CIO: Challenge the sales director

Let’s face it. You have never liked the sales director what with their flash clothes and cars and alpha-ish behaviour. It doesn’t sit well with your low profile no nonsense hard working philosophy.

Had enough of their using you as the whipping boy for their poor sales results? Well maybe it’s time to take them on. I am not suggesting a dust-up in the car park. Why not throw down the gauntlet and challenge them to a sales duel. Your IT department versus the sales function.

For the purposes of this challenge you need to have control over the electronic market touch points of which the web and the app are two.

Here are the rules. Anything that is purchased via the e-channel is considered an IT sale. Anything brought in via a sales executive is a sales sale.

Now your job is to work these interfaces with SEO, PPC, inbound links and anything else that your tech-savvy techies can think of. Some of your staff who operate in the ‘grey’ web might know a trick or two to boost the prominence of your e-channels.

The aim here isn’t to win of course but to let the sales director know that your department is increasingly influential when it comes to sales. And that you have the power to turn his empire of sales executives into a server rack.

This game might also enable you to work with marketing. They are likely to be on for it as often the sales guys see marketing as the company’s mechanism for constipating the sales funnel.

I am teasing the sales guys here. Without them there is no business. Or Is there?!