If your organization sees generative AI as a technology challenge, you're not alone.
But in the enterprise, the leading cause of project failure up to
70% of CRM deployments stall, for example, is poor user adoption.
My name is Alexandre Nevski and this is Innovation Tales.
Navigating Change one story at a time.
We share insights from leaders tackling the challenges of today's digital world.
Welcome to Innovation Tales, the podcast exploring the human
side of digital transformation.
GenAI headlines promise game changing features, but real value
still comes down to people on the ground choosing to work differently.
Smart algorithms can't help if users won't adopt them.
Just like many past CRM rollouts that run over budget and fizzled on day two.
Those flops weren't about bad software.
There were about gaps between strategy, process and personal motivation.
Today's episode tackles that gap head on.
My guest, Ryan Pollak, is a seasoned sales professional with a rich background
in the Microsoft Dynamics space.
He's passionate about the future of AI, the cloud, and
upgrading from legacy systems.
His hard won lessons will help you focus on what truly matters
and win executive backing.
Without further ado, here's my conversation with Ryan Pollak.
Ryan, welcome to the show.
Hi Alex.
Thanks for having me.
It's great to have you.
You and I, we agreed to discuss the impact of artificial intelligence
on business processes, but since we spent both a lot of time enabling
clients on customer relationship management, I didn't want to miss the
opportunity, so to say, to compare notes.
So maybe to illustrate the recurrent transformational challenges,
would you mind taking us through a particularly eventful CRM project?
Oh, absolutely Alex.
I've got a lot to pick from.
One that comes to mind recently would be a big transformation from a well-known
ERP, one of the big market players, right?
That had been implemented and customized and ingrained in processes
for the last 12 to 15 years.
And when something like that happens, and as an organization grows and processes
become entangled with technology and people become attached to their
own processes, when it comes time to consider a replacement for something
like that, it goes far beyond technology.
It goes immediately into the realm of change management, which is helping people
understand why the change is happening and how it's going to impact them, and,
why the organization is making the move.
And so in this particular case, there was an owner internally of that CRM
and there's, even more of a personal attachment, when somebody considers
something to be their baby, so to speak.
They've poured their effort and blood, sweat, and tears into this
application for such a long time.
And now you're gonna take it away from them.
There's a very personal element to that.
So in this case, very early, in the process, we had to align with the
executives of this company and say, we need you if this is going to be a success.
We cannot go into this replacing one enterprise CRM with another without having
buy-in from the executive level that you're gonna help us manage this change.
There's going to be pushback and there's going to be pain and there's
going to be a tendency to want to remake what you already have.
That's a big pitfall in any technology project.
CRM is no exception.
you want to use your target application.
If you've got great reasons for moving to it, that's fine, but you want to use
that target application as it's intended, not rebuild what you've done in the past.
And so the pain there is in helping people understand the why.
I have three kids and I can tell them to do something just like an executive could
tell their employees we're changing CRMs.
End of conversation, right?
No.
What's the first question that your kids are gonna ask?
Why?
Every time employees are no different.
Why are we changing?
We're changing because our business has changed or our technology is outdated.
We're falling behind our competition.
We've maybe we've acquired additional business units that have other
requirements, whatever that may be.
That why is critical and it's only the second step right in, in
this change management process.
It's not just, yeah, we are changing.
But, and here's why we're changing organizationally, that starts
to frame the picture right?
But then how does it impact each individual personally?
and that's, maybe a topic for further on in the podcast.
But for this individual use case and this individual story, the executives aligned
very early on and said, we understand.
And they were pressing us to control budget and to control timeline.
And the only way to do that is to make sure that we are, using our application,
our CRM Microsoft Dynamics in our case, as it's intended to be used, if we get
into customizing it to do what you do now and your people are not willing
to change their processes, the budget will extend, the timeline will extend.
the project will become custom, and we don't advise that, right?
We want to use our software, as it's intended to be used, and that's more
important now in the SaaS application world, the software as a service
cloud-based application world than ever because these applications are updated
automatically several times a year.
And the more custom you are, the more painful that can be.
So in this case, as we got the executive buy-in early, which was great.
CEO, CFO, COO, they all agreed.
