How do you get them to eat sushi?

Why don’t shared services leaders focus on marketing? First, the belief among most is that the facts should speak for themselves—what’s not to like about saving substantial cost, or obtaining faster turnaround, or leveraging a corporate platform to free up vital management resources? Second, the leadership composition typically (and understandably) is missing sales and marketing talent. With a focus on implementation and execution, staffing the team with so-called softer marketing, training and communication skills is not a priority.

However, “build it and they will come” is not a viable approach to achieve shared services scale in most organizations. Business line stakeholders may not perceive a burning platform for change, fear loss of control, believe that their back offices are too integral to the creation of their profit margin, have other options such as outsourcing on their own, or remember a similar initiative way back when that, in their minds, was a dismal failure.

Think of selling shared services as getting friends to eat sushi. While the ingredients, save a few, are familiar to the Western palate, it’s the combination and the presentation that can be a bit scary to a meat and potatoes man. But there are methods to overcome resistance that are easily applied to shared services expansion.