Build Your Own LEVERS Model

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Create a comprehensive change plan using the LEVERS.
  
• Build a prescriptive roadmap to execute your LEVERS strategies.
  
• Describe how to apply the LEVERS model to lead sustainable change.
  
• Build your own LEVERS model to drive successful change in your organization.
  

It’s one thing to dream up multiple strategies to help change. It’s another to turn them into real change drivers! For several reasons, it’s helpful to build a LEVERS playbook and execution roadmap.

Cocreate Your Strategy

Not only is it important to identify strategies for each of the levers, it’s also crucial to create agreement and buy-in throughout the process. Instead of building a plan for change on your own, enlist key stakeholders and influencers. Who should be involved in the change plan for it to be a sure success? Consider gathering leaders, representatives of the impacted group, and anyone who will be involved in the training, comms, and enablement activities to build the working plan. 

Work with this team to identify the strategies that make sense for the group and find activities they’re willing to help execute. Create a playbook of strategies for each lever for the group to use throughout the change initiative. Some strategies, such as team huddles, floor walking, and team-specific comms and training, can be used by managers of smaller teams at their own discretion. Others can be used at scale across the entire impacted group. 

Discover, Roll Out, and Optimize Your Change Initiatives

Next, work with the group to plot the identified activities on an execution timeline. Consider different phases of the change initiatives, namely the Discover, Rollout, and Optimize phases. 

Once the activities are on a roadmap, it’s easier to understand where to allocate people and resources. The roadmap shows where you need people’s participation (especially time-starved leaders); where you might run thin on resources and need help; and when to begin activities to meet deadlines. Once you have the roadmap, start assigning roles and responsibilities, and enlist the help of key leaders and influencers on the team. 

Let’s look at a case study from Cloud Kicks that illustrates how the LEVERS model works. 

Managing Change at Cloud Kicks

Cloud Kicks is a personalized apparel company based out of Oakland, CA. It’s a small company that has experienced rapid growth over the past couple of years. 

As Cloud Kicks continues to acquire new customers and expand its product offerings, the company needs to consistently manage its sales process, simplify order creation, and create a more well-rounded and informed view of its customers.

To tackle these challenges, Cloud Kicks wants to roll out Salesforce across its 60-person sales organization. 

Cloud Kicks’s sales reps currently maintain opportunity and pipeline data in spreadsheets, so moving to a CRM platform is a big change. 

Candace Evans, who has been with the company for several years, is tasked with ensuring that the Salesforce implementation runs smoothly and delivers the value Cloud Kicks expects. As someone who has served in multiple roles at the company (first in customer support, then as a sales rep, and now a sales manager), Candace is confident that she can build excitement around the rollout and help people succeed using Salesforce. Let’s look at how Candace uses the LEVERS model to lead sustainable change adoption at Cloud Kicks.

Clarify the Change and Diagnose Barriers

Candace brings together a cross-functional team of sales reps and leaders for a change management workshop. The purpose of the session is to:

• Align on a shared vision of success for the rollout.
  
• Identify key changes that will result from transitioning to Salesforce.
  
• Use the LEVERS model to build a roadmap of change management strategies.
  

The Cloud Kicks Team

The team starts by identifying their SMART objectives for the implementation. Their primary goal is to achieve 90% adoption, as measured by the percentage of reps who manage their opportunities from lead to close in Salesforce by the end of the next quarter.

Next, Candace uses the LEVERS model to guide the group through an exercise to identify the possible challenges from a leadership, ecosystem, values, enablement, rewards, and structure perspective. The group discusses previous challenges in past change initiatives. These include getting leaders to model new ways of working for their teams, and the need for more frequent communication during times of change.

With a solid understanding of their goals and potential barriers, Candace and the team are ready to build their LEVERS model to guide the organization through change. They work together to come up with strategies for each of the levers, and then divide accountability among the group to execute the plan.

Let’s look at how the team taps into social, individual, and structural sources of influence to make the change successful.

Pull the Social LEVERS

Leadership

During the workshop, Candace agrees to lead the execution of the team’s leadership engagement strategies. From her years of experience at Cloud Kicks, Candace knows it’s important to get leaders onboard first. She sets up 1:1 meetings with leaders to provide them with information about the rollout. She also urges them to cascade the information to their teams in their weekly sales meetings. She reiterates the importance of managers modeling new behaviors by running every sales meeting from Salesforce once the system goes live. Her encouragement works! They begin using the mantra, “If it’s not in Salesforce, it didn’t happen!” as they discuss adoption with their teams. 

Ecosystem

Darrell agrees to chair an “Influencer Network” made up of key opinion leaders across the sales organization to publicize the rollout. With Candace and the rest of the team’s help, he assembles the network and conducts a kickoff meeting. He uses the network group to gather input across the organization to understand resistance or concerns that the team can address. The members of the Influencer Network are invaluable to the project, building awareness and grass-roots support for the change.

Pull the Individual LEVERS

Values

Throughout the workshop, the team discusses how to build a compelling case for usage to promote Salesforce adoption. How can it make a day-in-the-life of a rep easier? How can it help people reach their number? Crafting the messaging around these key points is essential to making the change stick.

The team works with managers to understand what about Salesforce will resonate with their teams. What do they care most about? What were their biggest pain points in the pre-Salesforce world? They use this information to develop messaging that answers, “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFMs) for various stakeholder groups. They provide managers with talking points specific to those WIIFMs for use in their team meetings.

Enablement

Melinda works with the Sales Enablement team to develop real-life scenarios for training. She uses her experience to provide the training team with realistic scenarios so that training is as relevant as possible. 

Pull the Structural LEVERS

Rewards

There’s no shortage of healthy competition at Cloud Kicks. As the team brainstorms strategies for the rewards lever, they decide to build a set of user adoption dashboards to encourage employees to use the new tools.

Armando works with the team to define user adoption metrics. He builds custom dashboards to recognize reps who use the tool and adopt new behaviors in their everyday work. A leaderboard on the home page displays the reps that use Salesforce consistently to manage the full lifecycle of their sales opportunities. In her 1:1 meetings, Candace asks managers to recognize the Salesforce Rock Stars at the top of the leaderboard at the end of their all-hands calls.

Structure

Finally, Terry updates all sales-related process documentation, onboarding guides, policies, and procedures to ensure they reflect the new workflows in Salesforce.

Getting Cloud Kicks ready for the Salesforce rollout is no small feat, but with the partnership and help of folks from across the organization, the change management team builds and executes a change management strategy that sets the organization up for success. You can too!  We hope this module has given you some useful tips and tools for managing any type of change in your organization.