We understand what you're asking for.
As soon as our consultants get into the project, they started
to get a bit of pushback and that pushback came in the form of
wanting to recreate the old system.
It's a natural thing and it is hard to avoid.
And we consistently met with leadership and reiterated the need to help us because
it's a two-way street, this kind of thing.
Any executives listening out there who are going to do a technology
project, you can't put the entire onus on your implementation partner.
It has to be a joint effort, a partnership.
And this is a great example of that.
So we continuously went back to the executive team and said, we need help.
We need help.
And eventually, we got that help in the form of having, this person relegated to
a different area of the project, they're very valuable to the organization.
They're not gonna let them go or anything like that, but they couldn't really
lead their side of it from a functional standpoint because they were so focused
on doing what they've always done.
And so we got a chance to break through that and get a fresh perspective from a
functional lead standpoint on the client side, and we're going live soon on a,
tremendous success under budget, very happy, in terms of the final work product.
And that case, it, it explains the need for a mutual partnership and
executive level change management on the client side as, as well as that
guidance from your technology partner.
Yeah, that's, also my experience.
The need for being involved throughout the initiative, is often underestimated
or maybe there's a hope that I can, just be there on the steering committee
once in a while and that'll be enough.
it's very tempting for people who are used to the existing processes to just
ask, okay, this new technology, just make it like the way we already know.
Yeah, it's so important to give everyone a path forward,
a reason to want the new state.
So besides new roles, what other tools do you have in your toolkit, to
facilitate people's to, to facilitate change management, to facilitate
the, the adoption of the To Be.
Sure.
On the partner side there, there is a lot of that, right?
We are the experts.
We do this all the time.
So any technology partner's role in implementing a business solution,
enterprise business solution, or small, medium sized business
enterpri business solution, right?
Is to provide that context in terms of best practice.
How do we see other people in your situation?
Using this application, how is the application intended to be used?
And this is a different thing than, business process re-engineering.
And there's a fine line there, where you really need a, if you need to
take a step back as an organization and say, how are we operating?
Are we doing it the right way?
Our business has changed and we're floundering in certain areas?
If you wanna take a look at that without a solution in context, you really need a
business process re-engineering firm or consultant who can take a system agnostic
view of that and say, here are the holes in your business that you need to plug.
And then once you get that desired state and process, you come then
to the technology partner and say, here's where we want to be.
Maybe you run an RFP process.
I'm not the biggest fan of RFP processes in terms of the best way to select
software, but they can be useful as long as they're properly executed.
And you go out to the vendors and you say, okay, we've baked what we want
to be when we grow up, so to speak.
and.
How are you gonna get us there?
Because that's where the technology partner is gonna help.
Now, some entities have business process re-engineering and
technology layer to them.
I tend to like to separate the two of them, to some degree.
And get a, an unbiased view of where you should be, and then
go find the right tool, right?
And so once you have that desired state in mind, then you
go find the right technology.
You go query partners, and you get demos and you get RFP responses and
you get answers to your questions.
Here's where we want to be now we have decided that, can you get us there?
and so then when it comes to us, the job is to say yes or no.
And man, I've said no.
In my 17 years doing this quite a few times, a good technology partner is
not going to, just say, oh yeah, sure.
we'll check the boxes before they understand it.
And a good story around that: I remember one early in my career and
I had been doing it for a couple years in terms of ERP and CRM, and
I walk into a conference room and one of the lead executives comes in.
I hadn't even had a chance to speak with this individual.
I had spoken to a lot of other people in the organization.
But still we had a lot to learn and we were there for discovery, right?
We were there to learn about their business and to understand the degree
of fit with our application, and could we get them to that what do
you want to be when you grow upstate?
Can we get you there?
And so the executive kind of comes in late.
And he said, I'm, he says, I'm busy.
I've only got a few minutes here, so give me your five minutes
on why I should go with you.
And it froze me for a minute and I thought, to in internally, right?
I don't know.
and then I just told him, you know what?
I don't know that you should go with us.
That's why we're here.
To figure that out, right?
And so why don't you let us go through some of the paces that we're here to do,
and then I'll come back and I'll tell you.
Either way, transparently, are we the fit?
