Sales Enablement

JonPayne
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Diamante
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Diamante

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?

 

*To learn more about this, check out the Evaluating Sales Enablement Technology lesson via HubSpot Academy. 

20 Respostas 20
MukhtarMeer
Colaborador(a)

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

Ask them for help setting things up, but involve the Sales and Marketing teams to learn a few things. This way, you can work more efficiently as a group, alleviating the IT team's workload. Many tasks are repetitive, and understanding how things work will allow for more complex tasks to be completed, as Sales and Marketing will have a granular understanding of how systems work and interoperate. You could also consider adding a good trainer to improve the company's understanding by creating training materials for all teams involved.

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SJBerry1
Membro

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

Many of the IT departments I've worked with are overworked and have a low budget - at least in marketing/sales driven organizations. IT can typically be an afterthought for a sales focused CEO. For that reason they can really railroad a lot of initiatives simply because they are used to playing defense. Don't put them in the defensive position. Bring them into the conversation early and often. Allow them to play offense on your behalf by solving the jobs they need to do. 

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LBJR
Colaborador(a)

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

Not Going to lie this doesn't usually happen its uncoventional so i don't reccomend it took about a 2 hrs maybe because of my background in eng but what I did was I offered the entire IT department they favorite food I asked them personally one by one I was at a SMB at the time it was only about 10-15 people In IT department I got them their food then I made the Sales Team go to the IT department In the building and then we winded up talking for an 1hr and how I did it I made sure the sales team time block for emails calls etc was 40Min after they came back from break so it looked like one huge break for the sales team it did cut into IT department time a little bit but, in the meeting sales was able to provide feedback they haven't heard yet and as a result it did shoot up revenue by 150% for Q2 when this happened this was also pre covid

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LBJR
Colaborador(a)

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

It wasn't just the food either it was mainly just two different worlds never crossing type of thing so when IT heard sales feedback IT actually reorganized what they optimized for a better customer experinece instead of optimizing for what they thought shareholders wanted for profit this winded up actually increaseing LTV overall

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MCentenoA
Participante

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

I consider that all the team (sales and IT) are the same team. We are one and we have to get good communication. It´s part of the process to get a different point of view, but the goal has to be the same. Working together is the best strategy to be stronger. Sales have to help IT and vice-versa.

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CeeKayNg
Participante

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

In my opinion, this age old battle is mostly because IT and Sales do not understand each other by default. In my experience in a B2B Technology products company, sales just wants the product to be good, stable and have the latest features of the competitors. Account managers want stability and the features to work optimally. This puts constant pressure on technology to be  creating new features while maintaining the stability of the whole application and the previous 50 or so features. 

 

Just like value is gained from SMarketing meetings, IT and sales meetings help. IT explains new feature additions, upgrades (beyond technical terms, but also describing the value and benefit to the application). IT also sets the expectations of requests and new releases and prioritizing them, informing sales in the meeting . Sales would provide valuable market feedback and also list pain points which IT would consider for modification. 

The key to success in these meetings is both sides (IT and marketing) speaking in simple terms that each other can understand. Sales might usually express frustration and IT would be defensive, but everybody should understand the point of the meeting is to find progressive ways to improve the platform for the customer. Having a senior member of the organization to mediate these meetings to reinforce these beliefs and mediate would help. 

Agentdelaney
Participante

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

Normally we only see conversations when something in the tech is broken, and IT needs to resolve it yesterday or update it immediately.  What should be happening and what I've seen work is a quartely meeting to review the current stack, review what's working and helping sales complete the cycle efficiently and if there is a need to re-evaluate the stack to better perform.  We looked at this when we noticed out contact search tool wasn't giving us stable results for a few months.  We involved IT to make sure whatever tool we were going to look at would integrate with CRM, was custamoizable to our liking and industry and so on.  IT had a lot of say here and helped us decide on our next growing application and is now a crucial part of our business.

SMegawe
Participante

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

I worked in an organization where we trained young hospitality school students the operational and commercial sides of hospitality industry and thus we had one goal in mind: to show them the ins and outs of a real hospitality business with innovation and sustainability at the core of the business. Indeed, IT and SM are always intertwined as most of our marketing and sales efforts are automated, yet it has been quite a challenge to create a seamless communication and processes between the departments. I am proud however that the IT team is actually working on centralizing the whole organization's processes, whether it be sales/revenue, marketing, to front office and housekeeping in one cloud. They will also provide trainings for each team member to properly utilize the available tools and I do believe that centralizing our database, or one source of truth as the videos referred it to, would make this classic issue slowly disappearing.

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DTrujillo
Membro

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

Identify how the sales enablement tools integrate with eachother. Leading to reduced friction and need for IT help by its' users.

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0code42
Participante

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

Not quite agree on this 😉 As an developer and head of IT, I do sales engagements every week. The key is very close work with both sales and marketing, and the follow up from sales and both new and excisting customers should be done by all. I do a lot of post-sale follow ups. 

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ARubbani
Colaborador(a)

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

Hi 

In my experience, for any departmental relationship to work & collaborate, it needs a over arching promotion and approval of the CEO or MD. 

 

In my last role, we had real problems in the relationship between IT & Sales. WHY? Because the IT dept was reporting to the MD directly. And the MD was calling the shots and prioritising the projects and work for IT to do on a daily basis. 

 

None of the work they were doing was there to serve sales or make the process or technology to ease the sales teams work. Infact, a huge amount of time & money was spent in automating the fullfilment elements of the business and not the inbound sales strategy or flow.  

 

There was a dysfunctional view of sales as a thorn in the side of IT which caused a huge amount of problems when it came to manage expectation starting at the board level and tricking down to ground zero!!

 

Not a good experience, but learnt alot from it on how NOT to do things!!

NitinMeta
Colaborador(a)

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

Sales vs IT... Godzilla vs KingKong...even top management is in a tough referee spot to resolve matters if at the core there is disagreement. So, it really comes down to Fundamentals of Culture Infusion that brings about a Unity of "Everyone is here for the same Goal"...its not about I or my department...its about the Growth and Brand and most of all about the Customer.

Frequent team meets outside of the meeting room where they get to know each other and blossom the comardery helps a ton....HR needs to be mindful of bringing about this Unity.

Sales Engineering (Pre-Sales) actually do a great Job in day to day IT and Sales smooth functioning as they are the critical bridge to this Unity ensuring communication and agreement in on the same plane...this is worth corporate level recognition.

 

 

 

SRCHAUDHURI
Colaborador(a)

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

It is only possible through the installation of a robust sales enablement function sponsored by the CEO/Chairman of the organization. When there is executive buy in and the project has high visibility, it becomes easy to rally the important stakeholders towards the goal. The sales enablement head is entrusted with the responsibility to educate IT about their very important role to help the reps sell better. This understanding enables them to take a design thinking approach in hammering out effective solutions for the sales organization and eventually improve sales effectiveness.

JonPayne
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Diamante
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Diamante

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

Love this @SRCHAUDHURI! So a better question would have been "how to get the business leaders bought in"? 😋 Any ideas on that? 😀

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SRCHAUDHURI
Colaborador(a)

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! 🙂 

JonPayne
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Diamante
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Diamante

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

"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 👍

SRCHAUDHURI
Colaborador(a)

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

Thank you! I am glad you found it useful. I'll look forward to the Decemeber office hours meet ups. Kindly keep me informed.

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fcommunicatio
Colaborador(a)

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

Very good 

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ELim51
Membro

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought in?

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.

JonPayne
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Diamante
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Diamante

Any tips for getting the IT dept bought 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?