You're facing resistant stakeholders in a digital strategy meeting. How can you win them over effectively?

To convince reluctant stakeholders in a digital strategy meeting: 1. Active Listening : Demonstrate respect by genuinely listening to their concerns. 2. Building Trust : Use their insights to build trust and strengthen relationships. 3. Addressing Concerns : Directly respond to each concern, showing how the strategy mitigates risks and provides clear benefits. Using Lewin's Change Management Model can help. By "unfreezing" stakeholders' preconceptions through understanding, introducing "change" with clear strategies, and "refreezing" with demonstrated benefits, one can effectively gain stakeholder buy-in.

Actively listen to their concerns, acknowledge them, and demonstrate how the digital strategy directly addresses those concerns. Use data and examples to illustrate the potential benefits and positive impact on their work.

Focus on data-driven insights. Quantify the potential benefits of the digital strategy, emphasizing increased efficiency, enhanced customer engagement, and revenue growth.

Share concise, relevant case studies highlighting tangible benefits: increased efficiency, cost savings, or improved customer experiences. Quantify results and relate successes to stakeholders' specific concerns.

Use your competitors. If there are things they have done that are clearly working, don't just present them and say "hey, we have to do this too". Unpack the strategic intent of those tactics, often being analyzed as a whole vs individually, and then frame that as something to emulate or even leap-frog with the tactics that work best for our brand/business.

This requires maturity and often involves inviting questions / concerns with an open mind. The way each opinion is managed by carefully reviewing and addressing concerns or view points is very important and comes with experience. I have often seen teams inviting dialogues but not open to accept opinions - and this can be very counterproductive. If a dialogue is invited, it should be conducted in all openness and sometimes its Ok to just say - we have not thought about this, but we will work on it and share our response to this view soon. Having such dialogues with preconceived notions is another thing to be avoided as stakeholders can quickly realize that it is being done as a mere formality. This ultimately distances them from the project!

Acknowledge their concerns, highlighting the benefits of the digital strategy. Share relatable success stories and data-driven insights. Facilitate open discussion, addressing their questions and fostering collaboration towards a shared vision.

Encouraging candor is the start to fruitful conversation. Sharing the problems and solutions as a team helps everyone understand and believe in the campaign. The worst thing that can happen is someone keeping quiet about the potential problems that might happen.

Offer tailored training sessions demonstrating the digital strategy's relevance to their specific roles and goals. Highlight immediate benefits like improved efficiency or cost reduction to address their concerns and gain buy-in.

Pilot programs are effective in winning over resistant stakeholders by: Addressing concerns with evidence. Showcasing tangible results in a controlled environment. Mitigating risks before scaling up. Fostering buy-in through collaboration. Building momentum for broader adoption. To implement effectively: Define clear objectives and metrics. Choose a focused scope. Allocate resources wisely. Communicate transparently. Evaluate and iterate based on results. By strategically using pilot programs, you can turn resistance into enthusiasm and pave the way for a successful digital strategy implementation.

If these are folks you know beforehand that may have some hesitations to the ideas you're presenting, one of the best strategies is to talk with them beforehand. Ask good questions to what their motivations are "at the end of the day", what hesitations they may have with your strategy and position yourself as an ally to their cause, and empathetic to their concerns. Showing at least that you care enough to listen, understand and consider their concerns into your strategy goes a long way in turning these folks into allies and actually those who will help you get things approved.