Projects don’t fail, people do.
That might sound a bit pessimistic, but after 10 years in varying client service roles amidst the swollen martech landscape – I know this to be true. I’ve directed and consulted on hundreds of projects – with timelines and dollar values ranging from the modest to The Entire Budget for the Whole Department for the Next Year and a Half. My team and I pride ourselves on being prepared, organized, and innovative. Every time a new engagement comes across our desks, we ensure the scope is within our expertise, and all the tools are set up to see us through from kick-off to completion.
And yet, some projects are not successful.
The greatest trick that any solution provider (technology or otherwise) can play is to make you believe that your current processes, colleagues, professional relationships and interdependencies don’t matter or don’t exist. The reality is that a large part of my work has to do with politics, change management, consensus building, and evangelism.
In short: the People are The Project.
Their roles and relationships inform their perspectives and more often than not, the success of the project has to do with an organization’s willingness to transform how they think about their entrenched ways of doing things.
It’s with this understanding that we began this blog series “ABM: In Real Life (“IRL”). Many organizations are switching from lead-centric to account-based marketing and sales. Here at Inverta, we consult on these transformations first hand – and wanted to share some of the situations that we encounter when marketing and sales stop being polite, and start getting real about account-based marketing.
