Navigating Buy-In: Timing is Key for Customer Initiatives

Hey all! Wanted to share this as an encouragement: If you have a great idea that makes a lot of business sense and you're not getting buy-in, the timing might be wrong (and it's not your fault). I've been aware for ~7 months that we have NOTHING in place to track and report on references, and yet almost everything deal touches one. This is egregious. We all thought so. And yet there was SO MUCH transition happening for account management, sales, and marketing that we all agreed to put it on the back burner. As a capstone for our leadership development course, I had to pitch a strategic initiative and chose to resurface customer references, now that a lot of those changes have been settled & implemented. Had unanimous buy-in across the board to fast-track this and, at the very least, create visibility into who's being tapped and when. Personally, I hate seeing systems broken. I hate inefficiencies. I hate when customers are endlessly asked for things because no one knows who's been asked for what. But I am learning to make my peace with this in favor of implementing programs when the timing is right, instead of right when I notice the problem. Thought this might be helpful as we all navigate the buy-in process for better customer-focused initiatives.