How To Be Impossible to Ignore as a Solutions Executive
Your CRO is just one stakeholder. Solutions leaders who matter most have built relationships across the company.
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Our working title for this piece was “How to Win Friends and Influence People as a Solutions Exec.” Pretty sure we can’t use that due to copyright, but you get the gist.
In The Modern Solutions Mandate, we posed this question: how many of us actually have a relationship with the CFO? And Jeff even took it further asking, what about the Chief People Officer?
From our purview, the most effective Solutions leaders are the ones who’ve built access and influence across their organization. They’re able to get things done because they’ve already embedded in the business. They’ve built relationships with legal, finance, HR, product, and IT long before they needed it.
Why the CRO relationship isn’t enough
Hear us say: the relationship with Sales is important. But optimizing for this relationship alone leaves you at risk.
A great CRO relationship is the floor of what being a senior Solutions leader requires. To matter at the next level, you have to understand the business outside of the sole lens of sales. The business is bigger than that: it’s finance, legal, HR, IT, product, marketing, every function that touches your team’s work without sitting inside it.
Understanding the business at that level does two things. First, it lets you build real relationships with the people who actually run those functions. Second, it lets you speak in the language those people use when they make decisions about your team. Relationships get you into the room.
As Brad Bennett at Pegasystems put it: “Presales earns influence when it turns field reality into decisions the business can use. People start depending on it because it helps them make better calls earlier.”
And Nathalie Gallaire at Sprinklr shared: “For a long time I argued in our language. Coverage. Attach rate. Engagement quality. All real. None of it moved the people who actually held the vote. The shift came when I started showing up in theirs. Same data I always had. Different currency.”
Senior Solutions leaders who optimize for the CRO and nothing else have built a single point of failure into their careers.
Building relationships that compound
Jeff has been deliberate about this for years. Three stories from his experience at ServiceNow show what this actually looks like.
Befriending the Legal Team. Jeff met Mark Cockerill, ServiceNow’s head of legal, at an internal leadership workshop. He struck up the conversation because he was genuinely curious about what the head of legal did all day. The relationship was personal first.
Eighteen months ago, when ServiceNow started selling AI-driven solutions, the AI legal terms became the single biggest blocker on POVs. Customers were taking eight weeks to negotiate. Jeff called Mark, walked through the actual sticking points together, and they got the timeline to three or four weeks. The relationship Jeff built years earlier did the heavy lifting.
The CFO and the Academy. Jeff had an SE Academy running at ServiceNow for years. When he invited Gina Mastantuono, the CFO, to come speak to one of the cohorts, he wasn’t asking for anything. Gina got a direct view of what was working in Solutions and saw the SEs Jeff had pulled into the program.
When Jeff came back months later asking for special dispensation on off-cycle comp adjustments to keep the Academy graduates from being poached, the conversation didn’t start cold. Gina already knew what the Academy was and why it mattered. That is how the relationship paid off. Not as a transaction, but as accumulated context that made the ask faster and more likely to land.
The CRO partnership goes beyond tech win. Jeff has spent years educating ServiceNow’s sales leadership on what a technical win actually is and how the methodology has had to shift as AI made the buying conversation more technical. The depth built the kind of trust that lets him give sales real feedback on plays before they ship to the field. “There’s nobody that’s out on the front lines pitching this stuff like we have to.”
The lesson is not “have a good CRO relationship.” Jeff’s CRO relationship works because he also has the depth across legal, finance, HR, product, and IT that lets him bring real insight to the sales conversation, not just team logistics.
Same skills, new application
It’s worth stressing that you aren’t starting from zero on this. The skills that helped build your career and allow you to excel with customers are exactly the skills that build cross-org relationships internally: curiosity, listening, problem solving, storytelling.
You already know how to do this. The shift is the audience and recognizing that oftentimes you have something to offer that the rest of those in their orbit do not. You are closer to customers than they are. You see the field reality before it shows up in their dashboards. You have a different angle on what the business is actually doing and what’s not working. That perspective is genuinely useful to the CFO, the head of legal, the head of HR, the CIO, and product leadership. But even the most senior Solutions leaders underestimate how much.
We put a question to our LinkedIn networks on what makes the strongest Solutions leaders impossible to ignore. And the most consistent theme across responses: curiosity. George Kuruvilla at Wrike framed it as not looking at the Solutions org as an island. And Brian Crosby at Cisco emphasized the importance of being genuinely curious in every interaction.
Here’s how to put those skills into play:
Get curious about other functions the way you get curious about customers. What does the head of HR actually do all week? What is the CFO trying to solve right now? What does the head of legal lose sleep over? Most senior Solutions leaders default to asking sales leaders these questions about their own customers. Apply the same instinct one row up. The answers are usually not what you expect.
Look for where your POV is genuinely useful to them. Jeff didn’t call Mark because he needed something. He called Mark because legal terms friction was hurting Jeff’s customers, and Mark had context Jeff didn’t. The relationship deepened because Jeff brought field reality back to Mark in a way Mark’s team couldn’t see on its own. The same applies to finance, HR, product, and IT. Where can your view of the customer help them make better decisions? Start there.
Engineer the collisions you actually want. Jeff has a whiteboard in his ServiceNow office with one word on it, kept up for seven years: collisions. The reminder is to go find reasons to be in the same room as people you don’t normally see. Sign up for every cross-functional leadership program. Volunteer for the offsite. Take the seat in the reverse-mentorship cohort. But also: do it deliberately. Identify the three or four leaders you most need a relationship with over the next year and make sure your paths cross.
Nathalie said that for her the breakthrough happens when, “Solutions leaders stop asking for a seat and just become impossible to decide without.”
Being impossible to decide without though requires sowing your knowledge throughout the org. That builds across a CFO conversation about headcount, a head of legal conversation about contract terms, a CIO conversation about deployment, and a product conversation about what the field actually needs. None of those happen because a senior Solutions leader has a great CRO relationship. They happen because the leader has embedded themselves in the rest of the org.
How are you building these relationships in your org? We’d love to hear what’s working, and what isn’t. Either leave us a comment here or reach out on LinkedIn.
Jeff & James