity that can take years to remove. Instead, talk about the company you want to (and may need to) create — a company that can do things it can’t do now. Show how your people’s strengths and talents are uniquely qualified to realize this vision, and how you can build or buy the collective capabilities to support them. To really inspire commitment, the new aspiration should be a genuine stretch — one that will take unprecedented energy and skill to fulfill, and will deliver an equally unprecedented payoff. Hearing it described should make your company’s leaders, employees, and other primary stakeholders feel simultaneously intrigued, energized, and uncomfortable; otherwise, it’s probably not complete.
The state-owned insurance company Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) in New Zealand is transforming itself this way — from being an established facilitator of claims to being, in the words of the 2017 annual report (pdf), a company dedicated to “improving quality of life by minimizing the incidence and impact of injury.” It is building the capabilities to help New Zealanders prepare for crisis and prevent accidents, not just recover from them.
Invite participation. Talk to employees; invite them to put their fingerprints on the future and to help design aspects of it with you. People are more likely to adopt what they help to create. Other stakeholders may also have powerful contributions to make. Investors, for instance, recognize the market forces driving change for your company as few others do. If they’re interested in long-term involvement with your enterprise, they’ll appreciate the power of a truly viable strategic identity.
Name the challenges you face. You’re seeking not only greater efficiency, or only the ability to employ three sales associates where once you had five. You might need a breakthrough in revenues, a step change in safety and reliability, the ability to compete in a new arena (a geographic market or a customer group), or a boost in customer loyalty. Consider every option for dealing with those challenges, including the formerly unthinkable. Call out the trade-offs you face, and the difficult choices you have to make. Name the choices you’re not going to pursue, and explain why. Choose your financial targets and milestones carefully, to show sustained movement toward your goal, not just good results for a quarter or two. Similarly, pick tough targets for improving your reputation — e.g., would a customer, competitor, or community member who’s been observing your company over the last few years agree that it has improved?
Connect with the community. You are remaking your company to be the kind of enterprise your employees want to be associated with. They will be concerned about its reputation (and their own) outside the company walls. Consider what social values your company should adopt. They may involve environmental quality, sustainable use of resources, frugality, integrity, ethics, community leadership, or other ways of serving society. Metrics such as Total Impact can help you identify opportunities that fit your company’s staff and capabilities. Take on only those goals your company can authentically stand behind.
Bring it all together into a “critical few” elements. Resist the temptation to include everyone’s ideas. Tell a simple, clear story that gets to the heart of the company you will create. In their forthcoming book, The Critical Few: Energize Your Company’s Culture by Choosing What Really Matters, Jon Katzenbach, James Thomas, and Gretchen Anderson suggest that you can distill all the complexity of change into a few cultural elements. Pick two or three traits that represent the company you want to become (such as Conagra’s nutritional consciousness, Bosch’s technological acumen, or ACC’s proactive approach to its customers); a few behaviors that you’ll need to realize the new company’s success (such as faster decision making or better collaboration across internal boundaries); and a few key people from throughout the enterprise who exemplify the new approach. It takes time to winnow the many down to the critical few. But once you’ve done this, you’ll be able to move forward much more quickly, and everybody will be able to operate more effectively, because they will understand the new company’s identity and how their job fits into it.

