3 Steps to Selling Change to Your Internal Team

In business, our customers and clients aren’t the only people we need to sell to on a daily basis. Sometimes we need to sell to our internal teams as well.

We encounter this frequently when coaching our clients to shift their business development and sales practices from old methodologies to new ones. They see the value in changing their practices — but they need their team to see the value, too.

They’re selling change to their team — upstream and downstream — and they’re struggling with it.

I’ve helped many of our clients through this challenge using the three-step process I’m about to share with you.

1. Be Proactive Upstream

Take initiative with your superiors and your leadership team. Sit down and have conversations with them about how the old methodology might be getting in the way of achieving company goals. Tell them how the new methodology may provide the right solution to the problem — and enlist their help in determining the best way to present that information to the team or organization at large.

2. Know Your Strategy

Stay focused on the greater good of the company. Know — intimately — how your strategy is going to deliver measurable results, and how it’s connected to your organization’s broader business goals.

When delivering your message to your team, always come back to these things. This will help them understand that the change good … and it isn’t personal. It’s a total shift in mindset for everyone, but the new methodologies will help them achieve better results individually and as a team.

Make it clear that the new methodologies will be a win for everyone!

3. Plan the Follow-up

Selling a change in methodology to your team is still a change for everyone — and change management principles apply.

Your team is likely to experience the dreaded “change curve ” — and you need to prepare for it. To reassure everyone that this change is positive, and they don’t need to feel anxious or upset, plan ahead to take the time to show everyone the difference in results between the new methodologies and the old ones.

Don’t just ask people to change how they’re doing things and expect everyone to go on their merry way. Don’t leave them wondering what’s different. Show them how the new methodologies are changing things for the better, so they can see the clear path to success.

The Bottom Line

Struggling to sell change to the team, both upstream and downstream, is something we see all the time with our clients here at RESET. This is one of the things we regularly coach people through, and we actually use The Connection Process to do it.

The Connection Process is not just valuable for selling externally to clients — it’s also an extraordinarily valuable approach to selling ideas of change internally to team members. It helps you shift your team’s mindset from the comfort zone of old tried-and-true methods to new methods that will accelerate results.

The three steps I shared here are part of how we coach people through The Connection Process, and I encourage you to learn more about it here.