Selling to a head of data

A head of data is usually doing two jobs at once. Building the platform, and answering the business's questions with it. That tension is your opening.

It's a different seat from a chief data officer. A CDO is an executive with a mandate. A head of data is often closer to the work, with a smaller team, reporting to a CTO, a CFO or a COO. They feel every broken pipeline personally.

What they own

The data platform. The warehouse or lakehouse, the pipelines feeding it, the models on top, and the dashboards the business uses. In a lot of companies they own data quality and governance too, whether or not anybody wrote that down.

More and more, they own the company's AI readiness. When the CEO asks what it'll take to use AI on company data, the head of data gets the question.

What they're measured on

Trust. Do the executives believe the numbers? When finance and sales show up to the same meeting with different revenue figures, the head of data hears about it.

Speed. How long it takes to answer a new question. If every new report takes six weeks, the business goes around them with spreadsheets.

Cost. Cloud data platforms bill by usage, and the bills can climb fast. A head of data who can't explain the bill has a problem with the CFO.

What they tune out

Pitches about becoming data-driven. They're the ones trying to make that happen, and the slogan means nothing to them.

They tune out AI hype too. They've been asked about AI by every executive in the building. A vendor who adds to the noise without a specific idea is one more person asking.

And they ignore anyone who doesn't know their stack. A note about migrating to a platform they moved to last year tells them you didn't look.

Signals that matter

Hiring is the biggest one. A head of data posting for data engineers, analytics engineers or a platform lead tells you where they're short and what tools they use. If the job post names a platform, you know the stack. Job posts tell you the budget is real, and data teams post a lot of them.

A new leader above them matters too. A new CFO who wants a faster close or a new CTO who wants an AI plan changes the head of data's priorities overnight.

And watch what they write. Data leaders post often about data quality, platform migrations, governance and cost. A post about a messy migration is a misery hypothesis written for you.

The note that works

Speak their language without showing off. Name the fact, guess the tradeoff they're stuck on, and keep it short.

Say a head of data at a consumer lender posted three openings for analytics engineers, all naming the same transformation tool, and the company's CFO is new.

You're hiring three analytics engineers on the same transformation stack, and a new CFO arrived this spring. My guess is the pressure right now is getting one trusted set of finance metrics out fast, ahead of the bigger platform work you'd rather be doing. Is that close, or is the priority somewhere else?

It's grounded in public facts. It names a tradeoff every head of data knows. And it's easy to correct.

How they fit the committee

The head of data is often the technical lead in a data deal and sometimes the champion. The economic buyer sits above them, usually the CTO, CFO or COO they report to.

Write to the economic buyer about the business outcome. Faster close, trusted numbers, lower platform cost. Write to the head of data about the work. If they reply with a correction, take it seriously. They know where the bodies are buried, and their correction is your real problem statement.

Once you're talking, offer to take something off their plate, not add to it. Heads of data are short on people. The firm that makes their backlog shorter wins the next project.