Selling your Project to Employees

In our article last week, we talked about how to sell our project to executives. In this article, we’ll cover how to sell our projects to employees (non-leaders in the organization.)

When we are launching a new project, we need employee buy-in just as much as executive buy-in. While employees are not the purse-holder, they are needed to support and use the project. While executives care most about the bottom line, employees can most about how the project impacts them and their role. This doesn’t mean that employees don’t care about the bottom line; after all we get a paycheck from the organization. But, we want to understand the project’s impact on us directly.

Consider how one of our clients sells projects to their employees. Each time one of Abudi Consulting Group’s clients launches a major strategic project, they take a “road trip” with the CEO to talk about the project about to be launched. During these road trips, the CEO focuses on the organizational reason for launching the project (the bottom line approach) and Abudi Consulting Group focuses on the benefit and value of the project to the employees. This two-pronged approach to talking about the project enables for increased engagement, and therefore acceptance, of the project within the organization.

When talking about projects with employees, share how the project helps them, whether that is to do the job more effectively, reduce stress and frustration in the job, learn something new, or any other number of valuable benefits to the employee.