Selling Technology

December 8th, 2015Dan Yoder

Our clients hire us because we create value for them. But that value isn’t always obvious to decision-makers and stakeholders. They may believe finishing a given project is possible with fewer resources or in less time.

Ideally, we can help answer their questions. After all, I’ve played a technical leadership role in a variety of organizations over the years, and so have members of our staff. We’ve faced these kinds of questions dozens of times. Unfortunately, since we’re the vendor, our motives are suspect. This makes it difficult for us to offer the coaching our clients need.

Nevertheless, establishing trust between technical and non-technical leadership is more important than ever. Software is eating the world and all that, right? Companies that figure out how to do this have a tremendous advantage. So…where to begin?

This is a complex topic, with lots of different facets. For now, we’re going to focus on selling technology projects to non-technical leadership.

Focus On Value

I’ve heard technical managers bemoan the fact that their non-technical counterparts don’t understand technology. But this shouldn’t be surprising. After all, reaching mastery in a subject means, by definition, that you understand it better. Bemoaning that fact is self-defeating.

In fact, part of good technical leadership is understanding and articulating the potential return of technical investments. This is not a technical question, however. I believe technical leadership often find themselves retreating or being pressured into technical justifications and then everyone ends up frustrated.

However, non-technical stakeholders are not going to understand all the issues that go into technical decisions. And they don’t need to, any more than the technical stakeholders need to understand why the accounting department upgraded the accounting system or the marketing department switched PR firms or why a particular business deal included “points on the backend.”

Technical People Are Business People

Unfortunately, technical leadership are rarely trained or prepared to articulate or defend their decisions. As a result, they inadvertently play right into stereotypes that divide the world into “business people” and “technology people.” That’s an absurd distinction: we’re all in this together. Not only that, but the most successful entrepreneurs in history have been “technical people,” going back to Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, right up through the present day, to Steve Jobs and Larry and Sergei.

The Case Of The Missing Sales Projections

A major digital content platform vendor asked for our help in building a pipeline for real-time data analytics. Funding was a concern, though. There was budget to get started but the CTO worried that the CFO would pull the plug before we finished. When I pressed him, he told me that the executive management just didn’t get it. “I show them a new mobile app and they love it, but something like analytics is just too abstract.”

Every month or so, we’d discuss the problem of how to sell the project to the board. The analytics the new system would produce would give the sales people new ad packages to sell. I believe the industry term is segmented ad inventory. The company would ultimately be able to sell more ads. “So why aren’t the sales people pushing for this?” I asked.

“Well, they don’t understand analytics,” came the response. The CTO was in a catch-22. The sales people wanted the features the new system could provide, but no one wanted to hear how much it was going to cost. So the CTO had found himself trying to justify the cost by educating them about the technology.

The signs grew increasingly ominous. The project got audited. Staffing was cut. One day, I decided to engage the CTO in a thought experiment. “Suppose the system costs twice what you expect…wouldn’t the company still see a return?” He didn’t know the answer. The sales projections were obviously based on the ad packages they could already sell, not the new packages that they couldn’t sell yet. “Well, that’s what you need to do,” I told him. “Instead of educating people on big data and analytics, focus on how much more revenue the company can generate if they leverage those things.”

Once I said it, we both felt a bit silly because it sounded so obvious. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the CTO was never able to get those projections. And, sure enough, the CFO pulled the plug six months later.

The moral of this cautionary tale is that technical leadership means more than just knowing how to lead technical teams. You also have to know how to sell the benefits of technology investment.

The Case Of The Optimistic Product Manager

Sometimes it can also mean recognizing that the benefit isn’t there.

In another case, a client was releasing a new version of their software. They expected use and adoption rates to increase as a result. We were performing an infrastructure migration to ensure everything ran smoothly. Halfway through, the client discovered that people weren’t using their software as they anticipated. Consequently, the migration was no longer really justified. We would have loved to finish the project, both from a technical standpoint and because we hate to leave our work unfinished like that. However, that’s known as a sunk cost, and good technical leadership means discarding sunk costs.

What would have been even better in this case would have been to recognize the possibility that the migration might not be necessary. Good technical people view their work as a form of craft. We take pride in our work. But this can blind us to the needs of the business. In this case, we could have encouraged the client to do more to validate the assumptions they were making.

A Good Start

In the end, there’s no substitute for building trust, and knowing that everyone is doing their jobs. But that process takes time. And your business faces challenges right now. So stay focused on the business value (not the technology) and the return on investment (not the cost). By the way, I am not saying that “the technology doesn’t matter, the people do” or any of that sort of nonsense. The technology matters, a lot. But non-technical staff don’t need to, and aren’t going to develop, an in-depth technical understanding of technology investments. It’s sufficient that there is a shared understanding of the expected return on those investments. And be honest with yourself when the return just isn’t there. That’s harder than it sounds: it’s tempting to delve into the technology, regardless of whether your technical or non-technical. But people can’t condense mastery of a complex subject into pithy bullet points. It’s a waste of time. Don’t go there. Focus on value instead and you’ll be off to a good start.