In this must-listen episode, we're thrilled to kick off part one of a two-part series that promises to revolutionize your approach to procurement and intranet software selection. We're joined by Sorena Tiba, VP of Technical Sales at Igloo Software. Sorena is an established leader in the realm of sales consulting and has worked with some of the most recognized organizations in the world. Sorena is a powerhouse in pre-sales and sales engineering, and she is here to share her insights on how you can get the most out of your vendor interactions.
Tell us a little about yourself and the work you’ve been doing over the last few years
My name is Sorena Tiba and I am the Senior Director of Technical Sales Consulting & Growth Operations at Igloo Software. I’ve been with the organization for a little over 10 years now. My role started in support, moved to BDR, then to owning a territory as a regional sales manager. Then I decided I hated contracts and loved platforms, so I moved to a more technical role and have really found my happy place in that part of the business.
What does pre-sales mean to you and why is it the most important role in the deal cycle?
To me, the word pre-sales itself always kind of annoyed me a little bit because it’s sales. It’s the pre-customer side of the business and it’s the most important side. One because it’s where my team sits, and two, because it’s where you're setting your future customers up for success. You are building the foundation of what they are choosing in terms of their most important platform requirements, what they are choosing in terms of the vendor and the type of partner that they want to work with, and what they will ultimately be using once they’ve signed that contract. If you’ve got a proper foundation on the pre-sales or sales side of things it becomes a smooth transition for implementation. It becomes a really great and strong customer success experience. The more up front, reactive, and relationship-y you are during the pre-sales side, the longer the customer is going to stay with you.
How should application leads work with sales engineers to understand how they are unique across the other vendors you are being compared with?
It’s always interesting to me because a lot of the times you’ll see two scenarios. Whether you are looking at an organization that just has a list of features they want to check off, or you are looking at an organization that is more pragmatic and they know what their business cases are, it ultimately always comes down to a “show me the feature like this” or “walk me through this use case like this” request. We still to this day see requests for demonstrations that are heavily scripted - go here, click this, do this. The big thing I always push back on these prospects is that no two platforms are going to be exactly alike so by pre-defining what your solution is by coming to the table with “I need you to click buttons in this series or workflows in an exact order,” that might minimize your change management when you’re looking at selecting a vendor post contract, but will also confuse your vendor selection through that process.
As a customer you want vendors to come to you and say “this is how we would deliver the solution for what it is you are trying to solve for” or “this is how you would navigate through our specific platform” because that is ultimately how you will be using it post-contract. So, kind of surrendering to the idea that you’re not going to the vendor with a list of features or a specific flow, but rather business challenges and opportunities within your business, and then letting the vendor come to the table and show the value of their system against your business needs. This will ultimately give you a better outcome in your vendor selection, in my humble opinion.
During post-sale implementation it’s all about aligning deployed use cases, but on the pre-sales side of the house it’s all about building the business case. How do you specifically partner with your prospects to ensure they are focusing on outcomes and business value, and are able to go back and justify their case to make the purchase?
A big part of justifying the business case is understanding the why and the who. So, when you’re looking at a digital workplace, or an intranet, or a community platform, or whatever nomenclature you want to leverage there, understanding who is at the helm driving this business decision can really help you figure out what your use cases and business needs are. If you are going down this path because of an HR initiative this might have something to do with employee retention and employee acquisition, so they’re going to be focused a lot on culture and recognition. They’re going to be focused on bringing together employees under employee resource groups and focus more on social collaboration, and things like policies and procedures. Understanding HR is driving this will help you find the right business case results. Not just ROI, because that might not be something that the platform itself can calculate – we can’t control your employee retention as there are multiple factors that come into play there – but it can help you define your return on objectives. So those business opportunities, and those business pains that you can alleviate with a technology like an intranet platform, you can use to align to those objectives and say, “yes by choosing this vendor and this type of system we can do the things that will ultimately lead to ROI.”
How have you started to really make sure you’re getting the right information through that process?
I think it’s a combination – I always like to say as a technical sales consultant, and as a salesperson in general, you always want to have enough information to be dangerous. You can’t go in and say “tell me how many users you have” or “tell me what industry you’re in.” If I was on the receiving end of that, that would just be a lazy sales rep. I would want to go in and understand your executive leadership team and their makeup. I would want to understand what they get really excited about – which are all things you can get from Twitter feeds and company websites. I want to understand your industry and your nomenclature. I want to know the makeup of your business. Do you have multiple businesses under a single umbrella? Do you have different cultures there? Do you have different experiences? How do you talk about your employees – are they employees, staff, or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?
You want to know these things so that when you are speaking to the individual you are already coming there with an understanding of their business. It makes it easier for them to open up about what their true challenges are because they feel like you can help them, consult them, and guide them. But it also is a two-way communication because you can only glean so much from corporate websites and financial reports and all the other Nancy Drew-ing that you can do in that early sales process. There needs to be a conversation back and forth which could be with a single individual but more likely should be with multiple individuals and stakeholders. An intranet is not just one thing to one person, it touches so many employees in so many different ways that you want different voices at the table that help to build what those use cases are to build that strategy forward.
What has changed over the last few years as far as the use cases that customers are coming to you looking for?
There have been a few different shifts that we’ve seen in the last five to ten years. I’d say when I first joined Igloo back in the day it was very IT driven still in terms of the part of the business that was actually purchasing this software. They were very technical in their asks - they didn’t want policies and procedures, but rather documents. They didn't want corporate information, they wanted blogs. So that was kind of the sales process and nomenclature we’d use back then. It has since shifted; I'd say about six or seven years ago to be more business driven. So, HR, corporate comms, internal marketing, those sides of the business, are getting more heavily involved. A while back IT didn’t really have a place at that table. They were just doing the checkbox to make sure everything was okay, but it was ultimately the business decision or business budget, so IT either got on board or got out of the way.