Design for Trust

It’s often possible to tell how a transformation is going by the way people feel about it. Many difficult options may be on the table, including selling part of the firm, reducing staff, and making radical shifts in strategy. But if people see reason for hope, they will invest their time and effort in building the new identity. They will trust the enterprise to deliver what it has promised.
Building trust is not just a matter of gaining buy-in. You put psychology first: designing every move so that it resonates with customers, employees, investors, regulators, and other stakeholders. This requires care, planning, and an attitude about people that often goes against the grain. Many executives believe, deep down, that people are “fixed”: once set in their ways, they will not budge. But the truth is that people can shift even their most fundamental attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors if they recognize the value of doing so and are given the opportunity to develop their skills. Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck calls this perspective the “growth mind-set.” If you don’t believe in the flexibility of your company’s employees, you won’t believe in the transformability of your company. Such disbelief is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
How do you learn that people will change? By designing an approach that gives you and your employees reason to trust one another. Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water, the sixth-largest of the 10 regulated water and wastewater utilities in England and Wales, accomplished this when it transformed its retail business in 2015. To reduce an excessive level of bad debt and drive its costs back into line, the company required more than 3,000 employees to reapply for their jobs; 40 percent of them were not rehired. Yet when Welsh Water conducted an employee engagement survey afterward, the remaining employees responded in record numbers, and the company’s engagement score (a measure of satisfaction and commitment, derived from that staff survey) rose substantially. There was also a significant improvement in cost-to-serve, an increase of more than 20 percent in capacity per pound invested, and a 73 percent improvement in cash collection rates.
The factors that made a difference were intangible, but all related to building trust. Welsh Water’s leaders were clear with employees about the criteria for being rehired. These leaders demonstrated a growing competence in their own managerial decisions, in part because of improvements in the way they used data. Data about customer use and operational efficiencies had been kept in organizational silos; as a result, finances had been mismanaged, excessive debt and overhead had accumulated, and customer experience had declined. To fix these issues, the company released a series of dashboards — electronic scorecards available to employees in which they could see, for the first time, key performance indicators related to their job. By calling this new approach the “Welsh Water Way of Working,” and rolling it out in a series of three-month waves, the company gave employees a clear signal that new behaviors would be valued and rewarded, and gave them time to adjust.
The new practices also built trust in the community. More than 5,000 customers who had been in arrears are now on a reasonable payment plan, with many more expected to follow, reducing the debt burden on other customers’ bills. Moreover, as employees saw customers’ lives improve (particularly those with little means who needed help), and as their own workday became easier and more rewarding, they gained more pride and confidence in the company.
These precepts can help you get similar results from your own transformation.
Start at the top. Your culture takes its cue from the leadership team. Are they in sync and capable? Or are they visibly uncomfortable with one another and distant from everyone else? If the latter, then you should help that group improve its leadership, perhaps through intensive coaching and conversation.
Redesign your HR motivators. Translate trustworthiness into tangible incentives such as salary, promotion, and perks. Incentives don’t have to be expensive; they could include flextime, educational opportunities, participation in a high-growth part of the enterprise (with the challenges and career prospects that go with that), or access to particular mentors or projects. Find out what different people want from this transformation, and tailor your menu of incentives, structures, relationships, and practices across that range.
Perhaps the most commonly overlooked motivation is autonomy. Set things up so people can control their own budget or part of the system, with clear accountability and open communication about how they might contribute to the new strategic identity. Foster the kind of workplace that encourages what London Business School professor Dan Cable calls the “seeking system”: the part of the brain that craves experimentation and creativity as a way to learn.
Treat resistance with respect. Some visible key people will inevitably remain beyond reach, opposed to your new strategy. There is a reason they object; can you engage with them, find out why, and make a good-faith effort to win them over without compromising your strategy? If you must lay people off, ensure that they are given the support they need to find new roles elsewhere. Even if you need opponents to leave, seeing you treat them fairly will give others more reason to commit to the new enterprise wholeheartedly.
Build trust with customers. Too many companies have undermined their customers’ respect and interest with careless use of data or duplicitous practices. Set an example for competence and genuine commitment to trustworthiness. Embody this in the quality of the online and offline customer experience you design. Devote the resources and attention needed to accomplish this and make it profitable.

