IT managers are often stuck between a rock and a hard place, and so are their sales counterparts. Most of the time, upper management wants to create one location for all their corporate documentation like Box or Dropbox, and their corporate security relies on it. Salespeople on the other hand, are really focused on the sales end-goal and some corporate security practices are dropped in favor of sales efficiency. Within the confines of corporate security practices, salespeople are often forced to find a workaround around from their corporate security protocols; resulting in breaking the rules that they deem as less of a security issue. Here ensues a strong butting of heads, but the funny thing is, they don’t realize that they’re actually in the same boat.

The Problem
When IT and Sales don’t communicate together, the company as a whole suffers lost opportunities, and its employees partake in a toxic “us against them” work culture. It doesn’t make for a winning situation.

The Why
There’s too much upper management, and they each tell a different story. They are giving conflicting goals to departments, and so those departments get into a pissing match.

The Irony
If no one wins, there are only losers. Collaboration towards the end goal of being profitable or growing users must be the key focus.

The Solution
IT and Salespeople need to connect together more and better, kind of like a mutually beneficial marriage. Instead of the IT department telling their salespeople to strictly use Sharepoint software, maybe there are other solutions that can keep all the documentation backed up to Sharepoint, or at least encrypted. On the other hand, instead of salespeople just screaming at IT that they only want to use Salesforce, and maybe some other stuff like Evernote or dare I say- Google docs or Dropbox, maybe salespeople can calm down and present solutions that doesn’t conflict with company privacy.

In fact, there are solutions that exist in 2 simple steps:

Step 1)
A company can sync the information in any of these cloud services onto different platforms. This way, the salespeople will be happier; cloudHQ does this (shameless self-promotion right there #sorrynotsorry).
Step 2)
On the documents that are highly sensitive to security, you can apply an encryption code on top of it. Credeon from Hitachi does that, for example.

cloudHQ. Sync your cloud. Save your work culture.