BRX Pro Tip: Managing Change
Stone Payton: [00:00:00] Welcome back to BRX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you. Lee, in our rules as studio partners, in our rules as client host, we do manage change. But let’s talk a little bit about managing change from a selling perspective, from a hosting perspective. Let’s just talk about the roles, and responsibilities, and the mindset associated with managing change effectively.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:27] Right. I guess I don’t know if this speaks more to our selling style or change management managing style. But for me, I always find when you’re asking someone to have a mental shift like it is when they’re working with us, because a lot of people have bought ads, or they bought some side of marketing before, and they’ve usually had to work hard in prospecting and selling. And our method doesn’t require a lot of that. And that’s a mental shift for a lot of people to really kind of grasp, but this doesn’t have to be a hard sell to ask someone to be a guest on a show. Like you don’t have to work super hard to do that. You just have to make it available to them and let them know what’s available and educate them that it’s available. Not, “Please, baby, please. Be a guest on my show.”
Lee Kantor: [00:01:21] And we’ve found that in order to make that change, they don’t have to be the hard salesperson maybe they’ve had to be historically. And it’s got to really kind of work with them and educate them in baby steps that adding all the reasons why it would be great to be a show, or how many listeners the show has, or all this information about why, why, why this show is great for them isn’t really necessary. It’s easier just to remove barriers, relieve pressure, reduce friction, lower hurdles and get them to act that way, and you’ll get more guests, and your client will be more successful. But Stone, you’re the change management guru. So, you tell me how this fits into change management.
Stone Payton: [00:02:11] Well, it’s interesting to me that you used the word removing barriers. I did back when I had something much closer to a real job, I worked for a high-end, premium-fee change management consulting firm, the last of three such firms that I worked with. And in every case, one of their primary strategies for planning and executing even large scale transformational change was all about reducing the friction and shrinking the timeline by educating people, and removing barriers, and equipping them to remove barriers. The last thing that they wanted you to do that they would recommend that you would do is try to “sell the change.”
Stone Payton: [00:02:52] And so, it’s interesting. You didn’t have to have all that education or an ankle in the business to arrive at the same point. I think you’ve hit it spot on. It’s all about removing barriers, educating, removing the friction and just kind of naturally letting it unfold. Almost creating that environment, the opportunity for what I call mutual self-discovery. And maybe there’s a little more guiding and nurturing going on on the edges than a prospective client or an existing client realizes, but you’re still kind of letting them find their own way with a little expert guidance from yourself.