Change Management

Each team experiences change differently

When a company launches a B2B store, a new ERP or a supplier portal, the change is not the same for everyone. The sales team fears losing its relationship with customers; customer service receives new questions about logins and online orders; the warehouse changes how it picks and labels orders; finance moves from entering data to reviewing exceptions.

That's why change management can't be a single plan for the whole company. We identify exactly what changes for each team, what they gain and what they lose, and build the communication and training from there.

In practice, this means talking to each team before designing anything and asking what worries them. The strongest resistance almost always has a specific reason, such as a process the new system makes harder or a metric they are judged by that no longer makes sense.

Change management with sales teams

In online sales projects, sales reps have the biggest influence on adoption: if they recommend the channel, customers use it; if they see it as a threat, customers keep calling. The first thing is to settle, before go-live, how online orders count towards their targets and commissions. If that question goes unanswered, everything else suffers.

Then we involve them in the rollout: together with us they choose the first customers to move to the online channel, they learn to enter orders for their customers in the portal itself, and they see in the data how much time they stop spending on repeat orders so they can spend it selling.

We also prepare sales reps for their customers' questions: how to sign up, what they see in their account and what to do if something doesn't match the agreed terms. If the rep can't answer, the customer goes back to the phone.

Training and communication during change management

Training is delivered by role, with real data and in a test environment, and it finishes before go-live, not after. Each profile learns what they will actually do day to day, not every feature of the system. For daily use we prepare short, easy-to-find guides designed to be checked on the spot.

Communication answers four questions: what is changing, when, why and who to ask. During the first few weeks we set up a direct channel for questions and review with each team lead what is proving hardest.

We also identify one or two people per team who learn ahead of the rest and act as the first point of contact for their colleagues. They solve many questions on the spot and alert us to problems before they turn into complaints.

Customer service training is brought forward ahead of everyone else's, because they will receive the first questions from customers and need to know the system before anyone else.

Usage metrics to measure adoption of the change

Adoption is measured with usage metrics, not satisfaction surveys: how many orders already come in through the new channel, how many customers have activated their access and use it, how many internal users work in the new system and which tasks are still done the old way, in Excel or by email.

These figures are reviewed regularly and, above all, acted on. If a group of customers doesn't activate, they get a call one by one; if a team keeps using the spreadsheet, we find out what the system or the training is missing. Shutting down the old way is the last step, not the first.

With customers, adoption is tracked in a similar way: how many activate at each stage of the rollout and how many order again through the online channel after their first order, which is the figure that really shows the change has worked.