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 a regular part of the workflow for many data professionals out there. You know that feeling of finding the perfect tool that streamlines your pipelines beyond imagination, only to get blocked at the end of a free trial or hit the limits of the free tier? Yep. We've been there!
To make sure you don't have to say goodbye to a solution that made your life so much easier—and has the potential to make it even better—we've gathered best practices to help you build a business case and convince your manager to invest in this new tool.
As Robert Cialdini, author of Influence, wrote, “the key to persuasion is to align your ideas with the interests of those you are trying to persuade.” Translating this to our context: you need to show your manager the tool's actual ROI, meaning its ability to optimize workflows and simplify daily operations, ultimately driving more value and efficiency for the business.
Contextualize your daily challenges
One of the simplest ways to do this is by highlighting the bottlenecks you face daily and showing the actual difference the solution makes in solving them. Storytelling can be a powerful strategy here.
Thinking about the challenges you and your team face? Now is the time to reflect on how this impacts your team's OKRs and deliverables—and go even further: how does this slow down business outcomes? This is crucial, as it's what will get your manager's attention to actually consider a potential solution.
For example: "The way we currently handle data ingestion is highly inefficient. We build custom extraction logic for each data source, orchestrate it with other tools, and have to manage cloud VMs to ensure everything is running. Every time an API changes, or our business teams switch tools, we have to manually refix the integration to our DW. Because of this, we spend most of our time reading API docs and putting out fires when a data pipeline breaks, instead of focusing on preparing data for consumption or building business-specific pipelines that would drive real revenue. It's frustrating because I feel our team has an endless backlog of initiatives that could increase company profitability, but we are stuck doing data pipeline maintenance."
Present a second scenario, demonstrating how the tool works and helps
It is important to show that you've mastered the solution you are presenting. Demonstrate how you've been using the free trial (or how you plan to use it), and clearly point out the features that stood out. When talking about the tool, show how the solution directly solves the pain points you mentioned earlier.
For example:
"Over the past few days, we've been testing Erathos, and it's a solution that can solve these issues for us. It's a data ingestion platform that allows us to build scalable data pipelines with end-to-end observability in just a few clicks. They offer plug-and-play connections to all the data sources we need, with zero manual coding required!
Erathos not only enables integrations in a fraction of the time, but also lets us receive error alerts with logs directly in our Slack channel. This way, if something fails, we are the first to know and can resolve it instantly, avoiding complaints from the business teams. Plus, we outsource the headache of keeping up with API updates and managing an entire extraction and ingestion infrastructure stack. This saved engineering time will allow our team to focus on more complex technical challenges that will take our data maturity to the next level."
Bring concrete examples of issues and outcomes
It sounds obvious, but sometimes we miss it! It is crucial to bring one or two examples of a real situation where a tool like this would have saved the day.
For example: "Last week, one of our pipelines got stuck and ran all day; we only found out when the support team complained the platform was extremely slow. With Erathos, we could set up a block window to stop the execution and alert us of the issue, avoiding any performance degradation for our users.
Three weeks ago, our HubSpot integration broke because the sales team added some custom fields. I spent hours trying to reverse-engineer what the previous engineer had built just to fix it. With Erathos, it would have been a simple click on a 'refresh custom fields' button."
Know the pricing and licensing details
It is critical to keep in mind not just the exact cost of the product, but also what is included in that price. How many team members can use it? What are the limits? Is there more than one tier? What is the difference between the plans? It's always a good idea to review the pricing page and the FAQs.
For example:
"Unlike other tools, Erathos pricing is based solely on row volume. Starting at R$159, we can connect all of our systems, as there is no limit on connectors. This plan already includes Slack, email, or Discord alerts, as well as SSH tunneling for our database."
Step up and own the implementation
Position yourself strategically by showing that you can take ownership of the migration process, onboard the team that will benefit from it, and handle any potential challenges that come with the transition. One of the main concerns for managers is the migration overhead and how well the new solution integrates with the existing modern data stack.
What you can say:
"Looking at our stack, they connect to all the data sources we need and already have BigQuery as a destination for our data warehouse. I've already set up a few integrations and they are running perfectly; I can migrate all the remaining ones in just a few hours.
Their onboarding is highly comprehensive, and if needed, we can get dedicated hours with their solutions engineers to help us migrate from our current setup to Erathos, so it will be a smooth transition. Another great thing about the migration is that we will only start paying once we have fully migrated all ingestion pipelines over to Erathos."
Make sure it is the best option on the market (for your specific use case)
Do your research and look into alternative solutions, comparing their offerings to understand what makes the most sense for your business. Just because you tested a specific tool that had a feature you hadn't seen before doesn't mean you should ignore other options in the space. Make data-driven decisions to present to your manager so you are fully prepared to address any objections.
Curious to learn more about Erathos? Start a 14-day free trial! We'd love to hear your feedback.
