Your sales force and your technology staff may not respect each other's turf, but you'd better broker a truce if you want your business to thrive. Think of the two most different people in your organization, the ones whose personalities are like night and day. Chances are, one of these is a salesperson, and the other's a technologist. It's a fairly established fact that, like Gangs in any of the popular Wild West Movies they keep pretty much to their own turf and socialize amongst themselves.
If you're lucky, the discord doesn't get in the way of their working relationship or, if it does, the individuals are not powerful decision-makers. Outside of casual chat around the water cooler, or at company outings, a sales rep and an IT runner might have little contact. The chief information officer and the executive sales director, on the other hand, can start a rumble that shakes a company to its foundation, paralyzing daily operations and stagnating innovation.
It's more likely to be this way in larger companies, where job specialization is more clearly defined, but even small businesses can experience conflict between the people who set up the laptops and the ones who use them. Minimizing those conflicts -- and getting the two factions to communicate -- is of critical importance to any business that wants to move ahead.
The Roots of Conflict
Why the disconnect between sales staff and technical personnel, anyway? "This is a good example of left-brain/right-brain conflict. The IT person is probably naturally inclined to be left-brain from the start. Then their professional training reinforces this mentality. The logical, analytical, and concrete thinking suits business technologists, leading them to the profession in the first place and then driving them to excel. Most sales folks, on the other hand, are talkers who frequently have difficulty staying focused on specific topics. This fits the sales lifestyle; sales folk don't succeed unless they're comfortable with extemporaneous speaking, and can adjust to new topics and situations rapidly. Salespeople are well served by an aggressive, competitive nature, combined with the desire and ability to keep somebody talking.
I believe it's a lack of understanding -- let's say a lack of lingua franca regarding process requirements and definition. .For the most part, sales is about closing business at the current moment. The sales role is about responding to what the customer needs in the present. There is a fundamental fear of saying 'no' to any customer need or question."
What's the Problem?
The place where sales/tech conflicts play out is usually the company's infrastructure. Salespeople demand new applications or functions that the technologists can't deliver, or the Techies abuse and ignore the tech they already have, infuriating the Sales Force. Each group complains to management, who promptly tells them to sort it out amongst themselves. The time wasted going back and forth on issues that won't get resolved is time that could be better spent on real job tasks. Energy that might have gone into a sales call, or into adding some juicy new bits of computer gear, is dissipated as waste heat from anger.
Tech folk need to understand that sales and marketing are totally dynamic -- and always will be. If these folks have worked on [enterprise resource planning], accounting, or other back-office problems, they get used to problems that are better defined and don't change as quickly."
On the other Sales folks tend to think, 'It's only a little software, what's the big deal?' Again, these issues need to be discussed in an ongoing exchange of working together to take better care of customers. People sometimes forget that that is really what their job is."
The key is maintaining a continuous dialogue -- before things blow up into a crisis and fingers start pointing. Working together should be defined as a priority and included in annual performance evaluations..
Some of the most egregious failures occur in high-profile industries. There are countless examples of sales and marketing going to market with a specific promotion or campaign that could not be supported by the billing system. Hence, revenue could not be collected and, of course, the campaign did not meet objectives.
But this seems to be a trend that is changing. Today's Techies often have a technical specialist whose job it is to act as liaison to the Sales Force, coordinating requirements and projects. "One example that comes to mind is the case of the sales organization of a large communications service provider that has decided to take back in-house its Web sales channel and some of its retail stores from a third-party sales company.. In this case, the sales and IT teams are working as one team to design and implement the communications retail experience of the future."
Solutions
Some would argue that software-as-a-service (SaaS) circumvents the Techies/Sales Force struggle. Indeed, the reduced impact on technical infrastructure and personnel has been among the chief selling points for SaaS. I don't think SaaS provides an end-run around the problem.. The same problems are all still there. Look at any big Salesforce.com project and you will see all the same issues present. Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that many organizations have already invested considerable time and effort in their CRM systems -- investments they won't be keen on scrapping in favor of SaaS. Let's focus on the needs of those companies, the ones that have something in place and no compelling reason to change.
Identifying and properly communicating requirements is one of the hardest steps for a sales team. Services-oriented architecture, business process management tools, and flexible-rules engines all can inject much-needed flexibility into a patchwork of IT systems without requiring costly, error-prone modifications to core systems. The technologists are thus embracing an environment that accepts and facilitates frequent change that will support "the sometimes-schizophrenic nature of sales."
Just as with any business, success starts with credible and reliable delivery. In manufacturing, for example, delivery of materials is crucial; in CRM, the key deliverable is IT resources. Predictability creates a certainty for sales that they can sell what they have, promote where they are going, and encourage the prospect to participate in the future vision. If there is a common, documented, up-to-date understanding of the business process -- like order-to-cash -- then it becomes easier to have a joint discussion around what needs to change." Sometimes it's a procedural change, sometimes it's a new system or feature -- and sometimes it's both -- "but you have to have the lingua franca of a common process model as your baseline.
CRM Engineering.
One possibility for facilitating communication is the use of a mediator -- especially one already familiar with both sides' needs. Whom we calls the CRM Engineers and the discipline CRM Engineering.
When it comes to bridging sales and technology jargon and processes, many organizations have a CRM Engineer-- a role uniquely designed for straddling both sides of the equation. "In many sales, there are two sorts of people at work for the vendor: the sales rep, who does the actual deal, talks about financing, and such; and a tech guy who runs demonstrations, handles RFPs, and is responsible for solution closure. We call that person the CRM engineer.
The CRM Engineer uses tech knowledge to move sales forward by working with the customer to establish technical requirements, functional needs, and points of integration. Somebody who understands the IT environment and is able to think like a salesperson could be the ideal moderator. In some cases, at least: "It depends on the seniority of the CRM Engineer, and maybe on the kind of business the company serves. With applications vendors, the CRM Engineer is always working with IT groups, and is sensitive to their needs" even while driving the sale to completion.
Improvements
I believe in iterative CRM rollouts and agile development processes. one of the common threads in failed CRM projects is trying to do too much at once.I always tell people to get a basic system up and running by focusing on the most obvious pain point, then expand to other areas as experience grows."
No matter how you establish good working relations between the Techies and the Sales Force, you must get it done in order to move on to the proper focus for a business: outward upon its customers, not inward to damage control. What is needed is for sales and IT to come together and form a consistent understanding of customer needs, business objectives, and business requirements. From there, both roles can work together to form a joint solution to immediate issues as well as future opportunities."
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