Master the Pivot from Sprint to Scale

New ideas need time and space to incubate; in their early stages, they must be protected from the larger system’s interference. But if they remain isolated, they’ll inevitably be marginalized. It takes a great deal of on-the-ground skill to resolve this paradox. Successful transformational leaders build in that resolution from the beginning. By combining the speed and agility of a startup with comprehensive full-scale execution, they acquire, develop, and sustain the capabilities they need to differentiate themselves.
Pernod Ricard, based in Paris, is the world’s second-largest wine and spirits company (after Diageo). Its many well-known brands include Absolut, Beefeater, Glenlivet, Jacob’s Creek, Jameson, Kahlua, and Seagram’s. In 2016, with the goal of becoming world leader, it began to transform its marketing and operations organizations. Among its tools was Briefcase, a distribution app that replaced paper binders and digital spreadsheets. With Briefcase, sales teams can pull up comprehensive sales data on their smartphones, along with sell sheets and cocktail recipes for particular accounts and brands, and connect through social media with their colleagues around the world. Because independent distributors that supply retailers, bars, and restaurants work with Pernod Ricard, they too are part of the Briefcase system.
In years past, it might have taken a long time to develop this app. Instead, Pernod Ricard brought together a dedicated team of internal and external professionals to create it on a cloud platform. They tested it rapidly with a target group of salespeople, implemented their suggestions, and rolled it out in key territories within a few months. Briefcase is credited with a 300 percent increase in account visits, a key sales metric for any customer-oriented consumer products company. “This is a game change,” said Marc Andre, vice president of IT solutions at Pernod Ricard North America. “We now have all the information and tools we need to manage each distribution channel.”
A successful transformation involves a continual series of small innovations, each building on the concepts that worked before. They can include new products or services, entries into new markets, operational improvements, new ways of tracking results, explorations of new business models, or new ways of working that emulate (or improve on) those of upstart technology companies. Typically, you will develop and try out each new approach on an experimental basis, and then syndicate those that prove themselves, implementing them at full scale. As you raise the bar a bit each day, the organization shifts much more easily and effectively than it would if you set up a grand dramatic scheme for demanding behavior change across the enterprise. Some precepts for accomplishing this follow.
Adopt the methods of agile innovation. Small groups can try out multiple new ways of working, and introduce new products and services, using the same development techniques that are common in tech companies and research universities. In a typical sprint-and-scrum process, a small cross-functional group of stakeholders and knowledgeable people is given a period of time, perhaps three to six weeks, to come up with the necessary innovation. The team should be diverse, representing every relevant function and skill — strategists, design thinkers, operational experts, finance professionals, and technologists. They converge on the problem, ignoring their other responsibilities, and develop a first-phase prototype. Then they test it in some real-world setting, perhaps with a few variations.
New Zealand’s ACC, for example, set up “innovation labs” — pockets of activity where people experimented with the use of analytics and new customer services. These served as incubators in the firm’s transformation. Avis is similarly prototyping 33 potential new revenue streams, each as its own mini-enterprise. “We’re making a portfolio of bets,” Ohad Zeira, Avis’s head of fleet ventures, told Wired. “When I came in, there were a ton of ideas. My job was picking the right ones.” In our own firm’s Experience Center design sessions, we bring together experts in business strategy, consumer and employee experience, and technology to work intensively as a team, building and prototyping new ways of solving problems. These prototypes are fast and imperfect by design, the equivalent of alpha releases in software; we then refine them, test them, and rapidly move the better ideas forward.
Plan for scale. Protect new ideas from interference, but only until they prove themselves. Then, replicate them quickly throughout the enterprise, replacing existing operations at every level. You will probably have a small, authoritative senior group set up to pick which ideas get scaled — not all at once, but when each is ready. The senior group may assign new team leaders at that point; the characteristics of experimenters and implementers are very different. Provide enough guidance for teams around the world to implement each new approach wholeheartedly.
Build your personal knowledge of customer needs. In many large, established firms, the innovate-then-scale approach is countercultural. Thus, you often see ideas emerge that should get picked up, but don’t; overly programmatic oversight that stifles the prototypes before they have a chance to take hold; or ideas that turn out to be impractical because operations people haven’t been involved. The best solution for any of these problems is deeper awareness of your customers and their needs, so that you can tailor and develop these ideas with more confidence. The practices of design thinking and in-depth customer research — in which you visit, work with, and develop relationships with representative purchasers of your products and services — are very useful. If you integrate that kind of activity with your own prototyping efforts, it becomes an enormous confidence builder for your teams. Even if you get an individual project wrong, your overall hit rate will increase, as you learn how to learn about your customers more effectively.

