How to convince your boss to adopt a new data tool?
To get a data tool approved, you need to talk in terms of ROI and cost avoidance. How to build a business case for different leadership personas.
Testing new data tools is often part of many professionals’ day-to-day work. You know that feeling of finding the perfect tool that streamlines your processes in unimaginable ways—only to get blocked at the end of a free trial or by a limitation in the free plan? Yeah. We know that feeling!
So you don’t have to say goodbye to a solution that has made your life so much easier—and has the potential to help even more—we’ve gathered best practices to help you convince your manager to invest in this new tool.
As Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, said, “the key to persuasion is aligning your ideas with the interests of those you are trying to convince.” Bringing this into our context, it’s important to show your manager this tool’s potential—that is, explain its ability to improve processes and simplify day-to-day operations, generating more value and revenue for the business.
Provide context around daily challenges
One of the simplest ways to do this is by revisiting the challenges faced in day-to-day operations and explaining the difference the solution actually makes when addressing them. Storytelling can be a powerful strategy here.
Have you thought about the challenges you and your team face? Now it’s time to reflect on how they impact your team’s goals and results—and go further: how do they hurt business outcomes? This is crucial, because it’s what will get your manager’s attention enough to at least consider a possible solution.
For example: ”The way we currently handle data ingestion isn’t very efficient. We build extraction logic for each data source, orchestrate it with other tools, and need to manage cloud machines to ensure everything is running. Every time an API changes, or our teams decide to switch tools, we have to manually redo the integration with our DW. As a result, we spend most of our time reading API docs and firefighting when a data pipeline breaks, instead of focusing on preparing data for consumption or creating ingestion processes tailored to our business that could generate much more value. It’s been frustrating, because I feel like our team has an infinite backlog of things we could do to increase company profitability, but we’re stuck maintaining data pipelines.”
Present a second scenario, showing how the tool is used and how it can help
It’s important to show command of the solution you’re presenting. Explain how you’ve been using the free trial (or how you could use it), and make it clear which features stood out. When talking about the tool, show how the solution addresses the pain points you mentioned earlier.
For example:
"Over the last few days we’ve been testing Erathos, and it’s a solution that can help us with these problems. It’s a data ingestion platform for building scalable data pipelines with top-tier observability in just a few clicks. They offer plug-and-play connections with all the data sources we need, with no manual work required!
Erathos not only enables integrations much faster, but also provides error alerts with logs directly in our Slack channel. In that case, if any issue happens, we’ll be the first to know and resolve it much faster, avoiding misalignment with business teams. In addition, we offload the burden of tracking API updates and managing an entire extraction and ingestion stack. This time savings will allow our team to focus on more complex technical problems that will take our organization to another level of data maturity.”
Bring concrete situations about problems and outcomes.
It sounds obvious, but sometimes we overlook it! It’s important to bring one or two examples of situations where a tool like this could help.
For example: ”Last week one of the pipelines became a bottleneck and kept running all day; we only found out when the support team mentioned the platform was very slow. With Erathos, we could configure a block window that would stop pipeline execution and alert us to the issue, avoiding any performance loss for our users.
Three weeks ago, the HubSpot integration broke because the sales team added some custom fields. I spent hours trying to understand what the previous engineer had done before I could fix it. With Erathos, it would have been just clicking a “refresh custom fields" button.
Know the pricing details that should be reported
It’s essential to keep in mind not only the exact price for acquiring a product, but also what is included in that cost. How many people in the company can use it? What are the limitations? Is there more than one plan? What’s the difference between offers? It’s always good to review the pricing page and the FAQ.
For example:
“Unlike other tools, Erathos only considers row volume for our plan. Starting at R$159, we can connect all our systems, since there is no connector limit. This plan already includes alerts for Slack, email, or Discord, in addition to SSH connection to our database.”
Show that you’re ready to make it happen
Position yourself strategically, showing that you can take responsibility for a potential tool migration, introduce the new technology to the team that will benefit from its use, and handle possible challenges arising from this change. One of managers’ main concerns is the migration process and how well the solution integrates with current tools.
What you can say:
Looking at our stack, they connect with all the data sources we need, and they already support our BigQuery data warehouse destination. I’ve already created a few integrations and everything is running perfectly; in a few hours I can set up all the ones we need.
The tool onboarding is very complete, and if necessary we can book dedicated hours with their specialists to help migrate from the current solution to Erathos, so we won’t have problems. Another nice point about the migration is that we’ll only start paying when we migrate all ingestion pipelines to the DW to Erathos.”
Make sure it’s the best option on the market (for your objective)
Do extensive research and look for similar solutions, comparing their offerings to understand what makes the most sense for your business. Just because you tested that specific tool, which had a differentiator you didn’t know before, doesn’t mean you should ignore other market possibilities. Make informed decisions to present to your manager and be well prepared to address any questions that may come up.
