Regardless of the intention, if you come into an organization outside of an IT role and immediately divert your attention towards IT, you will be judged. The IT department is there to assist other departments, no question about that. I don’t want you to think that we’re talking about people that need tools in order to perform their jobs. No, these are the individuals that will write you an email on day one of starting their position and tell you exactly what IT needs to do to improve the organization. The other group is the group that’s barely holding on in the company. The imposter syndrome is not just running rampant here, it’s actually accurate. I’ve been through both of those scenarios multiple times.
Sales Story
The first story that we’ll dive into highlights how these individuals divert attention from themselves because they’re not doing the work that they need to do. It also shows that some are skilled at convincing owners or upper management that they are in fact right.
We had a sales person that was somewhat of an under-performer. Each time that he was approached related to sales, it was always the website’s fault. After the 5th time that I had the conversation with the owner of the company, he finally understood what was happening, and even then he was skeptical. Rightfully so. Neither the owner nor the sales person understood what the website was doing, or not doing, and neither understood what the role of a sales-person was.
The conversation with the owner went a little like this:
Owner: Sales-person is stating that the website is not attracting the kind of traffic we need to attract.
Me: We can go over all the details where that’s not true and the reasons why the website is not selling product, but I think it’s a wasted cause right now. You know what needs to be done. You know the kind of product that you need to stock in order to increase sales. We’ve spoken with others that do the same type of sales, and they’ve told you the secret to success online. However, let’s break this conversation down a little further.
What happens if we improve sales online?
Owner: We get more sales.
Me: Correct, partially. We get more online orders.
Owner: What’s the difference?
Me: Nothing to you, other than you’re paying a sales person x amount of money for no reason. If the website starts generating $10 million in sales per year, and the sales person generates $0, are you still going to keep him around?
Owner: No, he needs to sell.
Me: Correct. As you can see, clear as day, your sales person isn’t selling. He’s trying to divert your attention towards the website so that you would be focused here. And you should be! We need to continue our discussions, that we’ve been having, on how to get more wholesale customers using and purchasing from your website. However, you also need to speak with your sales staff so that they develop a non-website sales strategy. Do you realize how easy that is? If you pay someone to complain about the website, even though his title is sales-representative, I want to move from IT to sales. I can do that too. Sit there, complain that IT is not bringing in sales.
Owner: It clicked. We used to sell to numerous businesses over the phone.
Me: Correct. How many outgoing phone-calls has he made? What’s his customer outreach strategy? Where are his customers currently buying from if they’re not buying from us? Do you think that everyone on $5,000 in sales per year that they purchase from us? No, they’re businesses, which means that they’re buying from someone else? From whom? Ask your sales-person those questions. What can he do to bring them back? If the answer that he gets is that individuals only want to buy from the website, then it’s time for some layoffs. The sales-staff is unnecessary. We need to hire more marketing and you need to purchase the different tiers of products that everyone stated was the key to success.
After the owner approached the sales-person about those questions, there was a ton of yelling from the sales-person’s side. He blamed everyone. The next day, he didn’t show up to work. The following day he texted that he was quitting.
Thankfully the next sales person came in and took a look at those accounts. He approached IT for a different reason this time.
New Sales Person: I have 60 accounts that I want to contact and start brining sales our way. I’m not sure how to use the reporting software. What I’m looking for is for a dashboard that shows me the sales-history over the past year with each account, their top-sellers, and how much they purchased each month.
Me: Of course. Let’s get that over to you right away.
Do you see how different the approach was there? One person was ready to work…the other one wasn’t.
Marketing Story
Marketing is unfortunately one of those roles that you can get even when you’re not familiar with marketing concepts. Everyone thinks that they can do marketing. One way to spot an inexperienced marketing staff is when they start requesting for a “digital marketer.” In 2023, those words should never come out of the marketing department’s mouth. There is no distinction between marketing and digital marketing. If you’re in marketing and don’t understand Content/SEO/SEM, you’re going to have a rough time. My favorite phrase to use for a marketing department that doesn’t understand the web is the “merch-team” because all they produce is merch, like t-shirts, pens, etc.
CCO: Thanks all for getting on a call with me. I seem to be getting some conflicting information, so I just wanted to see if I can come to an understanding. We have various Ad platforms, like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, etc. Who manages that?
Marketing: That’s normally managed by IT.
Me: That’s interesting. How do you propose that?
Marketing: We’ve always had our IT staff take care of that.
Me: That’s probably why those platforms are a huge waste of money. Let me ask you a question, why do Google Ads and Microsoft Ads fall under the marketing budget? Let’s move that budget under IT and I’ll just go ahead and shut them down and we’ll use that money for other IT related tasks.
Marketing: But we advertise on those platforms.
Me: Right. Advertising sounds like Marketing to me. This is what the issue is. Marketing doesn’t know how to use the tools.
Marketing: Google Ads and Microsoft Ads are extremely complicated pieces of software that only someone in IT can figure out how to use.
Me: What do you think if finance came in and said, “Quickbooks is really complicated. IT needs to do this.” I, and everyone else in the company, would laugh at them. Just because a piece of software sounds like IT, it doesn’t mean that it is IT.
Marketing: IT was the one that set it up.
Me: IT setup your email as well. Do we need to start crafting emails for you too now? The real issue is that, you’re right, it can get complicated. If you want to be in marketing in 2023, you’ll need to learn a new skill. If that means learning a little bit of JavaScript, you’ll need to do that. Or hire a JavaScript developer into the Marketing team. What I will tell you is that there is currently no maintenance being performed on either platform. There’s no A/B testing. There’s no conversion tracking. How do you know how many sales were generated from this spend?
Marketing: That doesn’t sound like something that we need to keep up with. Shouldn’t IT create us a report?
Me: Yes! We can do that, however, what are the metrics? What are we tracking? What does a conversion mean to you? You’ll have to get an understanding of those concepts.
Off-call conversation between the CCO and myself
CCO: Okay. I got it. Our marketing team doesn’t know how to use the tools. What do you think we should do?
Me: Get a new marketing department. I heard nothing about them trying to improve themselves. If they want to be called the marketing department, then they need to implement current marketing practices. Speak to them and tell them that there will need to be training on marketing practices. Or, bring in an agency and outsource some of the work. IT, unfortunately, doesn’t have the capacity currently to do both IT and marketing tasks.
These are just a couple of countless conversations that I’ve had over the years. There are so many that I could write a trilogy. Role clarity and expectations should be introduced early on. If expectations change throughout the person’s career, speak with them and let them know of the new expectations. Sometimes that requires a little more money from your end, but it’s usually worth it.