Treat Your Legacy as an Asset

Your existing company has a great deal of value; otherwise, it could not have thrived thus far. Now it is moving into a new form. It is time to dispassionately and creatively determine how to make the most of the value you’ve created. Inevitably, some elements of your old organization must be left behind as the company moves on. These services, processes, practices, brands, and even subsidiary enterprises will not fit your new identity and operating model.
The attention you pay to managing your legacy can affect the entire transformation. Moreover, while you shift to a new identity, the old business must stay in motion; the company depends on its revenue and profits. You thus need a clear and effective plan for harvesting the best of your past, while fixing up and divesting anything that will distract your new organization. These precepts can help.
Maximize value throughout the enterprise. This precept includes parts you divest. Some of your businesses and assets may contribute to revenues or market share, but not as well as they would as part of a company with more appropriate capabilities. For instance, in 2011, McGraw-Hill was a broad and scattered media and information services provider under fire from activist investors. The company leaders knew they had to sell off the businesses that didn’t fit, particularly the large education publishing business. But rather than hurriedly dismantling the company, they mapped out a multiyear program in which they restructured costs, put new management in place (even for the businesses that would be divested), and transformed their operating model. The divestitures, when they happened, contributed strongly to the bottom line. The resulting company, focused on financial information and rechristened S&P Global, increased its market value by $23 billion.
Balance nostalgia and foresight. Managing the legacy entails much of the most wrenching work in transformation. Suddenly, people are told that activities in which they have invested years of their lives are being jettisoned. For example, if your company enthusiastically switches to cloud-based interoperability, people who have held the old proprietary IT system together may wonder if they have wasted their time. Communicate your appreciation for the value that they created in the past, and make sure there is a path available for those employees to work productively in the new regime. At the same time, don’t say yes to emotionally driven pleas for the status quo. You may have to stop doing many things that served your company well in the past. Focus on the distinctive value proposition and capabilities that you need to develop now.
Put bold and talented people on the front lines of legacy management. The legacy management aspect of transformation is frequently treated as a backwater. But it is as critical to transformation success as the other three building blocks, and probably only a small group of executives in your company have the critical thinking skills and dispassionate temperament to master it. This can be a plum temporary assignment, in which people learn how to distinguish your company’s strategic capabilities from everyday activities; divest elements that aren’t needed; and integrate the right legacy and future-oriented capabilities together.

The Transformative Way

These four elements are all crucial to your design, no matter what type of company you have. The way you apply them depends on your unique situation; your industry, your company’s geographic footprint, and the circumstances of your company can affect the way you sequence these elements.
The first step is akin to the due diligence you would do on another company while considering an acquisition, but is performed on your own company. Ask yourself questions like these:
Creating a strategic identity:
  • What is the enterprise we most want to create?
  • What value would this new identity offer customers and the world at large?
  • What are the critical few elements — attributes, behaviors, and key people — we could draw on to move forward?
  • Why do we care about the enterprise we’re building?
  • Why should our constituents care?
Designing for trust:
  • How do our employees and customers see us, and what has led them to see us this way?
  • How can this transformation help us tap into the full potential of our people?
  • How can this transformation help us deliver more consistent and reliable value to customers?
  • How should we communicate the transformation to resolve the gaps in employee and customer trust?
Mastering the pivot from sprint to scale:
  • What are the most promising things our company can do to deliver value — including products, services, practices, experiences, and capabilities — that it isn’t doing now?
  • How can we best prototype those new ideas? Where? And with whom?
  • How do we select the best ideas to nurture and scale, and then redistribute resources in the enterprise to support them?
  • Are we prepared to learn from our experience as we go along? What practices for observation and feedback do we need to put in place?
Treating your legacy as an asset:
  • If we were designing our enterprise from scratch, which of our current activities would we still choose to undertake?
  • How well do our legacy activities fit with our future strategic identity?
  • Where is the latent value in our legacy activities?
  • What would we have to do to realize that latent value, either by integrating those activities into our core business or by divesting them?
These questions deserve deep reflection, because the answers can allow your company to fulfill its short-term and long-term objectives. The better you understand your strategic identity and the priorities it demands, the more certain you can be about the changes you need to make — and thus the more confidently you can double down on them. That’s why in a successful transformation effort, fear is not your ideal motivator. Fear leads you to hedge your bets, and that makes your change less effective. Vow to set up your transformation initiative to emphasize aspiration, not fear. Every day, employees and other stakeholders are asking you how they can help build the company you wish to lead. If you remain resolute in your answers, one day not too long from now, you will discover you are already leading that company.