Curious to learn more about Erathos? Try it free for 14 days! We’d love to hear your feedback.
Testing new data tools is often part of many professionals’ day-to-day work. You know that feeling of finding the perfect tool that streamlines your processes in unimaginable ways—only to get blocked at the end of a free trial or by a limitation in the free plan? Yeah. We know that feeling!
So you don’t have to say goodbye to a solution that has made your life so much easier—and has the potential to help even more—we’ve gathered best practices to help you convince your manager to invest in this new tool.
As Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, said, “the key to persuasion is aligning your ideas with the interests of those you are trying to convince.” Bringing this into our context, it’s important to show your manager this tool’s potential—that is, explain its ability to improve processes and simplify day-to-day operations, generating more value and revenue for the business.
Provide context around daily challenges
One of the simplest ways to do this is by revisiting the challenges faced in day-to-day operations and explaining the difference the solution actually makes when addressing them. Storytelling can be a powerful strategy here.
Have you thought about the challenges you and your team face? Now it’s time to reflect on how they impact your team’s goals and results—and go further: how do they hurt business outcomes? This is crucial, because it’s what will get your manager’s attention enough to at least consider a possible solution.
For example: ”The way we currently handle data ingestion isn’t very efficient. We build extraction logic for each data source, orchestrate it with other tools, and need to manage cloud machines to ensure everything is running. Every time an API changes, or our teams decide to switch tools, we have to manually redo the integration with our DW. As a result, we spend most of our time reading API docs and firefighting when a data pipeline breaks, instead of focusing on preparing data for consumption or creating ingestion processes tailored to our business that could generate much more value. It’s been frustrating, because I feel like our team has an infinite backlog of things we could do to increase company profitability, but we’re stuck maintaining data pipelines.”
Present a second scenario, showing how the tool is used and how it can help
It’s important to show command of the solution you’re presenting. Explain how you’ve been using the free trial (or how you could use it), and make it clear which features stood out. When talking about the tool, show how the solution addresses the pain points you mentioned earlier.
For example:
"Over the last few days we’ve been testing Erathos, and it’s a solution that can help us with these problems. It’s a data ingestion platform for building scalable data pipelines with top-tier observability in just a few clicks. They offer plug-and-play connections with all the data sources we need, with no manual work required!
Erathos not only enables integrations much faster, but also provides error alerts with logs directly in our Slack channel. In that case, if any issue happens, we’ll be the first to know and resolve it much faster, avoiding misalignment with business teams. In addition, we offload the burden of tracking API updates and managing an entire extraction and ingestion stack. This time savings will allow our team to focus on more complex technical problems that will take our organization to another level of data maturity.”
Bring concrete situations about problems and outcomes.
It sounds obvious, but sometimes we overlook it! It’s important to bring one or two examples of situations where a tool like this could help.
For example: ”Last week one of the pipelines became a bottleneck and kept running all day; we only found out when the support team mentioned the platform was very slow. With Erathos, we could configure a block window that would stop pipeline execution and alert us to the issue, avoiding any performance loss for our users.
Three weeks ago, the HubSpot integration broke because the sales team added some custom fields. I spent hours trying to understand what the previous engineer had done before I could fix it. With Erathos, it would have been just clicking a “refresh custom fields" button.
Know the pricing details that should be reported
It’s essential to keep in mind not only the exact price for acquiring a product, but also what is included in that cost. How many people in the company can use it? What are the limitations? Is there more than one plan? What’s the difference between offers? It’s always good to review the pricing page and the FAQ.
For example:
“Unlike other tools, Erathos only considers row volume for our plan. Starting at R$159, we can connect all our systems, since there is no connector limit. This plan already includes alerts for Slack, email, or Discord, in addition to SSH connection to our database.”
Show that you’re ready to make it happen
Position yourself strategically, showing that you can take responsibility for a potential tool migration, introduce the new technology to the team that will benefit from its use, and handle possible challenges arising from this change. One of managers’ main concerns is the migration process and how well the solution integrates with current tools.
What you can say:
Looking at our stack, they connect with all the data sources we need, and they already support our BigQuery data warehouse destination. I’ve already created a few integrations and everything is running perfectly; in a few hours I can set up all the ones we need.
The tool onboarding is very complete, and if necessary we can book dedicated hours with their specialists to help migrate from the current solution to Erathos, so we won’t have problems. Another nice point about the migration is that we’ll only start paying when we migrate all ingestion pipelines to the DW to Erathos.”
Make sure it’s the best option on the market (for your objective)
Do extensive research and look for similar solutions, comparing their offerings to understand what makes the most sense for your business. Just because you tested that specific tool, which had a differentiator you didn’t know before, doesn’t mean you should ignore other market possibilities. Make informed decisions to present to your manager and be well prepared to address any questions that may come up.
Curious to learn more about Erathos? Try it free for 14 days! We’d love to hear your feedback.