Ever nailed a pitch with an IT manager in one customer account, only to crash and burn with another, even though the businesses looked identical on paper?
More often than you may think, this can come down to a simple case of ‘same language, different dialect’ and in this post, I’ll explain why.
We’ve all been there; entering a pitch meeting confident that the prospect will jump at what’s on offer. Leaving dazed and confused; mulling over why your hot lead went cool in the space of an hour.
It’s often put down to the presentation or pricing, but what can be overlooked is how the personal expertise of an IT Manager can influence their take on your pitch.
Every IT manager has what we call a ‘home base’; the area of technology where they cut their teeth.
They all talk in the language of technology, but understanding their home base dialect can help you tune your approach to hit more of the right notes.
If your contact came up through infrastructure and data centers, then uptime, storage tiers, DR runbooks, and RTOs are their second language.
Maybe they’re a cloud specialist, fluent in cost governance and automation, but less interested in the finer points of file-level restore.
A background in network engineering background means segmentation, telemetry, and latency rule the day.
Their technical backgrounds will shape the way they filter information, where they may have blind spots and can even be the source of unconscious bias for or against what they hear during a sales pitch.
When you start talking about data protection, the home base biases can show up fast.
If you open with the wrong angle, you’re speaking a different dialect. They hear noise, not value.
So, what’s the fix?
Do your homework on your prospects, dig into their LinkedIn profiles for clues to their background and listen carefully in any pre-pitch conversation:
Once you know their lens, frame your pitch around what they care about first, then bridge to the broader data protection story. For example:
“You’ve already nailed your DR runbooks, so what we can help you do next is make that recovery auditable and immutable.”
or
“You’re optimising cost in your cloud environment beautifully; let’s make sure that same discipline applies to how your backup data is stored and protected.”
Understanding the mindset behind the job title can help you turn a first meeting into a long-term relationship, and this is something we’ve gone into across our Data Protection Playbook series.
Each playbook tracks how IT leaders’ perspectives shift as their organisations move from basic backup hygiene to orchestrated resilience.
What starts as “Can I restore?” becomes “Can I prove it?”, then “Can I automate it?”, and ultimately “Can I assure it across every workload, every cloud, every team?”
That evolution isn’t just technical, it’s behavioural, and it’s key to meeting every IT Manager where they are, at every stage of data protection maturity.
If you’re in a sales role where cybersecurity and continuity are part of the solution and service catalogue, I really do recommend you download the Data Protection Playbook series.
We’ve developed four covering each stage of the customer maturity lifecycle, and they’re all packed with actionable information, including persona-based conversation guides, practical sales plays and pitch summaries.
The first two are out now and you can link to where to find them below.
Happy hunting, and remember, we’re here to support you. Ask your Crayon account rep about a Data Protection Discovery Workshop. It’s a 30 minute intensive call with our in-house experts.
We’ll help you identify where there may be opportunities to position Data Protection solutions, and take you through how our through-partner services could be leveraged to accelerate deal-flow.
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