How to Sell a Data Strategy to Business Executives Part 1: Partnering with the Business

To sell data analytics to executives, you need to partner with them. The first step is to listen and learn the business. The second is to speak like a businessperson, not a technical one. The third is to deliver a quick win to gain credibility.

The primary task of a data analytics leader is to lead—that is, set a course and get people to follow. That’s easier said than done, especially when you’re leading top executives to embrace a new data strategy. Executives have little patience for lengthy explanations and ill-founded requests for money.

To persuade busy executives to allocate sufficient dollars to fund an enterprise data and analytics strategy, data leaders need more than a business plan with numbers. They need to foster a partnership with key business executives to gain leverage when it comes time to ask for money.

Step One: Listen

The first step in partnering with executives is to listen and learn. When Tim Leonard was appointed chief technology officer at U.S. Xpress, he made a point to take key executives to lunch. “When I join a new company, I spend a lot of time listening to people and learning how the business works. If I open my mouth too soon and expose my business ignorance, I lose credibility. So, I try to master the business quickly.”

It’s also important to get to know executives as people—what motivates them personally and professionally. Get to know their families, hobbies, and interests, and also their professional history, challenges, and successes. If possible, learn the metrics or goals for which they are accountable and their allies and adversaries in the business. Create a profile or “cheat sheet” of key leaders. Sales is all about knowing your customer.

Step Two: Speak Intelligently

Once you’ve learned how the business works and established relationships with executives, then it’s time to converse with them in their language. Tim Leonard learned the hard way the importance of talking like a business executive rather than a technical one:

“I discovered the more I discussed architectures, schemas, and tools, the less businesspeople seemed interested in what I had to say. But if I talked about business concerns, like increasing wafer counts per square foot of factory floor at a semiconductor plant, then executives paid attention.“Ultimately, it’s all about sales,” Leonard concluded. “You know you’ve made it when a businessperson says, ‘You know a lot about the business for an IT guy!”

Shut up. But once you start speaking, it’s important to know when to stop. “I also discovered that in key situations—like when you need executive support for a project—it’s best to shut up and let the businesspeople do the talking,” Leonard says. “Although businesspeople appreciate a business savvy IT person, they would rather hear a businessperson explain the need for an analytics solution. So, when appropriate, I ask businesspeople to deliver the presentations about data proposals, and I sit in the back and talk only if called upon.”

Step Three: Act Quickly

The most powerful way to “sell” executives is to take bold action. Most data and analytics leaders understand the importance of a quick win to gain credibility, momentum, and trust. Once you demonstrate that you can deliver value quickly, executives will seek you for help. You will likely be overwhelmed with requests. Once you have credibility with executives, the “curse of success” replaces sales as the key challenge.

Not long after he arrived at U.S. Xpress, Leonard discovered that the CEO had long wanted to track the “idle time” of the company’s long-haul trucks to better manage fuel expenses. So, Leonard took his team on a six-week “death march” to build a simple dashboard to display truck idle time. In order to work that fast, the team decided to break its architecture and build an independent data mart (i.e., data silo) rather than extend the company’s data warehouse. The team also scoped the project narrowly, capturing only a handful of relevant data elements out of hundreds emitted by onboard truck sensors and systems.

“Our quick win gave us instant credibility,” says Leonard. “That dashboard got me in the door and enabled me to pitch other things.” Later, his team rebuilt the dashboard on the enterprise infrastructure and expanded its scope to meet additional needs. The win also created new demand for his team’s services: “Business heads lined up to talk with us. We quickly ended up with too many project proposals.”

Step Four: Wait

Leonard was fortunate to work for an “enlightened” CEO at U.S. Xpress who was willing to invest money in information technology (IT) in the middle of the 2008–09 recession. But not all data analytics leaders are so lucky. For many, getting funding—even for small, “quick win” projects—can be like pulling teeth. In those situations, the best strategy is to do all the work necessary to act when the time is right.

That’s what Kevin Sonsky did. He was appointed director of BI at Citrix Systems in 2005 by the company’s CFO to standardize the way the company reported on key sales and financial metrics. For the next 11 years, Sonsky did his best to work with department heads across the company to gain consensus on terms, definitions, and reporting output.

It wasn’t until the company hired a new datacentric CEO in 2016—11 years after Sonsky started the BI team—that the company got serious about data and report governance. Fortunately, because Sonsky had already established cross-functional governance committees and processes, the company had a ready-made structure to ramp up governance activities. “For years, we weren’t sure we were making an impact,” says Sonsky. “But we had laid the groundwork and had the foundation to accelerate once new leadership arrived.”