Selling Adoption Services

It’s no secret that Partners have challenges selling change & adoption services. I’m talking specifically about Partners who will provide offerings to complement other professional services they provide, like technical delivery. Proposals are subject to scrutiny and in the absence of a value proposition, change & adoption will be one of the first things to go in a re-scoping exercise.
“It’s OK. We do change & adoption ourselves”
Organisations like Kloud deliver a range of professional services centric to our mission to ‘move organisations to the cloud’. In order to succeed, we call upon other competencies to support technical delivery such as project management, delivery management, and change & adoption.
Your investment in change management equates directly to the impact you think a change is going to have. You take into consideration the impact to people your organisation, the cost of delivering activities to support them, and logistics required to deliver them.
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know…. But there are also unknown unknowns – the [things] we don’t know we don’t know”
Sometimes the impact of change to your organisation may not be clear because the functions of the technology you are introducing aren’t fully understood. In-house change teams can struggle applying what they’ve been taught in practice.
In my experience a successful change team is a coalition of people who can engage the business, people who understand the technology, and people who understand the methodology. The objective for Partners therefore, is to present a compelling offering to their customers which brings together the customer’s knowledge of and ability to engage with their business, and the Partner’s experience of delivering change management activities specifically to the (cloud) services it specialises in.
The Return on Investment
The value proposition for an adoption service is crucial. Prosci have led the charge. They understand that demonstrating a return on Investment is key in prospective customers adopting their own change management framework. The assertion is that success (based on measures you define) will depend on a level of investment in managing organizational change (whatever that looks like; small to large). There are many attempts to distil this into a basic equation (e.g. CHANGE + CHANGE MANAGEMENT = SUCCESS!)
Prosci constitutes a valuable and powerful set of tools and techniques, hardened by years of investment and research. I see it as a box of tools that can be selectively applied. Partners can provide compelling offerings by taking the foundation of these methodologies and developing compelling, cost effective solutions to support their products and services. We see evidence of this through the evolution of change and adoption services Microsoft are providing through FastTrack, available to Partners to support adoption of O365 workloads.
When forecasting ROI, Partners can refer to their own case studies to demonstrate ROI and draw parallels between engagements (“the conditions are similar, therefore the outcome will be similar”). Those that are licensed to do so can call upon the Prosci ‘library of statistics’ to support their value proposition.
Partners like Kloud who specialise in the enablement of cloud services can lean on the capabilities of modern cloud technology to support their campaigns. O365 in particular (My Analytics, Power BI Adoption Content Pack, Yammer) can serve up many measures and insights that historically would have difficult to elicit. In short: technology is helping to strengthen the change management value proposition.
The funny thing is, Partners need a change management framework to successfully embed a change management competency within a customer, and the same is required sell the value proposition within its own organisation (to its sales representatives, account managers, engagement leads). Consider this a good test of your offering.
Moving forwards, now is a great time for Partners to be discussing change management with their customers. What’s their level of maturity? How successful have initiatives been? Is the ROI clear and is it retrospectively validated? What is their current view of Change Management? What are they looking to Partners to provide?