Working with Other Teams

Marketing is all about selling- not to customers, but your colleagues. Listicles are definitely not a replacement for talking to your team, but here are common questions, objections, and all the above I’ve hit when it comes to getting cross-department buy in on a new MarTech stack:

IT

• Login Security: Questions like “What happens when someone leaves? How do we only give the keys to people who should have access?” will (rightfully so) be in front of mind for IT teams. This means that getting an SSO (single-sign on) for new platforms is key for both appeasing the IT gods, and making the new tool easy to get into.
• If your company uses Outlook for your work email, this will usually look like an O365, Azure, or Active Directory integration.If you use Gmail, this will typically be a Google Workspace integration, or with a 3rd party service like Okta.
• Some platforms may gate this feature behind an enterprise plan; if that isn't for you, ask about logging in via a Google account- a login many Marketers already have if they're using tools like Google Analytics or Adwords.
• Security Audits: You may hear mention of a SOC2 or security audit, which is the IT equivalent of ensuring your system is secure. Most established platforms are already prepared for this, and it can be helpful to have resources (a simple Google search for platform + SOC2 can typically find it, otherwise ask their support) around this when you approach IT.

Legal

Remember: I'm not a lawyer

• Privacy Compliance: CCPA (for US businesses) and GDPR (for ones active in the EU) are good starting points, and as a rule of thumb, most established platforms are prepared for these types of questions. I advise clients to have privacy documentation from the platform ready when discussing with legal teams.

Accounting & Finance

• Clear Renewal Terms: Preferences vary per company and team, and this more kicks in for enterprise level agreements, but it's important to have clear terms about the billing cycle. I typically recommend annual terms that auto-renew unless notice is given 30 days before as a starting point; it makes it easy to cancel, but cuts down on paperwork year over year.
• Future Cost Projections: Platforms that have volume/event-based pricing (most analytics/data tools do) will typically have a table outlining what the pricing looks like for each volume tier, and it's helpful to have that ready for your finance team. Match that pricing to your growth forecasts, so you can outline the expected cost for this year, increase for next year, and so forth.

Technical Teams

• Integrations: This will vary by platform, but I recommend clients reach out to their technical teams (product owners, development managers, etc) as early as possible if they aren't already part of the conversation. It's a common pitfall I've seen where Marketing teams sign for a service, then pass it along to their dev team to implement- only to find that the integration needs custom work that will take 6 months to complete. 
• Reporting: A usual afterthought is where success of the new tool gets shared. Most platforms offer their own internal analytics, but the usefulness of that can range from easy-peasy to feeling like you’re trying to break into a vault. If you want to match data from that new tool (ex sending push notifications) with your existing data (ex revenue or new users) then your technical team- typically data engineering or data science- will need to ingest that data. That requires the platform to have an API, or a 3rd party connector, to import the new data into your company's data warehouse.