Every meaningful project I’ve worked on created friction. Every single one.

A new quoting process meant reps couldn’t discount freely. A CRM redesign meant managers had to learn new pipeline stages. A portal launch meant the inside sales team lost the phone calls that made them feel essential. In each case, the change was objectively good — and in each case, people pushed back. Not because they disagreed with the goal, but because the change disrupted something that was working for them personally.

Change and friction aren’t opposites. They’re inseparable. If you’re introducing change without encountering friction, the change probably isn’t meaningful enough to matter.

Friction is information, not failure

When friction shows up, the instinct is to treat it as a problem. More often, it’s telling you something useful: what people value, what they’re afraid of losing, where the real dependencies are.

A rep who resists discount governance might be telling you that their compensation is built around closing fast, and the approval process adds two hours to a workflow they’ve optimized over years. A CS manager pushing back on structured handoffs might be telling you they’re already overloaded. Listen to friction instead of dismissing it and you learn where the change needs to be adjusted — not abandoned, adjusted.

flowchart TD
    C["Meaningful change"] --> F["Friction appears"]
    F --> L{"How do you treat it?"}
    L -->|"Dismiss it"| R["Resistance goes underground<br/>Low adoption later"]
    L -->|"Listen to it"| I["Learn what people value<br/>and fear losing"]
    I --> A["Adjust the method<br/>without abandoning the goal"]
    A --> P["Early proof<br/>and stronger adoption"]

Every change has a cost to someone

Pricing governance takes away discretion. Before CPQ, a senior rep had full control over pricing. That authority was part of their identity. The company gains margin visibility. The rep loses autonomy. Both things are true.

Process documentation exposes informal power. In every organization, some people’s influence comes from knowing things others don’t. Systematize that knowledge into a CRM or guided selling flow and you make the organization less dependent on those individuals. That’s good for the business. It can feel threatening to the person whose value was tied to being the one who knows.

Visibility creates accountability. Building dashboards that make operations visible is one of the highest-value things you can do. It’s also politically sensitive — visibility means performance is now measurable. Automation changes who matters. A portal that lets customers check order status eliminates the need for the support team to answer those calls. Nobody loses their job, but the shift in what they do and how they’re valued is real.

None of these reactions are irrational. Ignoring them doesn’t make them go away. It makes them go underground, where they show up as passive resistance, slow adoption, or quiet sabotage.

The size of the friction tells you the size of the change

If you’re implementing a CPQ system and nobody is pushing back, one of two things is happening: you’ve done extraordinary change management, or the implementation isn’t actually changing anything meaningful. The tool is new. The way people work is the same.

The absence of friction should make you nervous, not comfortable.

You can’t eliminate friction. You can make it productive.

Name it. When you acknowledge that a change is going to be hard for specific people in specific ways, you earn trust. “I know this approval process adds a step to your workflow. Here’s why it’s there and here’s how we’ve designed it to be as fast as possible.” That’s a different conversation than “here’s your new approval process, please comply.”

Involve the people affected before the decision is made — not as a courtesy, but because they know things you don’t. Separate the goal from the method: people rarely argue against “we need faster quoting.” They argue against the specific implementation. Hold firm on the goal while being flexible on the method.

Show results early. The first rep who sends a quote in 30 minutes instead of three days becomes your best advocate. The first dealer who self-serves and closes without calling anyone becomes proof that the change was worth the discomfort.

The projects that failed treated friction as an obstacle to overcome. They pushed through resistance, launched the system, declared victory, and moved on. Six months later, adoption was low and the old process was running in parallel.

The projects that succeeded had more friction, not less — because they were attempting deeper change. But the friction was addressed, not avoided. People were involved. Concerns were incorporated. Results were shown early enough that skeptics could see the value before they were asked to fully commit.

If nobody is uncomfortable, nothing is changing. If everyone is uncomfortable and nobody understands why, the change won’t stick. The space between those two is where good consulting lives.