It’s every business’s worst nightmare. The engineering and product development teams have been working on a product before they hand it off to sales. Then the problems start. The sales team lacks critical information necessary to properly pitch the product, which leads to flagging sales and disinterested customers.

Is this a common issue? Yes. Does it have to happen? No. Digital commerce transformations can happen efficiently, accurately, and appealingly. It just takes a combination of leadership decisions that bring IT and sales together from the beginning. Here’s how.

Start With a Shared Vision

For a lot of businesses building a product or a major feature, sales and IT might only come together somewhere in the middle of development. This is a mistake. In order to ensure that the sales team knows how to sell the new system in a way that delights customers (without overselling the product), they need to work together from the beginning. In the earliest discussions, sales managers need to work with IT, and engineering leads should be working with sales. Once both teams have reached a consensus about necessary features and parameters, then more work can be done to flesh out the design.

Choose an Effective Mediator

Companies that tend to silo IT and sales departments might find that true collaboration between these teams is hard to achieve, especially at first. In this case, finding a specific someone to bridge the gap can help to maintain positive and effective communication. A product manager for the new system can become a champion of all parties’ needs and expectations. This person understands IT’s performance goals and design challenges, and they also appreciate the sales team’s requirements for clear details that fit into metrics and other measurables. As a result, both teams can feel like their perspectives are heard and integrated into the vision for the digital commerce transformation.

Promote Collaboration

Although having someone in the middle to negotiate is a helpful tool, especially for teams that don’t play well together, true collaboration is the goal. At the very start, engineering teams should bring sales leaders into the room to learn and discuss the development of the product roadmap. Some businesses smooth the path to a successful launch by bringing an engineer into the sales team. In any case, collaboration should be fair, effective, and frequent. The sales team should get regular updates from IT during development and testing, and the sales team should invite engineers to participate in sales planning.

Train for Sales Success

Although any system should be built for the end user of the B2B ecommerce platform, it should be designed for the sales team to be able to sell it. Salespeople can’t just pick up any new product or feature and sell it at the drop of a hat. They need training from people who fully understand the system. They’ll require accurate materials and the right language they need to position the product to the target audience. As such, IT engineers should attend training sessions and demos, with the ability to provide feedback that improves the quality of the sales team’s selling models.

Cultivate Feedback Loops Between IT and Sales

Once the system is ready to launch and the salespeople are ready to incorporate it into their pitches, the teams still need to work together. Feedback loops provide a handy model for salespeople to report issues or concerns they see after launch, with opportunities for IT to review and address them. More than just filing a ticket that someone might look at later, these feedback loops need to provide opportunities for continued collaboration. Long-term feedback can help to resolve the issues causing failing sales, ideally making the system more usable for all.

Spending months working on a transition that makes your digital commerce business more efficient and resilient takes investment in both IT and sales. You can’t expect a good result unless the people designing the system and the people tasked with selling it can come together for real collaboration. By following these tips to improve communication, reduce conflict, and provide a better roadmap for system development and launch, you’ll ensure that these teams can work together for the good of the company.