Are we not the fit?
Is the product the fit?
Do you need to go find another partner, another platform?
Or, hey, maybe you're right, they're in our wheelhouse
where we can deliver success.
Because the last thing that a good technology partner wants
to do is to get into a project where they can't be successful.
To help in that change management, it's gotta be understanding the client's need.
And then, helping them to use the tool as it's intended to be used, not
customizing it for whatever they might want, even if the platform doesn't fit.
Yeah, if you're starting the working relationship with
your partners for delivery non transparently, you get sales answers.
Yes, of course.
It has to be us and we can do everything.
It's just such a bad way to, to begin, on such an initiative because is
going to be so many times when you will need your partner to tell you
the truth, to tell you that, look, this is not going to be that easy.
You're gonna waste a lot of budget on something that
doesn't provide that much value.
If since the beginning you're just setting the tone, like I don't want you to hear
any difficult answers, just give me the No, that's a terrible way to to start.
So let's expand now.
as, as we wanted to talk about the impact of artificial intelligence technologies
that have been coming to market.
So staying within functions that deal with, customers.
So whether it's, your customer service department, your sales team, et cetera.
From what you've been seeing in the last year or two, what has been some
of the capabilities that they have been looking to get now that there is
additional technical, features available?
So AI is still on the horizon in many regards.
It's here, but the true final capabilities or what's to come are unknown to anybody.
it's evolving every day.
And, you go look at the roadmaps for the major.
SaaS software, CRM players, Microsoft Dynamics included.
You'll see when you go through their update release notes.
Every one of them is chockfull of AI.
Microsoft Co-Pilot is what they call co-pilot, this co-pilot, that co-pilot
for sales, co-pilot for customer service.
So the short answer is that, it is completely evolving now.
That said, there are concrete use cases that are emerging.
And you mentioned customer service, for instance, you can have somebody enter a
support case in a portal, and that support case is automatically created in Dynamics
365 customer service, whatever customer service application you may be using.
I can't speak for others, really, I'm more Microsoft focused, but
in, in the Microsoft case, the AI may suggest solutions right out of
the gate with no human interaction.
It may also help a human be more efficient at their jobs and suggest potential
solutions for them as opposed to searching knowledge bases or Googling something
or going through documentation, to more efficiently service that customer and
more efficiently use your employee's time.
Now with that comes a little bit of fear on the employee side.
And this goes back to the change management piece
of, am I gonna be replaced?
Do you need me anymore?
And the answer typically right now is, yes, humans are still absolutely required.
Now, can you gain some efficiencies?
Absolutely.
and one, one of my mantras with AI in the way that it's changing businesses
is AI may not be coming for your job as a customer service rep, but
somebody using AI efficiently maybe coming for your job because they're
gonna be better at what they do.
And so systems absolutely enable that.
And where I see a lot of a lot of miss there is going purely feature led in terms
of what can the software application do.
Whereas nowadays, I think the technology roadmap for the organization that
you're partnering with for CRM is tremendously more important because
there's so much that's going to emerge in terms of AI and how you can use it.
That a small shop who might have every feature that a door manufacturer
pick your specific industry needs and they can check all the boxes.
But maybe they're a 10 person company and they don't have the technological
foundation to take advantage of some of this artificial intelligence
that's coming down the pike.
I think that conversation has become, less feature led and more
what's your technology foundation?
You've got all kinds of no code, low code out there.
You don't need as many developers crunching through code to, to
get you where you need to be.
And understanding the technology foundation of your application
is more important than ever.
On the sales side, you can use outta the box features to tell a sales person,
Hey, Alex was interested in buying your widget, whatever you're selling.
You haven't contacted him in seven days.
Do you wanna send him an email?
And that can be presented to a sales rep, in a UI.
And when you log in, it's, Hey, go call Alex.
he wanted to buy something.
I could tell by his emails that he wanted to buy something.
The AI is telling you this.
And that goes back to change management, where we talked about you gotta let
people know, Hey, we're changing.
You gotta let people know, here's why we're changing and this, we're beating
our competitors, we're falling behind.
But the third part of that change management is how is it
going to affect me, Ryan, who's trying to sell Alex my widget?
