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?
When the IT and sales teams are not communicating effectively, how can a marketing/sales manager potentially/theoretically overcome the traditional barriers to communication between these two teams?
I believe there are a few tactics or areas for communication improvement and action:
1. Ensure that the tone and respect level are the same as those of the IT and other departments.
2. Treat the IT department as trusted partners versus employees, helpers, or contractors.
3. Explain issues from a high level so the IT department understands the greater context and implications of action and inaction, depending on the plan in place. This way, the IT department can make suggestions. If the IT department makes suggestions, could you listen and get involved? The IT department will invest in you if you invest in them. If you take time to understand the basics of the tech they work with, they will take the time to understand the marketing and why you're doing what you're doing. They'll become champions versus departmental "frenemies."
4. Acknowledge their work on LinkedIn or other sites and offer referrals and testimonials to those you feel deserve it.
5. Encourage upper management to sponsor and fund internal and external leadership training and career growth programs with and for IT staff members.
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.
Bravo! I agree with some of the things you said, especially that departments should better understand what the other does and that it would help to bring on a trainer!
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!
Dec 29, 20211:08 AM - edited Dec 29, 20211:12 AM
Contributor
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.
Nov 16, 20219:22 AM - edited Nov 16, 20219:24 AM
Contributor
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.
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 👍
