How Leaders Derail Consults (And How to Avoid It)

The consultation phase is where the real leverage lies. You aren’t just deciding on a siloed piece of software, you’re charting a course for the future of your business. Consultation is where you decide:

• what your future architecture will look like;
• how marketing and IT will work together;
• how much you’ll spend — not just today, but in total cost of ownership over years;
• and which vendors and integrators you’ll trust with your brand.

Handled well, consultations create alignment, clarity, and momentum. Mishandled, they set the stage for multi-million-dollar rework and a contentious leadership battle where we all end up losers. So how do you ensure a successful consultation?

Let’s make one thing clear from the get-go: e-commerce is never just a marketing project or an IT project. It’s both (and then some). Too often, decisions are made in the interest of one team, and the results show it. The brands that succeed are the ones that invite the right mix of voices to the table from the start.

• Technology leadership (CIO/CTO): They guard scalability, integration, and security.
• Commercial leadership (CMO/Head of Digital): They keep the focus on customer experience and revenue growth.
• Finance leadership (CFO/Controller): They ensure decisions hold up under financial scrutiny.

Bring them together, and you get a balanced lens on both risk and opportunity. Leave one out, and you inherit blind spots that can stall or sink the project later.

Consultation with other departments and especially with those on the front lines who will be impacted by the investments is important, too, but too many voices in the room can muddy waters and make decision-making impossible. Gather the information from as many corners as you can, and then ensure those three leadership voices are the ones actually hashing out the pros and cons, and making the final decisions.

With the right people in the room, the next step is actually deciding. What many miss is that the hardest choices aren’t about vendors. They’re about principles: buy vs. build, speed vs. flexibility, cost vs. capability. These conversations are crucial, and they can be uncomfortable, but rushing past these debates doesn’t make them go away— it merely delays the eventual reckoning.

Setting the right parameters for how you discuss up front can help keep conversations on track and productive. Three things you must do:

1. Define success upfront. If speed-to-market is more important than cost efficiency, say it out loud. If global scalability trumps short-term wins, make that explicit.
2. Acknowledge the friction. Marketing will want agility, IT will want control, finance will want predictability. That tension isn’t a problem, it’s the point.
3. Invest with intent. For a $1–2MM future project, expect to dedicate 5–10% of that budget to consultations. Spending less may feel lean, but it’s often just short-sighted.

A disciplined consultation isn’t about slowing down. It’s about preventing the wrong kind of speed— the kind that races into a wall. A seasoned agency guiding your consult won’t just show up with canned templates and try and force your use-case into them. They should develop both the technical and functional requirements with you, along with the decision making criteria, scorecards, total cost of ownership models and known risks.

Once the full consultation “kit” is in the hands of your leadership, it’s up to you to listen to it. You’ve invested time, energy and capital into this process, use this data to make educated decisions. All too often we see it set aside to then argue amongst the leadership team based on personal preference. Don’t fall into this trap. Take time to talk about your biases at the beginning of the consultation as a leadership team, and commit—in both word and action—to being transparent and aware upfront.

At their best, consultations transform uncertainty into alignment. At their worst, they’re just theatre (expensive theatre). The difference comes down to how seriously leadership takes the process.