SalesforceChaCha
Posts
💃 The Stakeholders Hated Change...Until You Came Along!🕺

💃 The Stakeholders Hated Change...Until You Came Along!🕺

Salesforce professional's insights for managing change

Salesforce ChaCha
January 09, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Ch-ch-ch-changes…are hard!

But what if you could make the people who matter embrace change? Even when their inclination is to hate it?

Users hate change because they hate anything that takes them distracts them from selling.

Managers hate change because it’s on their shoulders to lead their team through it.

Executives hate change because they live in it and want a break from it.

Enter - You 🫵.

With these 3 techniques, you will transform the perception of change from zero to hero 🦸!

(disclaimer - it’s hard to do!)

PIGGYBACKIN’

You Have (Indirect) Power and Influence

As soon as a change is announced, it’s like losing a game 7 in overtime, all the energy is sucked from the room.

Except for person who decided to make the change.

The bigger the org → the more bureaucracy → the decision-maker is closer to the top.

People at the top inherently have power.

Power is influence.

If the person at the top says “our B2C sales revenue is overtaking B2B sales. It is time to turn on Person Accounts!” then the road has been mapped. It will be done 🫡.

And it will be your responsibility to make it successful 😬😅.

As a Salesforce professional, the best thing you can do is to passively utilize the executives influence to drive the change-

“I mean, I agree with you. We don’t need Person Accounts. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Amirite?! But the big boss says we gotta do it, so 🤷🏻.”

Wouldn’t it be cool to have your boss give you a piggyback ride through the office? This is basically the same thing 💁.

😅 🥵

Change is Hard, Except When It’s Not

Business transformation is kinda a zero-sum game.

If upgrading the ERP to automate financial operations was easy for the accounts receivable admin, then it was hard for the ERP analyst.

If implementing Person Accounts was easy for users, then it was really hard for you.

Hard because you-

🧑‍🎨 Designed an amazing solution through intense thought and iterations.

👷 Put in the hours to build your design. Worked late to resolve your bugs.

🧑‍🔬 Tested the shiznit outta everything.

✍️ Documented all the things and wrote SOPs for the users.

🕴️All while aligning all things with all the stakeholders.

When you take extreme ownership to setup the business for success, then of course it seems easy for the business 🙂!

And of course it was really hard for you 🥵.

ELIXIR

Winning Cures Everything

The Shaq-Kobe Lakers were famously tense.

Shaq was the greatest big man of all-time.

Kobe was on his way to fulfilling the impossible comparisons to Jordan.

The only thing bigger than the expectations of the Lakers pairing the 2 best players of their era was their competing egos. Not even the Zen Master could keep the peace between them.

In fact, literally, the only thing that kept that team from tearing itself apart was winning. The duo won 3 consecutive championships, a feat that has not been repeated since.

Winning cures everything!

But winning in the workplace 🧑‍💼 looks different than winning in the NBA ⛹️. Here are 3 ways you can win in the workplace as a Salesforce professional-

🧠 Get some quick, early wins. Identify and deliver features that produce immediate, tangible benefits. Page layout improvements, relevant Related Quick Links, or better pipeline visibility.

🏆 Embrace your champion. There’s always that one salesperson who is a hardcore Salesforce champion. Give them a mic 🎙️, let them sing the praises of the changes and put all the positive vibes out there. Emotions are infectious. Empower your champion to be the thermostat dial in the room.

🙌 Success stories are $$$. Humans using storytelling to teach and influence is uniquely our nature. A story about a user who couldn’t see activity on dwelling deals and so was missing out on hot leads, but their recently changed dashboard shows them Opportunities that have had multiple inbounds then powerdials through this list of deals and ends up being the top closer that month 🤑!

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

You were warned that this wasn’t going to be easy 😅.

Change is hard to manage, always 💯.

But tools, frameworks, and insights can help you to grease the wheels and set yourself up for success in managing change, which sets up your stakeholders for success. The most excellent synergy!

SOUL FOOD