Marketing Your ERP Project Internally: How to Build Buy-In Before Go-Live

On one of our projects, everyone who turned up to the kickoff meeting was handed a jacket with the project's name on it.

It sounds like a small thing. But when those people went back to their teams, everyone could see who was on the project. And the people wearing them, mostly our change champions, felt looked after.

That's project marketing: promoting your ERP project inside your own business the way you'd launch a product. It goes well beyond the usual ERP communication plan of a kickoff email and a training invite. The biggest mistake we see is starting it far too late.

"People think, right, it's three months before go-live, time to think about testing and training and getting people on board," says Keith Dunkinson, our founder. "Well, you've probably already lost them if you've not been bringing them on the journey with you."

Here's what bringing them on the journey looks like.

Give it a name and a look

Set up the project's branding on day one: a name, a logo, a font and a PowerPoint template everyone uses. Then add a few things people can hold, such as notebooks, pens, T-shirts or the odd jacket. Get the client's marketing team involved in designing them. It's what they do best, and it gives them a stake in the project from the start.

(Our late colleague Chris Wise had a soft spot for Comic Sans. Clare reckons it's getting cool again, and he'd be pretty stoked.)

Use the channels the business already has

Every business has its own way of getting news to people: staff-room whiteboards, a SharePoint site, a monthly town hall, the company newsletter. Plug the project into those, rather than asking everyone to come to yet another project meeting.

Start straight away, in small ways. The people who'll use the system in two years' time need to know it's coming now. If you don't control the message, it spreads anyway, and the version that spreads is usually "they're going to cut jobs and nobody's told us anything".

Your change champions are the best messengers. Pick senior people from each department, involve them from the requirements stage, and give them short presentations they can take back to their teams. About six months in, encourage them to run their own monthly team catch-up on the wins so far and what's about to change.

Make it fun, and budget for it

The kickoff is the first time most people meet the project, so make it an event: a good lunch, an escape room, a proper meal out. Then plan something social for each of the three or four big moments when the team comes together, such as conference room pilots and user acceptance testing. Most of these people are doing their day jobs as well as the project. They deserve it.

Fit it to the people in the room. Clare Morrissey, who manages change and project management for us, remembers a go-live in Egypt: "Culturally, it was harder to get everyone out to a dinner and drinks, so I took everyone to the pyramids for breakfast instead." Same team spirit, a better fit, and a great photo.

Then there's the CFO. When the bill for a team dinner gets queried, Keith has his answer ready: "Put 25 people in a room together for four hours with some food and drink. Imagine how much business gets discussed in that room. You've got 25 consultants for free for four hours." And nobody has ever sent him a timesheet for the project social.

The serious point is to set aside a project marketing budget at the start and protect it, because the crunch usually comes at testing and training. By then the contingency is spent and everyone's doing more with less, just as the project moves from the project team to the whole business. That's the worst moment to go quiet.

It helps to make project marketing a standing item on the monthly steering committee agenda, alongside data migration, reporting, security and the timeline. If it's on the agenda, it's much harder for it to quietly disappear.

Keep talking when things go red

If you publish the timeline or the project status, keep publishing it. "We're green, we're green, we're green", followed by silence, tells everyone exactly what's going on. If you wouldn't be comfortable sharing a status when it's red, don't share it when it's green either. Choose messages you can keep giving, like the number of processes in scope or milestones reached.

So who runs it?

Project marketing sits most naturally with the client's own marketing team. Ideally, someone from that team is seconded to the project, with the project manager or change manager acting as their "product owner" and telling them what needs saying. Bring HR in too. Even if HR isn't getting a new system, the project affects everyone, and HR deals with everyone.

Where it often goes wrong is the hand-over. Clare has seen an implementation partner launch a project brilliantly, then, as their consultants were phased out as planned, nobody inside the business had the time or budget to pick it up, and the messaging faded. "It doesn't happen overnight," she says. "You've got to build it and build it, and it's got to be intentional."

That's the gap we fill. When we run a project, we make sure marketing and HR have a footprint on it from kickoff, that it's on the steering agenda and in the budget, and that it keeps going through go-live and beyond. It's part of our ERP change management support, because, as Keith puts it, "these projects are continuous cultural change."

If your project is about to start, or you're worried people aren't on board yet, get in touch. We're happy to talk it through.