Develop an IT Strategy to Support Sales
Bring Sales back to your side with a rock star sales technology strategy.
RETIRED CONTENT
Please note that the content on this page is retired. This content is not maintained and may contain information or links that are out of date.The painful symptoms of misaligned sales and IT functions can result in:
- IT/Sales-independent application deployments with low return on investment.
- Lack of in-house resources to properly execute on Sales-IT initiatives.
- Poorly defined application maintenance processes.
- Immature vendor negotiation and project implementation capabilities.
- No steering committee or formal mechanism for Sales-IT collaboration.
A successful strategy for improving Sales-IT alignment and support can result in:
- Superior customer acquisition.
- Increased customer renewal.
- Increased revenue per customer.
- Deduplication of effort across sales divisions.
- Increased sales professional efficiency.
- Reduced cost-to-sell.
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Module 1: The Benefits of Sales-IT Alignment
The Purpose
- Review of the importance and benefits of Sales-IT alignment efforts.
- Identify IT and business drivers and objectives.
- Define the future state sales business processes to support Sales-IT alignment.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Root causes of Sales-IT misalignment identified.
- IT and business drivers for Sales-IT alignment identified.
- Risks mitigation plan for Sales-IT alignment developed.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | Develop Sales-IT alignment guiding principles from IT and business drivers. |
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| 1.2 | Assemble the core Sales-IT alignment strategy team. |
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| 1.3 | High-level project scoping. |
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| 1.4 | Define future state sales business processes. |
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Module 2: Define the Target State, Review the Current State, and Identify Gaps
The Purpose
- Gain a systematic view of the current sales application portfolio.
- Understand the current degree of integration between sales applications and related IT environment.
- Understand the status of customer and sales-related data.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Functionality and integration capabilities of current sales applications evaluated in supporting current and future sales business processes.
- Posture towards key IT applications and systems architecture decisions developed.
- Root causes of data quality issues identified.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | Assess the satisfaction levels of applications from multiple perspectives. |
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| 2.2 | Evaluate the current state sales business processes. |
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| 2.3 | Develop an inventory of requirements for future state enablement. |
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Module 3: Build Solutions for Sales
The Purpose
- Learn about various sales-related applications and their best-fit use cases.
- Organize requirements into logical groupings.
- Identify opportunities to establish/improve on governance of Sales-IT alignment.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Knowledge gained with regards to which sales applications are required to support future state sales business processes.
- Potential governance structure to create ongoing synergies and collaboration between Sales and IT.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | Translate requirements into Sales-IT initiatives. |
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| 3.2 | Score and prioritize Sales-IT initiatives to place on implementation roadmap. |
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| 3.3 | Structure the Sales-IT alignment committee. |
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