Bridging the Gap Between IT and Sales (or other users)

My first gig as a consultant was to help a very large and sophisticated technology services company determine why their teriffic new web-based offering was getting such poor reviews from their field sales organization and end users.

The offering was really powerful and for its time, was nearly revolutionary in its comprehensiveness. IT believed that it delivered exactly what their sales organization had requested, and was extremely frustrated that the feedback was so bad. Sales wouldn't admit that IT did what it was asked to do, only that their clients didn't like the offering. Sales was demanding that it be "fixed", but could not say what was broken.

All in all, this was a miserable situation, and no one was willing to reach out to the "other side" to try to figure out what someone could actually do about this problem.

So, what did I do? As the joke goes, I borrowed their watch to tell them what time it was. I hit the phones and the road, and talked to a couple of dozen of their sales people and clients. It took a while to see the forest for the trees, but eventually a clear problem description emerged.

There were actually two problems: 1) response time from remote locations (outside the network) was so bad that work just couldn't get done, and 2) the user interface exposed all the power of the package to the user, even the majority of the users who did not need 75 to 90% of its power, and it felt overwhelming.

IT hadn't discovered the response time problem because all their testing had been from within their network; and they didn't realize that ease of use was an issue because they thought that all customers needed the full power of the package.

The solution was simple to say, but a bit more difficult to actually perform. The response time problem had to be fixed and the user interface had to be layered in such a way that a simple interface was presented to most users, and a more complex and powerful interface was presented to the minority of power users.

Once these things were done, a much greater level of client satisfaction was achieved.

What are the lessons from this engagement that can be generalized?

• Listen to the subject matter experts (in this case, Sales and IT), but also talk to the market directly.
• Listen with an open mind. If you think you already know the answer, you won't hear what's being said.
• Nearly every user base is segmented, and often one of the results of this segmentation is a need for different views of the solution. Many, many packages have power users and casual users -- make sure you address the needs of both.
• When testing, test from the perspectives of your end users in as many ways as you can think of: inside and outside the firewall, with and without other applications running, at various times of day, etc.