Brilliant article in the most recent Harvard Business Review which you'll find here, proposing that – when your customers are slashing their discretionary budgets – the best way to make a sale, and indeed to really help the customer – is to provoke them(!)
By “provoke”, the authors don't mean “upsetting them”.
Rather – by not accepting there is “no budget” – and by developing a compelling point of view about changes that are needed to the customer’s business given the economic climate – the customer is challenged into considering a scenario that, up until our visit, they had been “feeling” but not “articulating”.
As a consulting organisation, we are about to produce a “sales blueprint for tough economic times”, to challenge our clients as to the quality of whatever strategy they have in place to modify their sales and marketing resources/plans to succeed during the GFC.
From a Microsoft Partner’s perspective, we think it is appropriate to “provoke” the IT Manager along the lines of “we’ve seen many IT Managers fail in the current climate because they can’t demonstrate business value to the rest of the organisation – it would be helpful if you could explain to me what process you’ve used to exhaustively consider every possible alternative to reducing not just IT costs, but also costs within the rest of the business by embracing IT automation and process modification”.
Except in the most “enlightened” IT organisation, our experience is that the IT Manager is “pulling in the horns”, reducing discretionary expenditure, and cancelling non-critical projects. We think this is not enough: IT has always held the promise of revolutionising business productivity – yet in many (most?) instances IT has not delivered. Now is the time for IT to step up to the plate to deliver dramatic savings in both IT and also business costs.
Most IT Managers, however, don’t have the experience of working in numerous IT organisations – compared to what we do as Microsoft Partners. We should be able to offer a consulting methodology to systematically go through a number of options for them to identify potential IT and business cost savings – and to develop business cases to warrant the expenditure to put these in place. If we can do this, we’re making more money – and we’re making the IT Manager a hero in the eyes of the organisation. Everyone wins!
The HBR article compares “provocative” to “solution” selling, and provides case studies on how this approach has been successfully pursued by other IT organisations.
Audentis fortuna iuvat.
