Change Management
Change management doesn't manage people's resistance. It manages the gap between what the company says it wants to do and what it actually keeps rewarding people for.
“Sales reps don't resist change out of habit. They resist because they earned more under the old model, and that's where your attention needs to go.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryWhy GTM change management is different
A process change in production or finance touches procedures. A process change in GTM touches the personal income of the commercial team: new qualification criteria, new territories, new quota metrics mean, for many reps, earning differently than before.
Managing this type of change requires economic transparency: showing reps, with concrete simulations, how the new model would pay them compared to the old one, instead of just communicating the strategic vision behind the change.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: communicating a commercial process change only in terms of strategic vision, without explicitly addressing the economic impact on individual reps, letting them calculate it themselves and draw the worst conclusions.
Second mistake: implementing the change with too short a transition plan, without a dual-incentive period (old and new model) that lets reps adapt without an immediate income collapse.
Practical Application
A company changes the quota criterion from total revenue to incremental ARR without communicating the economic impact to reps: sales team turnover rises to 34% in the following six months. In a comparable company that introduces the same change with 2 quarters of dual incentive and individual economic simulations for each rep, turnover stays at 9% in the same period.