Eric Ries on How to Make Gatekeepers a Source of Power and Speed

Teaching non-gatekeepers how to approach them is often a critical component - especially in highly-regulated markets like education, healthcare, finance.

While Eric's lense is on a startup, the strategies he recommends are great suggestions for customer executives.

For example, if you hear "we've got a budget cap or we have to put out a bid." A fairly standard policy for most organizations with some government funding.

What you might not know is that all of these policies have a "sole-sourcing" exception. If your champion will submit a statement on why you are the only vendor capable of fulfilling their specific requirements, the bid clause is waived.

I learned that by taking the initiative to contact the CFOs of organizations I was pursuing and letting them know I wanted to better understand the requirements/regulations their business units needed to follow.

I was also able to help a few internal champions summon the courage to ask their contacts within procurement by sharing "this is what we've seen at other orgs we've worked with, perhaps your policy is similar?"

In the end, helping champions reduce their fear of an internal regulatory smack down is often the key to creating permission for innovation. To some degree, most "back office" functions see themselves as a service unit, even if their business units don't.

Happy to answer any other questions on this!