How to help your clients understand the value of OCM in 5 easy steps
As an experienced Implementation Partner, you know your clients can benefit from leveraging Organizational Change Management (OCM) during their engagements.
The challenge is that your clients don’t want to pay for training or communications related to OCM.
Sound familiar? You aren’t alone. Many SaaS clients ask their Partners for OCM services at the outset of their relationship. They recognize most organizations need support to adopt the processes and UI changes from rolling out a product like ServiceNow.
Yet, many Partners find OCM is one of the first items stripped from a statement of work (SoW) to lower the overall cost of the engagement. Even when OCM services make it into the SoW, the activities related to successful OCM implementation, such as training and stakeholder engagement (which carry the heaviest weight towards the end of an engagement), may be slashed when clients determine the engagement is running over budget.
If this is happening to you and you’re finding your clients, more often than not, decide they don’t want to pay for OCM, you don’t have to give up and give in. Instead, it’s likely you are not clearly communicating how the OCM work supports the success of the implementation.
By the end of this article, you will feel more confident in communicating the value of OCM to your clients so they find the budget for it and keep it in the SoW.
If you still need help, we’re here with resources that can ensure your entire team is well-versed in the importance of OCM and comfortable conveying that information to your clients.
How to address the problem
So, how can you convince a client that spending money on OCM and related services is in their best interest? It’s all about demonstrating how OCM will help your client move their business forward.
According to Gartner, half of all change initiatives within organizations fail. In fact, only 34 percent of them are considered a success. Your clients don’t need to be another statistic.
Follow these five steps to ensure your clients understand and recognize the value of including OCM services as part of their engagement with you.
1. Demonstrate OCM can help clients improve their reputation.
First, you need to ensure the client knows effective OCM will make them look good to the public and their internal teams. OCM will improve their internal reputation, which can lead to greater retention and more engagement from your talented team members. Outwardly, OCM can bolster their public reputation, making them more appealing for recruiting and marketing purposes.
A well-managed OCM rollout includes effective organizational communication – upward, downward, and outward. Everyone from the highest executive levels to internal associates to clients needs to be in the loop throughout the change process. When done correctly, this will increase internal confidence in leadership / management. By default, this will also improve the reputation of every team within all levels of the organization.
2. Integrate stakeholder management and OCM activities into the overall engagement.
OCM activities should not be done separately from the rest of the work in your engagement. Instead, an OCM perspective should be involved in all aspects of the engagement and considered a common thread.
It’s your job to ensure your clients and stakeholders understand how OCM relates to their teams’ overall work and success. This will improve the employee experience while ensuring that OCM remains at the forefront of the entire engagement.
3. Facilitate conversations around the client’s budget flexibility.
The flexibility matrix refers to the iron triangle of scope, schedule, and budget. As the common saying goes, pick two out of three – fast, quick, or cheap. It is a common expectation projects cannot entail all three.
Use the time during kickoff workshops to facilitate conversations around your client’s flexibility matrix to discover how flexible (or not) they are in each area as it relates to software quality and employee experience.
This conversation will be helpful to refer to later to ensure decision-making throughout the engagement is always aligned with your client’s values and priorities. You can also refer to the conversation if priorities shift or the client becomes more or less flexible in one or more areas.
4. Offer scaled-down options for OCM.
In some cases, OCM must be slimmed down for the sake of a timeline or budget. If that happens, offer your client scaled-down options that can take less time to create and could be an OCM minimal viable product (MVP).
This is a perfect opportunity to demonstrate stakeholder engagement and change management do not require an all-or-nothing approach. And fortunately for you, we have done the work of scaling OCM for you. We offer a scalable OCM toolkit that can be used to help your clients benefit from OCM at any size.
5. Educate all team members on the value of OCM.
Finally, ensure all of your team members across departments, from sales to delivery, know and can articulate the value of OCM. They should all be equipped with key talking points about the importance of OCM to help clients understand the ramifications of cutting spending in this area.
Not sure how to train different teams on the importance of OCM? No problem! We’ve put together training and upskilling workshops to solve this problem for companies like yours. Take a look at our services to see how we can help educate your team on the value of OCM for your clients.
Conclusion
OCM services are essential for organizations that care about adoption, employee experience, and overall successful engagements. Therefore, it’s vital for you to be able to communicate the significance of OCM to your clients so they keep OCM services in their budget.
We know it can be a challenge to figure out the best way to convey valuable information about OCM to clients, and we’re here to help! Schedule a call to discuss how SkyPhi can help position your team to communicate the value of OCM to your clients.