Testing new data tools is often a regular part of the workflow for many data professionals out there. You know that feeling of finding the perfect tool that streamlines your pipelines beyond imagination, only to get blocked at the end of a free trial or hit the limits of the free tier? Yep. We've been there!
To make sure you don't have to say goodbye to a solution that made your life so much easier—and has the potential to make it even better—we've gathered best practices to help you build a business case and convince your manager to invest in this new tool.
As Robert Cialdini, author of Influence, wrote, “the key to persuasion is to align your ideas with the interests of those you are trying to persuade.” Translating this to our context: you need to show your manager the tool's actual ROI, meaning its ability to optimize workflows and simplify daily operations, ultimately driving more value and efficiency for the business.
Contextualize your daily challenges
One of the simplest ways to do this is by highlighting the bottlenecks you face daily and showing the actual difference the solution makes in solving them. Storytelling can be a powerful strategy here.
Thinking about the challenges you and your team face? Now is the time to reflect on how this impacts your team's OKRs and deliverables—and go even further: how does this slow down business outcomes? This is crucial, as it's what will get your manager's attention to actually consider a potential solution.
For example: "The way we currently handle data ingestion is highly inefficient. We build custom extraction logic for each data source, orchestrate it with other tools, and have to manage cloud VMs to ensure everything is running. Every time an API changes, or our business teams switch tools, we have to manually refix the integration to our DW. Because of this, we spend most of our time reading API docs and putting out fires when a data pipeline breaks, instead of focusing on preparing data for consumption or building business-specific pipelines that would drive real revenue. It's frustrating because I feel our team has an endless backlog of initiatives that could increase company profitability, but we are stuck doing data pipeline maintenance."
Present a second scenario, demonstrating how the tool works and helps
It is important to show that you've mastered the solution you are presenting. Demonstrate how you've been using the free trial (or how you plan to use it), and clearly point out the features that stood out. When talking about the tool, show how the solution directly solves the pain points you mentioned earlier.
For example:
"Over the past few days, we've been testing Erathos, and it's a solution that can solve these issues for us. It's a data ingestion platform that allows us to build scalable data pipelines with end-to-end observability in just a few clicks. They offer plug-and-play connections to all the data sources we need, with zero manual coding required!
Erathos not only enables integrations in a fraction of the time, but also lets us receive error alerts with logs directly in our Slack channel. This way, if something fails, we are the first to know and can resolve it instantly, avoiding complaints from the business teams. Plus, we outsource the headache of keeping up with API updates and managing an entire extraction and ingestion infrastructure stack. This saved engineering time will allow our team to focus on more complex technical challenges that will take our data maturity to the next level."
Bring concrete examples of issues and outcomes
It sounds obvious, but sometimes we miss it! It is crucial to bring one or two examples of a real situation where a tool like this would have saved the day.
For example: "Last week, one of our pipelines got stuck and ran all day; we only found out when the support team complained the platform was extremely slow. With Erathos, we could set up a block window to stop the execution and alert us of the issue, avoiding any performance degradation for our users.
Three weeks ago, our HubSpot integration broke because the sales team added some custom fields. I spent hours trying to reverse-engineer what the previous engineer had built just to fix it. With Erathos, it would have been a simple click on a 'refresh custom fields' button."
Know the pricing and licensing details
It is critical to keep in mind not just the exact cost of the product, but also what is included in that price. How many team members can use it? What are the limits? Is there more than one tier? What is the difference between the plans? It's always a good idea to review the pricing page and the FAQs.
For example:
"Unlike other tools, Erathos pricing is based solely on row volume. Starting at R$159, we can connect all of our systems, as there is no limit on connectors. This plan already includes Slack, email, or Discord alerts, as well as SSH tunneling for our database."
Step up and own the implementation
Position yourself strategically by showing that you can take ownership of the migration process, onboard the team that will benefit from it, and handle any potential challenges that come with the transition. One of the main concerns for managers is the migration overhead and how well the new solution integrates with the existing modern data stack.
What you can say:
"Looking at our stack, they connect to all the data sources we need and already have BigQuery as a destination for our data warehouse. I've already set up a few integrations and they are running perfectly; I can migrate all the remaining ones in just a few hours.
Their onboarding is highly comprehensive, and if needed, we can get dedicated hours with their solutions engineers to help us migrate from our current setup to Erathos, so it will be a smooth transition. Another great thing about the migration is that we will only start paying once we have fully migrated all ingestion pipelines over to Erathos."
Make sure it is the best option on the market (for your specific use case)
Do your research and look into alternative solutions, comparing their offerings to understand what makes the most sense for your business. Just because you tested a specific tool that had a feature you hadn't seen before doesn't mean you should ignore other options in the space. Make data-driven decisions to present to your manager so you are fully prepared to address any objections.
Curious to learn more about Erathos? Start a 14-day free trial! We'd love to hear your feedback.