Agur Jõgi, CTO of Pipedrive and expert in scaling technology and organizations. Experienced as an innovator, founder and C-level manager.
This year, like many recently, is all about making sales and protecting revenue in a challenging, volatile climate. The CTO plays a significant role in making that happen. They can be proactive about ensuring both the stability of the business and customer experience, as well as how efficient and directly effective the sales and marketing teams can be.
The Customer Is Always King
If you’re managing an enterprise function, then see the end customer as the end point of everything you do. Consider that they will be the ultimate beneficiary of whatever tool, platforms and services you provide—and build with that in mind. This helps focus every enterprise team like an arrow pointing to the most important goal: satisfying customers. CTOs and leaders of all types should be thinking about how to help sales in everything they do.
Ruthlessly Focus On Operational Digital Maturity
They say the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. There’s a similar dynamic for creating enterprise digital maturity. One model of operational maturity, from PagerDuty, shows how organizations can be ranked on an ascending five-point scale from the lowest level, manual, up to preventative.
What I mean by the tree reference is that you need a resource at the right time with no excuses, which you achieve by properly preparing in advance. So, when assessing enterprise levels of operational maturity, seasoned CTOs know that it takes time to make the various investments, changes and training required to move through from a reactive, toilsome operational flow with lower operational stability and higher incident risk. Yet, it’s absolutely worth it to safeguard business operations so that every function can deliver on its shared goals.
The digital maturity full model moves from manual to reactive, where the organization is permanently trying to manage contingent digital events. The third level of the five stages is responsive, where engineers use tools like ML to support visibility and response speed. One stage higher is proactive, where incidents can be managed before customers notice, and internal incident processes work smoothly with the help of programmatic learning.
Finally, at the pinnacle, is the ability of the CTO’s team to deliver a preventative service. This is the CTO’s dream, as it leverages best practices and automation to remove engineering toil. It results in a reliable, stable and productive business environment that can manage customer needs and support strong growth and profitability.
The higher the operational maturity, the stronger the enterprise is placed to take advantage of new technologies, embrace opportunities and deliver desired business results—such as new AI projects and services.
Enable Sales And Marketing Teams
Talk to the chief revenue officer about the digital maturity of the sales team. Pipedrive’s most recent annual State of Sales & Marketing Report showed that salespeople, given the right tech to support them, are much more optimistic and relaxed about their workload and business plans. Right now, the data shows that 35% are making use of AI tools, the same percentage as those using the mature technology of email marketing automation, underlining the rapid adoption of AI. But right now, AI appears to be in use more by smaller companies. Right now, 42% of firms with up to 10 employees have adopted AI, versus 37% of those with 11–100 employees, and a mere quarter (23%) of organization of over 100 employees.
Colleagues who can use automation report feeling happier and a more equitable work-life balance. On a five-point scale of happiness (on a scale of 0 being very unhappy to 5 being very happy), automation users were an average 3.8/5, versus those who don’t use any (3.5/5) for workplace happiness. Automation supports higher employee experience as well as profits, as 82% of respondents who enjoy their tools meet their sales KPIs, versus 62% of those who don’t like their tools.
Looking broadly at enterprise technology provision, of all the company well-being offerings suggested to the respondents, including team building activities, access to fitness classes, employee assistance programs and so on, remote working and flexible work hours far outstrip in perceived value. These are based on services totally within the CTO’s remit.
Finally, the report showed a 20% difference between workers hitting their professional goals from those who like their technology tooling compared to those who don’t. In today’s climate, many businesses are considering reducing budgets, but leaders must understand exactly the sentiment of their tech investments from those that use them daily to ensure that smart spending supports delivering enterprise revenue growth.
A CTO that delivers for the company helps the company deliver.
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