Answer extracted from the The Best of the Brutal Truth about B2B Sales & Selling podcast — listen to the full episode below.
What organizational obstacles typically block priority and adoption of new IT infrastructure solutions?
IT teams face two insurmountable barriers to adopting new infrastructure: a perpetually overloaded project backlog that leaves no room for innovation, and institutional resistance to abandoning the status quo when shifting from on-premises systems to cloud or newer solutions. Breaking through requires framing new infrastructure not as an IT initiative, but as strategic fuel for marketing, operations, and engineering goals.
The first obstacle is organizational gridlock. IT departments operate under perpetual resource constraints, with endless competing demands on their calendar. A new infrastructure solution, no matter how transformative, simply gets buried in the queue behind firefighting and maintenance. It's not a rejection of the technology—it's triage.
The second obstacle runs deeper: organizational inertia resists moving away from proven on-premises systems or from established vendors. The perceived risk of adopting a startup-born solution acquired by a larger company, or of migrating to cloud infrastructure, feels higher than staying with the familiar, even when that familiar approach is technically obsolete.
As Herb Klan explains in the episode, the solution is to stop selling to IT and start selling across the entire business. Sales professionals must identify strategic initiatives in marketing, operations, and engineering departments—revenue growth, cost reduction, time-to-market acceleration—and tie new infrastructure directly to those outcomes. When the CFO, the CMO, and the VP of Operations all understand why this infrastructure shift supports their goals, IT's backlog becomes irrelevant. The project moves up the priority list not because IT wants it, but because the business demands it.
"If you can't teach it, you don't know it. And if you don't know it, your customer certainly doesn't know it."
Herb Klan — Account Manager at Cisco Systems. After six years in finance and audit at GE Healthcare, Klan transitioned into sales in 2015, spending seven years running the imaging business in Charlotte, North Carolina before moving to Cisco to manage top-ten accounts across manufacturing, entertainment, automotive, fashion, and hedge funds.
This shift in approach requires genuine understanding of the customer's business. Network engineers won't prioritize new infrastructure because it's technically superior. But they will prioritize it if the marketing team's campaign velocity depends on faster data processing, or if operations can reduce OpEx by 30% through cloud consolidation, or if engineering can ship features six weeks faster on modernized infrastructure. The technology becomes a business enabler, not a technology problem.
The key is going wide across the organization, building a coalition of stakeholders who see the infrastructure shift as essential to their own success. IT's resistance dissolves when the business imperative is clear.
Breaking the Status Quo Through Business Alignment
Moving from on-premises to cloud, or adopting newer solutions, triggers organizational fear. The status quo feels safe, even when it's inefficient. Klan's experience at Cisco revealed that the smartest way to overcome this inertia is to tether infrastructure decisions to measurable business outcomes. Rather than debating whether the new solution is technically better, frame it as a competitive necessity for the business functions that matter most to leadership.
Sales professionals must become translators. They take what network engineers understand—throughput, latency, redundancy—and convert it into language that marketing, finance, and operations understand: campaign speed, cost per transaction, time-to-revenue, and risk mitigation. When infrastructure aligns visibly with these priorities, adoption accelerates and the obstacle disappears.
Key takeaways
- IT backlogs are the first barrier—new solutions get buried behind operational demands regardless of their merit.
- Organizational inertia resists moving away from on-premises systems or established vendors, even when modernization is overdue.
- Success requires selling across departments: tie infrastructure to strategic initiatives in marketing, operations, and engineering, not to IT priorities alone.
- When business leaders demand the infrastructure shift, IT's resistance becomes irrelevant and the project jumps the queue.
See also
How does the nature of enterprise IT infrastructure sales differ from transactional capital equipment sales?
Enterprise IT infrastructure sales involve ongoing relationships focused on continuous network management and strategic alignment, whereas transactional capital equipment sales are project-based and fleet-focused with defined endpoints.
What is the primary skill advantage that helps close complex enterprise deals?
The ability to distill complex technical concepts into clear, digestible formats—such as one-page visual summaries—allows salespeople to communicate value across diverse stakeholder groups and drive faster decision-making.
How should sales professionals approach complex multi-stakeholder deals across different organizational levels?
Recognize that enterprise deals involve five to ten or more stakeholders with different priorities. Sales success requires managing multiple parallel relationships and understanding each stakeholder's specific concerns and budget authority.