And so I've been doing it in a notebook just fine for 20 years.
I've been managing in an Excel for the last five years, and
I'm still doing just fine.
But when you explain then to Ryan, if you haven't contacted Alex and you
want to prioritize who you're talking to, the AI will help you do that.
It'll help you create more sales.
It'll help you close more business, and it'll put more money in your pocket.
That's the old WIIFM, if you ever heard of it.
It's one of my favorite radio stations, right?
What's in it for me?
And that's as human as it gets, it is on a very individual level: okay,
great that we're changing on the organizational level and we want
to compete in all those things.
But what about me?
Yeah.
How is it going to affect me as well?
It's gonna help you close more sales and put more money in your pocket.
And here's how that conversation has to happen internally, because
you're not gonna have every sales rep in your company sitting on
demos and making a CRM decision.
You ever try to get five friends to agree on where to go to dinner.
It'll never happen.
That decision has to happen on the executive level, but then the executives
have to push down to the individuals using the software: here's why and here's how
it's going to affect you as a person.
And AI is a big part of that.
Every employee should want to leverage AI because you, you will fall behind
competitively if you don't, right?
There could be someone 20 years younger with less experience who comes in and
can do your job better because they're open to change and they're open to using
the tools that are available to them.
That goes back to that internal change part of it.
And there's definitely the pressure stay, to remain competitive, to
make sure that you use the tools to augment your productivity.
I've also been hearing other patterns that, benefit employees.
I've heard for example.
quite a few instances or examples where we humans are not that great on doing
repetitive tasks that require constant focus and, to ensure quality be always,
a hundred percent, depending on the task.
But if you have lots of smaller tasks, at some point, actually, the
artificial intelligence can be an amazing partner before you complete
the case or whatever you're working on, to have a look over the shoulder
very quickly, give you feedback without involving any managers or anything.
Just yeah, you've ticked all the boxes that are mentioned in the SOP, so I
think there is also the other design patterns or other patterns of how
employees benefit, besides the one we've mentioned already, or the one
where you get, uh, assistance when you're doing research because you know
you're processing maybe, there's a lot of data to go through, like a knowledge
base and the artificial intelligence of course, a lifesaver in these cases.
And also when it's, giving you reassurance that you've followed the
process, you've tick ticked all the boxes.
So is that how you see artificial intelligence implementation
in current business processes?
It's around the current workforce, or do you see that we're already,
approaching a time when we are going to have, artificial intelligence
that take over full functions.
I think that it's inevitable that artificial intelligence will take over
full functions, and then hopefully allow humans to get out of those
mundane, repetitive tasks, and focus on more creative value added type tasks.
But it's important, in my opinion, to divide artificial intelligence.
There's really two big groups, in my opinion.
You've got tactical, artificial intelligence, is what I call it.
I am not, I don't know, what the industry would call it, but that is, okay, hey,
I wanna write this email and I want to have AI revise it for me, right?
Or I want to, answer a question and I don't want to type this
whole paragraph out and I'm not quite sure how to articulate it.
So I'm gonna put it in ChatGPT and let it do it for me, and I'm
gonna copy and paste it, right?
I. That is a tactical efficiency gain, right?
Which is a, certainly an important part of AI.
And you better be ready to do this guys.
If you're not willing to take this on, you're gonna fall behind in
terms of performance against your, colleagues and your competitors.
So you've gotta leverage that tactical part of it, get an answer
for something, write an email, all of those things, populate a
spreadsheet, create a PowerPoint, all of these type tactical things.
But from a business and enterprise perspective or a C-level perspective,
there's the business insights and the decision making that comes with letting
machine learning and AI that is leveraging your data, drive your business decisions.
That's much different than a tactical use case for an individual employee.
And I saw a great cartoon.
it was a couple guys in a shirt and tie, and one of 'em is clearly the boss.
he says, Hey, so and so we need AI, make it happen.
And the other guy says, okay, what do you want to use it for?
And the boss says, I don't know, but we need it immediately.
And I hear that, it's reality, right?
It's real life.
And so we get it all the time, I wanna use AI tomorrow.
What's your current landscape like?
