How IT and sales are working together to get deals done

Sales teams are getting to know their colleagues in IT—and it’s not because they forgot their password.

Marketing and sales orgs are claiming, more than other business teams, that AI is leading to revenue increases, according to a recent global online survey from McKinsey. Of those rev org groups, 67% reported benefitting from the automation tech. But a sales team can’t build the potentially revenue-revving tools without some assistance from their technically minded colleagues.

AI-powered sales assistants are automating previously manual processes for sellers, like scoping and client research. This kind of deal-accelerating assistance requires a conversation between IT and sales. IT must understand sales team challenges (like how to find a good lead), and sales teams can learn how to support IT on their own priorities, like protecting and refining data.

We spoke with business pros who shared how IT and sales are bringing forth communication bridges, sales assistance tools, revenue intelligence platforms, and data protections. This trend is also creating indispensable employees who understand how to solve both business and technical problems.

AI as a bridge. Edward Gorbis, a sales lead at Amazon Web Services and writer of the Morning Sales B2B newsletter, said he is seeing the heightened role of IT in the revenue organization firsthand, and it starts with increased communication.

“What we’ve seen is these types of coding tools enable a much shorter bridge between technical folks and business folks within a business,” Gorbis said.

For example, he explained, there have been past situations where team members didn’t fully understand the language of business and sales teams. Today, by contrast, it’s more commonplace for salespeople to vibe code, use tools to translate their goals into technical terms, and even generate specs for the IT team to build software.

“If a sales team needs a specific automation flow, whether it be conducting account planning or going through thorough and deep research, that’s something that can be bridged really easily,” Gorbis said.

Gorbis added that closer relations between sales and IT results in the faster creation of technical solutions.

And IT has answers. Innovative Solutions helps customers build AI agents and document processing systems on the AWS public cloud—concepts that can be difficult for a salesperson to understand.

According to Travis Rehl, the company’s CTO and head of product, it wasn’t unusual for a member of the sales team, when confronted with a technical question from a client, to say something along the lines of, “Let me go get my solutions architect,” which could lead to a rescheduled conversation that stretched the deal cycle.

To overcome those sorts of issues, Rehl created a “call coach” that listens in on conversations between sales teams and clients, and provides answers to technical questions “in sub two seconds,” he said. The call coach is a part of his DarcyIQ platform, which also helps teams with another technical challenge: scoping. Employees can build out customer requirements and expectations with a plain-language prompt, then a sample scope—one meant to be reviewed by a human at the final stage—pulls from previously approved spec data to provide suggested text and details.

Rehl noticed the scoping problem two years ago: “Our sales team [was] saying, ‘Hey, we have all these deals. We can’t scope them [fast enough], we can’t get them enabled for our customers and my team was becoming a bottleneck in our process,’” he told us.

Clean data is a flex(era). Greg Petraetis, CRO at IT software firm Flexera, said in today’'s revenue organization, he sees IT, rev ops, sales, marketing, and the chief customer organizations working together to co-architect and deploy revenue intelligence platforms, copilot AI, and other outreach and automation tools to help sellers automate tasks.

“I think the overriding theme is that AI is elevating IT into a revenue partner, and all of the AI driven revenue initiatives depend on it for data infrastructure, for integration and for governance,” Petraetis said.

In order to make these collaborations work, Petraetis said, his company has emphasized building a solid data foundation for AI. This includes a data lake project and an effort to cleanse account and contact data: “At the end of the day, we don’t want to see hallucinations in the information, and that’s predicated on us having really high-quality data.”

Despite buyer behavior shifting away from just technical heads—Demandbase estimates that 72% of B2B purchases involve high-complexity buying groups, spanning IT, operations, finance, and end users—it seems technical input on buying decisions is perhaps more important than ever.

Technical revenue enablement. Another way IT teams are establishing their role in the revenue engine is by protecting the data that makes AI tools run. That’s where tech solutions provider Thales’s software monetization comes in. The company specializes in creating software and cloud solutions to enable security and monetization for software vendors.

Thales, in many ways, uses IT solutions to enable revenue leaders to implement flexible models like subscriptions and usage-based billing. It also offers tools to secure software against piracy while simultaneously providing data analytics on usage.

“We have the data, we make sure that the data is going to be available within the CRM for our customers, whatever CRM vendor they are using. That’s our philosophy of bringing those valuable data,” Damien Bullot, vice president of software monetization at Thales, said.

In Bullot’s view, as sales teams continue to grow their tech stacks, IT teams are establishing a protective role in the revenue organization, especially in terms of securing data and software products.

“Software theft is misunderstood and really underappreciated, and so that’s where we come in. Just to give you a data point, we estimate that [on] average, between 8% and 12% of the revenue of a software company is left on the table because it’s not properly secure,” Bullot told Revenue Brew.

Gone in 90 seconds. Sales teams need to strike while the incoming lead is hot.

Russell Levy, chief strategy and AI officer at go-to-market platform ZoomInfo, knows that the revenue team has a higher chance of success if a rep can call a site visitor in 90 seconds after filling out a “try our tool” demo form.

“It’s still fresh on their mind,” Levy told attendees during an IT Brew event in February. “They haven’t context-switched to something else yet.”

Levy developed an automated mechanism that, he said, uses those valuable seconds to pull company profiles, case studies, and talking-point info to the sales team, so they can call the interested site visitor right away, and be well-informed.

“It usually took people six or seven minutes to do basic research,” Levy said. “And this is much better than basic research.” He added the implementation has increased meeting, conversion, and demo rates for the ZoomInfo sales team.

A different caliber of IT. Levy, with encouragement from his CEO, has used AI mechanisms to take on an initiative to “transform the way sales was working.” Since that directive, he has deployed a number of automations, including a “GTM assist” that helps sales teams answer product questions.

IT is working more closely with sales, but to Rehl, that collaboration highlights a new caliber of IT professional. “You need to have IT staff who can understand business outcomes, but technically,” Rehl said. “And if you have that mix in your company, they can look at business processes like sales issues, revenue gaps, or goals, and they can build and design solutions very quickly, because they understand why it matters to the company, and they understand the technology needed to get there.”