Vev’s Framework for Building Trust with Enterprise IT Teams

Getting IT teams to embrace new development tools often feels like pushing water uphill. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Vev founder Tine Karlsen shared how they transformed typical IT objections into their strongest selling points.

Understanding the Core Challenge

The fundamental problem with selling visual development tools to enterprises isn’t feature sets – it’s trust. “The biggest tactic that we had to figure out was how would we make Vev acceptable for the IT team,” Tine explains. Traditional no-code platforms often face skepticism from IT teams concerned about limitations and edge cases.

Reframing the Conversation

Instead of positioning Vev as a replacement for developers, they positioned it as a tool that enhanced developer capabilities. “We had to build into the platform, pretty much making the platform limitless,” Tine shares. This wasn’t just marketing spin – it required fundamental architectural decisions.

The Technical Solution

Their breakthrough came from making the platform extensible rather than closed. “The way that we did that is enabling developers to build new react components for the platform. So anything that you can code, you can build within Vev, but developers are there to expand the capabilities of the platform,” Tine explains.

This approach addressed a key IT concern: what happens when you need functionality the platform doesn’t provide? Instead of hitting a wall, developers could build exactly what they needed.

Proving Enterprise Readiness

Their success with major clients like Shipstead demonstrated the platform’s enterprise capabilities. When they could show that they “reduced the time to market for these types of sites with over 90% from three weeks down to now being 30 minutes,” IT teams started seeing the platform differently.

Multi-Stakeholder Alignment

Rather than treating IT as a barrier, Vev integrated them into their core value proposition. “We cater to teams, so we have to get through to both the designer, the developer, and other stakeholders on the team. And that makes the task incredibly complex,” Tine notes.

This complexity became an advantage. They could show how the platform maintained clear boundaries while enabling collaboration: “If a designer sets up something in Vev, for example, a template for a blog post, a marketer can access that template without having the right to change design, but only change content.”

The Future Vision

Looking ahead, Vev continues to position themselves as an IT enabler rather than a replacement. “When it comes to the product, which I of course love talking about, we want Vev to be the front end builder that you naturally think of no matter what CMS you have chosen,” Tine shares.

For founders selling technical solutions to enterprises, Vev’s experience offers valuable lessons about working with IT teams. Instead of trying to circumvent technical stakeholders, they built a platform that empowered them. The key wasn’t to eliminate development – it was to make it more efficient while maintaining the control and flexibility IT teams require.

Sometimes the best way to overcome technical objections isn’t to argue against them, but to transform them into advantages. By embracing rather than avoiding IT concerns, Vev created a platform that technical teams actually want to adopt.