Lawrence Scott

Buying, not Selling

Spent time in Europe last week with a number of account teams and their customers. Heard a comparison from a customer's perspective of relative priorities of technologies and the same prioritization from vendors. Here's a summary of some of the more interesting bits.

Greatest Disparity
By more than 2:1, vendors were pushing Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. Fewer than half as many of their customers thought it as important.

Greatest Shocker
By an order of 5:1, customers were more inclined to rate Web 2.0 as a higher priority. We are seeing banks embrace Web 2.0 less as a product play and more as a process play. It's less about what you are marketing and more about how you are marketing and to whom.

No Surprise
Storage was a dead heat. Both vendors and customers felt this was a priority. Phew!

Greatest Disparity #2
Again, in a 2:1 delta, vendors felt SOA had a greater impact than their customers. Are vendors sending the wrong message here, or are the difficulties of implementing enterprise SOA finally pushing firms to reconsider their strategies?

No Surprise (Sort of)
IT Governance, Compliance, and Business Software (ERP, CRM, etc.) were closely aligned, although in all cases, the customers attached greater importance than the vendors.

Greatest Disparity #3
In a testament to mobile computing (aka Blackberries, etc.), the topic of Unified Communication held the greatest nominal delta for customers and vendors. By more than a ratio of 5:2, customers saw this area as problematic, more so than vendors wanting to offer solutions.

So the question is this: are we selling what customers are interested in buying? In some cases the answer is "yes", but in others, it's a clear "no". And it seems that while customers are focused on how to make the operations run efficiently and with the least risk, vendors are pushing forward with new technologies (the "shiny penny" syndrome). I'm still reeling in shock over the Web 2.0 comparison.

Do's and Don'ts

In this same session, we had a senior IT executive give us the benefit of his experience with account management. It was a great insight into "how the other half lives". Here goes, with apologies in advance to those of you in the know as I have modified portions to protect the parties involved.

Account Management Do's
1) Do focus on long term relationships
2) Do promise only what you can deliver
3) Do build credibility by occasionally providing solutions which result in lower profit/revenue
4) Do solve the customer problem first, then talk about compensation
5) Do talk about your customer challenges, not yours (!)
6) Do be brave and demo your new products live

Account Management Don'ts
1) Do not focus on short term revenue
2) Do not show up at client with nothing to say
3) Do not take the blame if it's not your fault
4) Do not deflect the blame to others during a crisis (solve the problem!)
5) Do not change the RFP process by selling higher (it will come back to bite you - IT managers have long memories)
6) Do not behave as a localized company when your customer is global

Yup, lots of this is common sense. Common sense begets candor which begets credibility which ultimately begets commitment. The best practices above are really about a "customer first" mentality. We need to be relentless in our customer-centric approach. It's more about "buying" and less about "selling".

Posted at 05:28PM Feb 21, 2008 by lscott97 in Sun  |  Comments[0]