It is continually frustrating to see IT sales people that know so much about their products - but so little about the businesses of the customers they sell these products to. In a 2006 Frost & Sullivan report on the key issues holding back the Enterprise Content Management market, they rate Difficulty in understanding business benefits and Mismatch between business needs and solutions offered as the highest and 3rd highest "market retardant" factors.
As an IT sales community, we should hang our heads in shame.
Increasingly research is at hand that points out the link between IT and "competitive advantage" within the firm. A great example is the recently published article Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference, by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynfolfsson in the Harvard Business Review. They argue that the US economy has accelerated to unprecendented levels, and that the key engine behind this growth is IT.
They suggest a 3 step approach to maintaining a competitive edge:
- deploy a consistent technology platform
- innovate better ways of working
- propagate those process innovations throughout the company
Andrew also references the article on his blog here.
This approach should ring bells of joy within the Microsoft community. The concept of a consistent technology platform - as represented by the "Microsoft stack" - is a key element of the Microsoft value proposition. Indeed, a course entitled Realising Platform Value has been developed to assist sales teams to have platform discussions with customers about realising the additional ROI that can be generated from the Microsoft platform. (This is one of the few courses I'm aware of that was compulsory for EVERYONE within Microsoft Australia to attend.)
What a great conversation starter for a meeting with a CIO. Instead of saying "what would you like to buy today?" we should be asking "are you happy that your technology platform is providing as much competitive advantage to your organisation as possible?" What a terrific way of supporting our CIO customers - assisting them to provide a technology platform that can maximise their firm's competitive advantage.
This diagram - from the Realising Platform Value course - illustrates the progression we can achieve for customers in moving them from point solutions to an integrated platform:
Having written all of the above - it is also important to be aware of contrary arguments - and Nicholas Carr has written an excellent article entitled IT Doesn't Matter - arguing that "scarcity, not ubiquity, makes a business resource truly strategic", and hence - like electricity - IT is now a commodity, freely available to all and hence not providing competitive advantage.
Either way - wouldn't this all be a terrific - and differentiating - conversation to have with a prospect!
