Process Adoption: How To Solve The Dilemma
Process adoption is a tricky issue that plagues most marketing agencies.
To make matters worse, searching for help does not bring up a lot of useful information.
It took me 3 tries on Google to find something that wasn’t related to Product Adoption or Adoption Marketing (SaaS is ruining everything!).
What I finally found wasn’t terrible, but it was heavily focused on getting people to adopt the process management software the author of the article was selling.
If good info is so hard to find on this topic, is it really a big problem?
Story time:
I started my marketing career at OMG Commerce.
At the time, they were a $1.5M agency with a split focus of local business (Online Marketing Giant, or OMG) and ecommerce (OMG Commerce). (They’ve since grown to $7M+, having hit the Inc 5000 list 3 times, and only focus on ecomm).
They were SUPER process-driven and were always developing and improving their task lists to tighten up their processes and subsequent service delivery.
I remember the walls of tasks I frequently saw in front of me that caused me to feel a sense of overwhelm and anxiety.
Admittedly, these were generally easy tasks that could just be knocked out quickly if focused one-by-one, but the whole list was always daunting.
I felt like I was just bad at my job (full transparency, I wasn’t great), but remember seeing a highly-respected coworker (he’s still there!) open his project management software in front of me and he had months of tasks that were unchecked.
I went back to my desk and removed the filters I had on my software and saw that a lot of my coworkers just did the work and didn’t get bogged down by the task lists. They just ignored them!
I concluded that task lists were “the man” and they were just trying to keep me down. I’d pay attention to the tasks that were due today or overdue, but ignore anything else.
(NOTE: This was not a good conclusion and many of those coworkers are no longer with OMG Commerce, nor would they approve of such thinking. They worked hard for a long time to get people to follow their excellent processes. OMG Commerce is an excellent model in many ways for how an agency should run).
In future agencies I worked with, I noticed that, if they even had project management software, many didn’t even use it for anything beyond a checklist for complex processes like Google Ads Account Setups (if they even did that).
The more I worked as a team leader (Paid Search Director, Director of Client Services, VP, Owner), though, the more I recognized the importance and value of processes.
When I needed to know the progress of a project, I should have been able to check that project’s folder, but I found myself having to ask team members for an update instead because no tasks were marked as complete.
When I needed to know a client’s budget, I would check the project management software and find… absolutely no information.
Key steps were being missed in processes and some client accounts wouldn’t even get touched every week.
Nobody knew how much time was being spent on any particular facet of their work, so we couldn’t find or address process inefficiencies.
If an account manager felt like a client was hogging too much time, there wasn’t a way to know how much time they were taking and what to do about it.
It was a pain in my butt as a leader, it caused us to provide a lower quality of service, and it actually cost us money as we didn’t understand our bandwidth or profitability. For all we knew, some clients could have been losing us money!
So what did I do about it and what can you do if you struggle with this problem?
Here’s my process adoption optimization process that I help agencies implement as part of my Agency Overhaul Program: (Note: I have added to and improved this process over the years, as you should do with any good process.)
1. Communicate the importance of processes to the whole team & express the desire to improve processes together.
There are two pieces to this. Piece A: Communicating the importance of processes. When I say “to the whole team”, I actually mean “the importance to the team”, not just that you’re communicating to the whole team.
Letting ad specialists know how their work impacts account managers (for good or bad), or vice versa, can be enlightening.
We don’t always think about how our work affects others internally, but a failure to check some boxes or share the full story can actually cause big problems for our coworkers.
An account manager may be in hot water because they told a client that “we haven’t done that thing you asked yet”, when the account manager actually did the thing and didn’t mark the task as complete. Then, if they tell the client that they were wrong and the thing was actually done, the agency now looks like one who doesn’t communicate internally.
On the flip side, if the account manager never communicated that the thing needed to be done, it’s totally on them, but the ad specialist is the one with the target on their back.
If a sales rep promises a Google Ads setup in a week, they’re just thinking about getting the sale, not about the mess they’ve caused for specialists and account managers alike.
In all of the above situations, the leadership looks bad to the client because they can’t get their team to communicate properly, follow processes, or fulfill on their promises.
Piece B is expressing the desire to work together on this. By getting the team’s help, you’re showing them the importance of their input and increasing the likelihood of their buy-in.
This is essential to increasing process adoption.
2. Review the relevant processes with each team (all of that team’s members, if possible) and gather input on how it could be easier to follow.
This has the nice benefit of removing excuses from your team members, but it can also be highly informative as to what you may have been asking that was either not necessary or reasonable.
Don’t let them remove essential elements, but you may be able to restructure the way the task is telling them it needs to be done.
For example, if you have a task list for a Google Ads account setup (I use this example a lot) and you have individual tasks for adding geo-targets, setting geo-targeting to “presence only”, creating audiences, excluding audiences, and excluding demographics…
You could, instead, just have a task for “Setup Campaign Targeting” and include all of the steps in the task description.
Experts will often ignore task lists with too many little steps that they always do anyway because they’re good at the task, but there should be reminders in there.
If something gets missed a few times, it gets added back in as a standalone task.
Going through the processes with each team should allow for them to leave the things that they’re more likely to forget as individual tasks and minimize on the unecessary detail with the things they’re not likely to miss or forget.
Don’t make the changes in these meetings! You’re just getting their input for now.
Be sure to take notes or, better yet, record and transcribe the meetings, as you’ll want the words of your team members for the next step…
3. Compile the data from each team, review, and make adjustments.
In addition to understanding what will make it easier for each team to follow processes, you should be looking for common themes across all of the feedback.
Honestly, the easiest thing to do is just dump all of the data into ChatGPT and ask it for common themes (you could do this by team and then for all of it, for better insights), but you can filter it however you want.
As mentioned earlier, you’ll probably see experts saying they want fewer tasks. You may also see account managers wanting more simplicity, whereas newer team members, specialists, and some admins may want more detail and specificity.
Looking at feedback trends by team can show you how the people doing the work see the problems with the processes, whereas looking at it in aggregate can show you how everyone sees the processes. It may also be helpful to sort the feedback by seniority as a further category under the team segmentation, as that can play a big role in process adoption, too.
4. Hold trainings with each team to explain the changes
These trainings should be relatively short, since you just had meetings in which you went over the processes with each team. The focus of these trainings is to show what you changed, explain your reasoning behind anything you didn’t change, and to re-iterate the spirit of each process (what it should be doing).
5. Communicate to the whole team that changes have been made, so it’s time to follow the processes.
This is where you share, in an all-hands meeting, by email, in a video, or whatever, that you’ve all worked together to make some great changes to the processes.
The spirit of each process was kept intact, but they should all be easier to follow now and it was thanks to the team’s input.
Now, with all that work behind us, it’s time to follow the processes.
Tell them what will happen if they successfully follow the processes for the next 30 days (e.g. pizza party?).
Tell them what will happen if they don’t follow the processes (e.g. reminder, warning, forced consumption of reality television).
At the end of the day, you’ve all worked to improve your processes with the goal of making them easier to follow, so it would be really frustrating if all that work was for nothing.
You’ve got a business to run and the processes are there to make sure it runs smoothly. They exist to improve the client experience first, but also to improve the employee experience and they only do this if followed.
So make sure they know the benefits and the consequences of not following the processes.
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All the best,
-Ryan Baker
Founder, Kingly Consulting