Different personality types choose different career paths. Sales is a very particular career occupied by people who have the full-time job of selling other people to change. I was on a call today with five salespeople from a company that has been trying to implement a web-to-print system for months. Today was the first day that sales was involved in the process.

What a difference personality types make in change management. For months, the implementation had been stuck in customer service and middle management. There was nothing but excuses and resistance. It seems as if they were doubling down on finding every single reason why the web-to-print system would not work. Working really hard to uncover reasons for not moving forward. The sales team’s focus seemed to be exuberantly expressing all the customers that would love this new approach to order entry. Then they started listing other challenges they were having that the system would solve simply by giving them better visibility into the workings of the plant.

Sales is a change agent. Good salespeople love change. A closed deal especially means you convinced a customer or prospect to choose your company over the status quo. The lesson here is that in every case possible, make all your change management efforts a sales-driven event. This does not mean sales has to literally drive the project forward but lean on them to help you sell it. The resistance engine inside print businesses seems to hold the line on all topics except sales. Because print businesses are in fact businesses that require profit to survive, resistance seems to melt for only one reason—sales. I believe literally all your change management efforts can be elegantly and believably tied back to sales. With that tie you can then utilize your sales team to sell the change internally.