Jun 29, 20219:28 AM - edited Aug 12, 202111:19 AM
Key Advisor | Diamond Partner
Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?
It’s a tale as old as time (well, since the 1990’s) - the IT team and the sales team not communicating effectively. But when they do get on, the combination can really light a fire under the growth of the business. How have you overcome (or seen people overcome) the traditional barriers to communication between these two teams?
Nov 19, 202111:32 AM - edited Nov 19, 202111:50 AM
Contributor
Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?
Thanks a lot for the question, Jon! Sincerely appreciate it.
My personal experience says that the sales operations and strategy teams in business verticals should be partnered with (the below pointers are from an IT services organization perspective).
The sales operations heads tagged to business units should be made the single point of contact as far as basic KPI reporting is concerned (to start with) in the sales enablement journey.
The reasons are:
1. their easy accessibility to their sales and business unit heads and their high visibility in the vertical they represent.
2. their ability to influence decision making in their individual business units and their available bandwidth to influence the basic sales enablement KPIs; like, number of sales folks being assessed (psychometric assessment if any), number of sales folks being trained (on methodologies, processes, tools and messaging), number of sales coaching sessions organized, number of talent coaching sessions completed and so on.
The meeting cadence should be crafted in such a way that the enablement team is able to capture quick wins as well voice of customers and report out in a story or video format. This activity performed consistently over a period of about 5 weeks usually will build the needed momentum and create the much needed stickiness.
Slowly, the other stakeholders like, finance, enterprise strategy, PMO (CEO's office), Global HR will buy in to the weekly meeting provided quick wins are messaged well (evincing interest in that community which is otherwise mired in transactions and a lot of orgnizational noise is a prerequisite).
"hope this makes sense"??? IT'S GOLD! Really useful answer which will no doubt help lots of the community here. Thanks! Hope that we see you at one of the Office Hours meet ups we'll be starting in December (no official announcement yet, but watch this space). Sounds like you might have plenty to contribute to the conversation 👍
It seems like more IT team members are now taking over sales and marketing roles.
For instance, observing what current sales/marketing folks are doing - keystroke logging, CCTV, archive retrieval etc...then replace them with existing IT staff. An interesting way to get total buy-in.
Us sales people often go into meetings with the senior IT team with a list of demands, sorry requests. While the IT team often enter the meeting thinking about their non negotiables around security, resilience, reliability.
And before you know it - we’re not cooperating much.
The odd thing is, as sales leaders in these discussions we often forget to use our soft sales skills - rapport building, asking open questions and negotiating a mutually beneficial solution.
What always works for me is to get them involved early, empathise and build rapport: “I know you don’t need yet another set of dumb ideas about how this new shiny thing is absolutely essential… but I think we may be on to something with this Sales Enablement stuff and I want to get your thoughts early on, see if it’s even worth considering… when would be a good time for me to pick your brains for 15 minutes?”
Much better than calling a meeting for an hour or even several meetings! It’s often the case that IT have been looking at similar solutions. And, worst case, if it’s something that for strategic reasons they can’t consider for 6-12 months, you’ve not wasted their time, or yours.
After that - lay out what you believe to be the benefits and why you’re considering this sort of tech. Then, you really need their advice, before you get their buy in. So ask - “what do you think?”, “where do you think there might be problems?” and if it’s going OK “how do you think we might progress this and, what are the timescales I should pencil in?”
I think as RevOps becomes a more popular role, these sorts of discussions might not be so commonplace but I think they’ll be around for a few years yet.
Anybody had to do formal presentations for this sort of thing - or even bypass it completely, and what were your results?
