SERIES: IT vs. Marketing – How to Communicate

The 4th post in our 4-part series investigating the difficulties between IT and Marketing.

Changing the Way IT or Marketing Communicates

Marketing should keep a few things in mind when communicating with IT:

• Fully communicate the end-state – the goal you wish to accomplish and not just what you want to do. IT can be a strong strategic partner in helping you accomplish your goals and not a vendor to do your bidding.

• Leave specific requests as open-ended as possible. Don’t jump too quickly into dictating specific solutions. You will miss out on potential undiscovered opportunities IT can suggest and you will undermine the expertise that they can bring to the table.

• Make requests to-the-point and cut out fluff. IT-types may disdain small talk.

• Treat IT as a key partner in the trenches, not as a vendor.

IT should keep a few things in mind when communicating with Marketing:

• Try to understand the end customer, the sales process, and the strategic goals of the endeavor.

• Approach the situation with positivity and a success-orientation.

• Make an effort to communicate in layman’s terms and don’t overuse acronyms.

• Proactively ask for clarification – especially if you see a potential weak spot. Take the time to fully marinate in the problem space before you jump into solution mode.

• Don’t perform a requested task exactly-as-asked if you know it will fail just to prove Marketing lacks depth of knowledge. It may puff your ego but it isn’t kind.

• When engaging, you may need to be more warm and schmoozy than you are when interacting with exclusively other IT-types.

This was the final post in our series on IT vs. Marketing. We hope you enjoyed it and got some value from our perspective. We did take liberty and spoke in generalities, there is a wide swathe of situations and sometimes there is zero friction between these two groups.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject! Please comment on any of the posts and add your two cents!

Need a firm to help bridge communication with IT / Marketing?
We’d be happy to chat.

IT vs. Marketing Series

Part 1: Why the Friction?

Part 2: The Website Battleground

Part 3: How to Find Success

Part 4: How to Communicate