We've got data in Excel, we've got it in Outlook, we've got it in notebooks.
We've got it in this antiquated on-premise ERP system.
Okay.
You can use the tactical side of AI.
You're not ready for business analytics and driving enterprise level decisions
yet, because your data's a mess.
You cannot do it as an organization until you aggregate your data in an organized
model and you get it in the cloud.
As we're about to wrap up, I usually ask a couple of questions at the end.
So one is, what is a book tool or habit has made a particularly significant
impact on yourself in the last 12 months?
Prioritize your own day.
Don't let your Outlook inbox do that for you.
And this is important.
I read a book called Essentialism, talks about making conscious decisions.
If you don't make a decision, the universe, so to speak,
will make it for you.
So if you come in and into your day, most people typically have a
handful of very high value tasks.
Here are the things that I need to do today that are really going to impact
my, my performance, help me succeed at what I'm trying to accomplish.
And so you need to actively choose to do those, not start at
the top of your Outlook inbox.
And start going through all of the meaningless stuff, and maybe you
finally get to the important one.
And a key part of that is turn your notifications off.
That's what I do.
Because what happens is, even if you prioritize your day, like I do, I've
got a list, and I say, here's, here are the things I need to accomplish first.
And I try to do those, and then I get to the less value added stuff.
If you get an Outlook popup, it's human nature.
What are you gonna do on that Outlook popup?
You're gonna click it.
grab your attention.
Of
That's right.
and you're gonna get sucked into something less value added, right?
You're, this is not as important of a task, but you just let that
pop up dictate what you're doing.
Next thing you do, you're going down a rabbit hole that really
isn't all that important.
So I turn Outlook popups off.
I don't have Outlook open all the time.
Whatever your email application you use, most people use Outlook and
I work through my important stuff.
I open up Outlook and I go through all the rest of the noise.
And I think it's tremendously important.
You decide what's important for your day.
don't let you know a pop up or an email list do it for you.
I completely agree with that one.
And the final question, we've talked about many things that are changing of course,
and change management to deal with it.
But is there maybe one thing that you would expect to remain
unchanged 10 years from now?
We talked about people all day, and I think the idea that you have
to put yourself in other people's shoes and you have to communicate.
My favorite saying is the problem with communica, the main problem
with communication is the illusion that it's already happened.
People assume that the person you're talking to knows what
you know and vice versa.
This is big in technology, guys.
If myself as a business, so systems solutions expert is going to assume that
this CFO who's doing it for the first time in 10 years knows what I know.
I'm gonna miss most of the stuff.
You have to start foundationally.
But likewise, we need that same feedback from the organization as a business
partner where, I don't know what you know about your business, and I hear all
the time we're just like everybody else.
We just want the basics.
Never have two companies implemented, CRM, or ERP for that matter, any
other system exactly the same way.
There's always nuance.
It could be industry, it could be the way that your business operates,
but what would I expect not to change is that human element that
we've been talking about today.
It's the importance of communication and the importance of putting
yourself in other people's shoes and understanding what motivates them.
Not we're changing systems.
It's my way or the highway.
You have to go deeper than that as a leader.
Here's why.
Here's how it affects you.
What are your concerns?
Here's how we're gonna empower you to use the tool.
Here's how we're going to provide constant care and feeding for you to
continue to grow and use this tool and help you thrive as a person.
That human element's not going anywhere.
Absolutely Ryan, it's been an absolute pleasure.
Likewise, Alex, great talk.
Thank you so much for having me.
Ryan reminded us that every technology initiative, whether a shiny GenAI pilot
or a full scale Dynamics rollout, lives or dies on three human checkpoints: a
clear why from leadership, an honest look at process fit versus custom nostalgia
and continuous communication that answers each employee's what's in it for me.
If you'd like to see how Ryan and his team put these principles into action
and dig into tools that help you stay self-sufficient, take a look at
their resources at Western Computer.
The link is in the description.
As always, we have more exciting topics and guest appearances lined up, so
stay tuned for more tales of innovation that inspire challenge and transform.
Until next time, peace.
Thanks for tuning in to Innovation Tales.
Get inspired, connect with other practitioners and approach the
digital revolution with confidence.
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