We'll be releasing videos of all Supernode talks to Crossbeam Insiders in July. But for now, I've summed up one of my favorite talks from the event — Maureen Little's talk on building influence internally.
— Olivia Ramirez, Managing Editor
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How to Build Influence & Make Your Ideas "Joint Ideas"
"The only way to get your company aligned on strategic partner-oriented initiatives is to build consensus and influence your internal executives," said Maureen Little, VP of Global Strategic Alliances, Okta last week at Supernode.
Below are four of the steps Little covered to help you influence your internal stakeholders and make your ideas "joint ideas".
Step #1: Identify the Resources You Need
Which individual contributors (ICs) and decision makers do you need to get on board to bring your next strategic initiative to life?
Let's say you're launching your company's first tech partner program. That's a big initiative that requires work from multiple departments and stakeholders.
Let's focus in on one piece of this strategic initiative — building and co-selling your integrations. You'll likely need sign off from your Head of Engineering and/or CTO, time from your engineers to build the integrations, and time from your marketing team to promote the integrations to your prospects and customers. You'll also need to enable your sales team to educate their prospects and customers about your integrations and joint solutions when they're ready.
Slides courtesy of Maureen Little/Okta
Consider each department and stakeholder's priorities and how your proposal will impact and help them achieve their goals. Then, gather data to help communicate your vision in a way that resonates with them and builds trust.
Step #2: Gather Data
When communicating the value of building integrations with tech partners to your engineering team, consider how the initiative will impact their existing work and their objectives. Will building integrations take away from the time they could spend on developing product features? How can you make the time they spend building integrations worth it?
Below are some of the datapoints you should explore and share with your engineering team:
The number of customers who have asked for the integration, and the number of prospects who have mentioned the integration during sales cycles.
How your existing integrations impact product usage and the number of active users in your platform (again, use other people's stats if you don't have the data just yet), and how the new integration is expected to impact these metrics.
The number of customers you have in common with your tech partners and how your integrations/partnership will improve product "stickiness". Use Crossbeam to quickly identify how many customers you have in common, which strategic customers you have in common for upselling, and which high-value target accounts you have in common for winning deals.
How the integration will impact feature adoption and usage (Check out how Bynder's partnership team got buy-in from their developers to make integrations a regular part of their dev cycles).
Competitive analysis (e.g. if your competitors have the integration and you don't and they're winning customers because of it).
Customer win/loss data from your customer relationship management (CRM) software, your customer success managers (CSMs), and directly from customer feedback.
Timeframe to launch - Estimate how many weeks, months, or quarters you'll need help from your engineering team, and make suggestions for how to timebox integration updates once the project is done.
The revenue potential of the integration and from co-selling with your tech partner. Little suggests being realistic and transparent about the revenue potential of your strategic initiative and never to overestimate your potential gains. Tip: Use Potential Revenue in Crossbeam, and reach out to your Crossbeam CSM to learn about our upcoming Attribution feature.
Industry market trends, earnings reports, public documentation, and more.
Simplify how you present the data to your engineering team. They don't need to know how you got the data, just how it impacts them (Lucky Orange did a great job of simplifying their data to get buy-in from their internal dev team).
When it's time to share your proposal (Step #3 👇), Little suggests having a secondary document just for you that has all of the information that you anticipate your internal stakeholders will ask you. Gather data to present your case and additional data to help you address any skepticism in the room.
As you meet with various ICs and executives and get their buy-in, build champions throughout your org who can help advocate for your idea to their teams and to others.
Step #3: Create and Share Your Proposal
You'll need to build proposals for each step of the process. Need time and resources from your engineering team but don't know how much time orto what extent? You may need to develop a proposal to begin the research and scoping phase for your integration development needs.
Tip: Our "Before You Build" e-book includes a suggested timeline for Discovery, Market Validation, Build & QA, Identifying Early Adopters, and Launching your integrations.
Little says that when pitching the idea of building out Okta's managed service provider (MSP) program, she created a proposal for conducting research for their product and engineering investment. The proposal included discovery to ensure that her internal teams could build the right product set to make the MSP program successful and included the foreseeable risks involved in pulling resources from her product/engineering teams.
Little says it's better to communicate about any risk ahead of time and enable other teams to pitch in with solutions. For example: If you determine that you'll need 20% of your engineering team's time, your Head of Engineering might suggest:
Dedicating a select group of engineers to work on the project until launch
If relevant, reorganizing your engineering team to have dedicated developers for specific integrations or by integration category/persona (like Typeform does)
Step #4: Get Commitment (Not a "soft yes" — real commitment!)
You don't have commitment for a project until next steps are outlined and each stakeholder knows exactly which responsibilities they own. Don't leave a proposal meeting without defining next steps for each of the stakeholders involved. If additional stakeholders are needed, organize a secondary meeting to get those stakeholders up to speed.
Using the tech partner program example:
Establish when you'll host the kickoff meeting for each department involved (e.g. a kickoff meeting for your engineers building a particular integration and a kickoff meeting defining the enablement plans and timeline for your sales team to co-sell with your tech partner)
Identify owners for each initiative and the exact teams that will produce the deliverables. For example: Your VP of Product Marketing might provide guidance around the strategy for promoting your integrations to prospects and customers. Your product marketers may be in charge of creating the deliverables, like developing targeted messaging that mentions your integration to prospects who are currently using your tech partner's software as part of their tech stacks.
If an internal stakeholder isn't fully committed just yet, take stock of their skepticism and gather more data to help make your case. Document everyone's concerns, address them using data, and build your joint solutions into your proposal (think: co-design your proposal with your internal stakeholders to gain buy-in and trust).
"Real commitment is headcount sign-off and budget. It's not a soft yes," says Little.
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'Til next time!
👋 Olivia Ramirez
Managing Editor
Crossbeam
Crossbeam, 1315 Walnut Street, Suite 300, Philadelphia, PA 19107
