How to Sell DataOps to Your Boss | 7wData

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So you’ve decided that DataOps.liveis the right solution for your company - now what? Like most organizations, you’ll need buy-in from your executives to begin implementation. But how do you sell the investment value of a technical product to a business-driven leader?

To begin with, you must identify the problem you are trying to solve, define whose problem it is to solve, and decide how and where to best spend your budget.

One of the most important aspects of selling to a business leader is to put the problem you are trying to solve for, as well as the solution, into a language they understand. If you start too soon on a technically heavy pitch, you’ll likely lose the attention of your intended audience rather quickly. Instead, you must identify the ideal business outcomes that their particular role finds most valuable to the company.

Keep in mind - DataOps is not a solution in search of a problem. As Snowflake Non-executive Advisor Kent Graziano puts it, “If you’re trying to sell DataOps to a boss that doesn’t see there is a problem - you’re barking up the wrong tree.” A key identifier in knowing that your organization is ready to begin implementing the #TrueDataOps philosophy comes at a stage of maturity where you’re able to recognize the problem in your current process, but don’t yet know the solution.

If your stakeholders have recently made the decision to adopt, DataOps will only reinforce and accelerate the goals they were hoping to achieve with that investment. Think of DataOps as the framework to operationalize Snowflake faster - it will dramatically increase your organization’s success in adoption while decreasing your time to value.  Customers like OneWeb and Roche have moved from zero to production data workloads or data sharing in 2-4 weeks.

DataOps.live Vice President of Partner Marketing,Laurent Deheuvels, perhaps explains the DataOps and Snowflake relationship best with this simple analogy - utilizing Snowflake without the DataOps.live platform is like skiing without snow gear.

“Say you’re going to invest in the hobby of skiing this winter - so you start to purchase the equipment you think you’ll need: a pair of old skis, random sized snow boots, etc., and then you decide, ‘well, I already have socks that work well for me when I play tennis, those should also work well enough for skiing. Plus I don’t need to buy gloves, I’m usually okay in the cold.”

Deheuvels continues this thought by justifying the initial money he saved at the beginning of the season by skipping out on purchasing ‘nonessentials,’ versus the ROI he’s anticipating from his investment:

“You won’t be at the skiing resort year-round, only on holidays, so you’ll want to have the best possible time there while spending as much time as possible on the slopes, which is why you need the right equipment. This way, you can tackle more slopes, ski better, and enjoy the full benefits of this beautiful sport even more. If you knew the pain that would come from not having the right skis or snow boots, as well as the additional pain of wearing your tennis socks and no gloves - wouldn’t you have purchased the right equipment for yourself to begin with?”

This same philosophy can be used to interpret your data strategy: the needs you have around data won’t diminish over time - they’ll only become more apparent.

At some point, your business leaders should identify that they will have to make an investment in enabling software.