How to Gain Executive Buy-in and Get Budget for Your Sales Initiative

You know what's working within your sales organization. And, perhaps more importantly, you know what isn't. Many of the sales leaders we speak to know exactly what needs to be fixed in their organizations. Things like:

• Selling too much on features and functions and not on business value
• Losing too many deals to the competition or to no decision
• Too much discounting late in the sales cycle
• No access or credibility with the economic buyer
• Unverified champions that don't follow through
• Limited understanding of the buyer's decision process
• Inaccurate forecasts that don't hold up as the quarter progresses
• Constantly scrambling in the final weeks just to make the number
• Relying on a handful of top performers to save the quarter, rather than getting consistent results across the entire team

Fixing these issues isn't just good for the business; it's good for you. Building a repeatable, scalable sales process makes you more effective at your job and makes your team's results more predictable, which is exactly the kind of impact that gets noticed and advances your career. Leaders who can point to a consistent, repeatable engine — not just a few heroic reps closing deals at the buzzer — are the ones who get more resources, bigger scope, and a seat at the table.

The flip side is just as real. Without a repeatable process, these challenges tend to repeat themselves quarter after quarter, leading to frustration, last-minute scrambling, and the same fire drills showing up again and again. It makes an already hard job harder, and it puts you in the position of hoping the number comes together rather than having confidence it will.

If you could fix this on your own, you would. But some challenges are bigger than any one leader can solve alone — they require alignment across departments and support from the broader executive team to actually change behavior and stick. The root of the problem is typically a lack of alignment among senior leadership on how to develop a revenue engine that enables the sales team to execute. It can also be difficult to move a sales initiative forward if your leadership team can't agree on the best mechanism to course-correct.

If you're trying to convince your leadership that investing in your sales initiative will make a difference, you need a plan of action. We help sales leaders do this all the time. Here are our best practices for getting buy-in from other departments.

Best Practice #1: Tie It to a Major Initiative

If you want other leaders to care about it, your sales initiative can't be just a sales program. It needs to be tied to a major initiative of the company, one that many departments have a vested interest in.

If the goals of your initiative are too sales-specific and don't have a clear connection to a company initiative, your colleagues will see it as a "sales only" program. They won't want to waste their time on something that's not going to move their desired outcomes forward.

For example, let's say your company is moving to subscription pricing. The goal of this pricing shift is to create recurring revenue that will improve chances for selling the company. You could say the goal of your initiative is to enable the sales team to sell the new products (which have subscription pricing) — or you can set the objective as improving RMR by 15% in the quarter following the kickoff. Perhaps the two are the same, but the latter shows how the event directly aligns to the company goal of driving RMR. That goal, stated that way, is probably something marketing, customer success, and product are also driving toward this year.

Positioning the goals of your initiative in a way that demonstrates value to other departments is a solid first step in getting buy-in from cross-functional leadership.

Be sure that the sales initiative is seen as advancing company goals.

Best Practice #2: Demonstrate "What's In It For Them"

People need to know the value of buying into something. Why should they sign on to support this initiative if they believe it's sales-focused? In reality, improving Sales efficiency and alignment to cross-functional partners can impact the operation of the entire commercial org. That answer may be obvious to you, but make sure it's crystal clear to your leadership team.

Why should a marketing leader invest his or her time in participating in the initiative? Perhaps it will ensure that demand gen leads are followed up on in a way that improves conversions and increases engagement on marketing campaigns, helping to reduce Customer Acquisition Cost and better justify marketing spend.

Maybe you're launching a program that will improve negotiation processes and you want the CFO involved. Are they concerned with improving revenue margins and EBITDA efficiency? You can demonstrate how the training will help make your teams more efficient and impact the metrics your CFO is measured on.

Beyond tying the outcome to a major company initiative, help each leader understand the positive business outcomes specific to them that will result from this project.

Best Practice #3: Articulate the Challenge

One of the best ways to show that you need to get an executive team aligned is to demonstrate a misalignment. If you know you need alignment, you're halfway there. Your job now is to demonstrate to others that the alignment is needed. We find that in many organizations there is often a lack of agreement cross-functionally on what's important to the buyer. Here are some points to consider:

• Is your sales team aligning your products with key business problems? Or are they focusing on demos filled with bells and whistles?
• Is your marketing team focusing on those same problems? Or are they producing the latest color-filled brochure focused on the latest features and functions?
• Is your product team improving your solution in a way that aligns to key buyer challenges? Or are they building widgets that are cool, but not necessarily something buyers would pay a premium for?
• Is the conversation or customer experience similar or unique with every touchpoint in your customer engagement process?

Make a list of examples where the misalignment created negative consequences. Then test your leadership on these four essential questions. Ask them:

1. What business problems does our solution solve?
2. How specifically do we solve those problems?
3. How do we do it better than the competition?
4. What's our proof?

The disparity of their answers can help you make your case. When we do this exercise with customers, more often than not, the answers are nowhere near the same. It's a great exercise because it makes evident what your buyers are experiencing. If your leadership team can't deliver the same message, how can your go-to-market teams? Be sure to articulate the negative consequences that currently result from the execution inconsistency. Then determine the positive business outcomes that will be achieved by building this alignment and consistency.

Our industry report on the business cost of go-to-market misalignment outlines some specific examples and trends quantifying negative impacts like revenue leak, longer sales cycles, lost deals and customer churn. It may be helpful in providing some general concrete evidence to support your narrative.

Best Practice #4: Put Yourself in the Shoes of the Buyer

If you're a Command of the Message^® veteran, we would tell you to formulate your own "Mantra." If you aren't familiar, the Mantra is a way to articulate three critical components of a deal. Answer these questions for your initiative in terms each member of your executive team will find meaningful:

• What are the Positive Business Outcomes (PBOs) that this initiative will achieve?
• What are the Required Capabilities in order to achieve those outcomes?
• What are the Metrics that you will use to measure success?

Outline the answers for each of the executives you're looking to convince. Make sure they're meaningful to their roles. They may not be the same for each one — the PBOs a marketing executive may be looking to achieve are likely different than what your head of product is looking to get out of the sales initiative. Then start your own campaign and "listening tour" to get their buy-in.

Best Practice #5: Proof Points

Proof points are powerful, even when you're trying to sell internally. If you are considering a partner to help you with your sales initiative, have the company help you come up with testimonials and proof points that are aligned to both the problems you're trying to solve and the different roles across your company.

For example, if we were looking to convince a Chief Revenue Officer on the value of messaging alignment, we would share that Salsify increased net pipeline coverage by 2.4x within 6 months and Net New Business by 240% within 12 months of Command of the Message^®.

If we were in conversations with a CEO, we may share that project44 saw a 115% growth in ARR after their Force Management engagement, followed by an $80M funding round that increased their valuation by 12%.

Whatever vendor you choose to work with, they should also be able to provide relevant testimonials and metrics that will aid these conversations. Ask if they can connect you to speak directly with a customer. Those conversations will help your fellow executives see the value in the initiative, especially since they're coming from third-party resources.

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A sales initiative is always more successful if you're able to build alignment around the Positive Business Outcomes the initiative is expected to drive. If you do the work up front to build the case for your initiative, it will be much easier to drive adoption and reinforcement once you launch the new process or methodology. When everyone is operating under the same goal and framework, your results are better — and achieved faster.

Reach out to start a conversation with our team. We're happy to guide you along the process of getting internal approval for your intiative and addressing any challenges that may arise.