Now, within the last few years, we are seeing more of a partnership between IT and business. We’re seeing a sort of natural friction that comes out of that – business moves very quickly and IT is busy keeping the lights on, making sure everything is secured, busy doing all of these other things that the pace in which the business needs them to move for the tools is not the pace in which IT can move because again they’ve got 5 million other things they need to worry about. So now they’re partnering in a way that says, yes IT can get behind this decision, makes their life easier, and allows them to support and be involved in the expansion but not manage the day to day. When it comes to the ongoing organizational breadth of this tool or app, it’s really the business side that continues to own it.
But the big thing that’s changed – everybody is exhausted. Whether you’re looking at frontline employees or desked employees, they have so many tools and applications that they need to leverage. They’ve got payroll, HRIS, LMS, CMS, CRS, you name the acronym, there is a tool within their toolbelt they have access to (and probably don’t even know that they have access to and definitely don’t know how to use it.) So, finding a way of not just combining the traditional corporate news and information and policies and processes, but also bringing in those integrations in a meaningful way – not just to check a box – but to do it the right way, is becoming a really important factor.
The other change is around the organizational initiatives. When I started the needs were black and white, wanting very clear things like policies and processes. It was about what the company wanted employees to know, but that has shifted. It’s not just what the company wants you to know, but also what the employee needs from that information. For some people it’s something as simple as what the menu is at their office location. For other businesses it’s organizational initiatives like philanthropy programs, community outreach programs, employee resource groups around equity, diversity, and inclusion and these types of things, so there is much more expected from a digital workplace or intranet than we would’ve seen when we started in this business.
It sounds like business leaders understand that technology needs to be humane in terms of engaging with employees.
It really does. It’s interesting because you’re seeing a lot of these pieces around artificial intelligence and machine learning but at the same time, platforms like digital workplaces must become an extension of the human experience. So, you’re getting the artificial side of the human experience with AI because they think “I’m not creative enough to start a conversation or a content piece and I need a little bit of help” or “I don’t want to go digging into this so give me a sentiment analysis or make me a recommendation based on who I am”. That mimics the human factor using technology as the basis of it, but on the inverse side of it, you’re using a digital workplace to try and mimic a human experience that used to be around face-to-face, people-to-people interaction in a specific building, in a specific location. You’re trying to take the beauty that was tribal knowledge and drive-by conversations and all these things that naturally happen when people are near each other and trying to digitize that in a meaningful way and that is extremely hard to do.
What are some of your thoughts on the build vs buy option when it comes to intranet?
I am so glad this is a voice only podcast because as soon as you talk about custom build I start sweating and trying to get air. We still see some organizations that have the perception that building in-house is free, or building with SharePoint is free. But we are seeing less of that to be honest. We saw this with some of our own customers, where their IT teams came in and said, “we’re already paying for SharePoint licenses, we are already paying for xyz, we will just build it in-house.” Then they end up coming back six months later because there isn’t that solid understanding that this isn’t just technology. It isn’t just a series of checkboxes, going back to features and functionality, it’s the way that those features connect. For the user, whether you’re looking at a content absorber, manager, or admin, the way those things fit together and the ultimate end user experience, the fundamental back-end parts of the system that you never think of when you are building these types of tools that you actually need, it becomes a lot more laborious than just “I just need a check box, I need a blog, I just need an xyz.”
So, I do think we are going to expect to see a shift to more out-of-the-box best-in-breed intranet options. But what’s really going to, in my opinion, distinguish different vendors, is customers looking at it and saying “ok, you are giving us the 7 out of 10 use cases, now we want to build the extra three on our own.” This way companies can build off of the fundamentals and still create a customized solution by taking the product beyond what the native offering is.
What do you think is causing the shift back to out-of-the-box intranets?
I think it might be learning from past experiences building custom solutions before. We chatted about this a little bit earlier in our conversation but it’s this idea that when you’re looking at these types of solutions, the way that business operates, and IT operates is very different. As far as the speed at which business can move as it relates to a solution that they are ultimately responsible for, that is driving their business needs, is much faster. That friction becomes insurmountable in a business. You’ve got HR that says “I need this thing,” and you’ve got IT that goes “Well, yeah, but this other system has to be fixed, and this tool has to be deployed, and there is a new requirement about user data, so I’m sorry but your newsroom is going to be put behind a list of 13 other things.”
In order to remove that friction between those two parts of the business I think a lot of organizations are looking for that out-of-the-box software because IT is too busy to move at the same speed that the business needs them to move.
What would be your advice to application leads who do have to reach across departments and are looking to find software that is right for them?
Honestly, do it early and do it often. The amount of times we have seen business people choose their vendor and end up being delayed for weeks or months at a time because IT says this is a new use case, you have no idea what we need to do before you can sign on the dotted line. So, getting them involved as early as possible so they are a part of the conversation and they are clear on what their responsibilities are going to be, and also to give them an opportunity to remind or educate you on their procurement processes for security, validation, integrations, authentication, etc. So that you don’t end up going down a path with a vendor and then in the eleventh hour realize you can’t sign with them because they don’t meet your security needs. Or you can’t sign with them because they don’t work with your authentication mechanism, they don’t work with your single sign on or membership management or all these other things. So, if there is any recommendation it’s do it early and do it nicely.
