Making IT Happen

Next month, our members get a special treat with a Breakaway keynote by best-selling author and noted business consultant Peter Sheahan.  As founder and CEO of ChangeLabs, Sheahan will give his cutting-edge insights into workforce trends and generational change. He’ll explain what companies must do today to stay relevant and competitive in the future. Below is a guest blog from Sheahan as a sneak peek.

There has never been a better time to be in information technology. New business models are emerging everyday; the cloud and all of its potential is opening the minds of businesses of all sizes to a whole world of new possibilities with technology. However, with this new opportunity come three distinct changes:

1. More "line of business" buyers,


2. Greater focus on the business outcome, and less on the technology itself, and


3. A shift in the role of the IT person from ‘technical architect’ to an architect of behavior change.

Here are four strategies for winning in the market place, in the midst of these changing needs:

Packaging

New IT buyers don't care about the technology itself. They care about business, and technology reaches the radar only insofar as it makes the business more efficient and effective. Knowing that, it is crucial that we refocus the sales process to stop selling on features and specifications, and start selling business value. Selling 101 is to align your offer with the buyers’ need; line of business buyers do not say, "I need an in-memory processed application which talks to my SQL based server, with 99.9% up time ensuring my sales team can access their data on demand.” They are far more likely to come to you and say, "Our clients are large, and growing more complex every day. I need different people in different locations in my business to have access to up-to-the-minute client information and project status in real time.” Your job will be to hear that, understand the underlying need and be able to translate the solution back into language that communicates the value to your client.

Start packaging the value you bring in the language of the business, and not of IT. Here is an idea:

• Sit a 13 year old down and make your pitch. If they don't understand it, then neither will a senior executive.


• Draw pictures. And I don’t mean data flow and complex systems maps, but simple illustrations which link the technology solution you provide with the business need.


• Speak in metaphors. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures. Be sure that the metaphors you choose are accessible enough that anyone can understand them, or paint verbal pictures in the language of your client’s industry – not IT.

If you find this hard, you are not the only one! But consider that business value generally fits into a few simple categories. How does your offer:

• make the client more money,


• reduce cost,


• protect them from risk,


• better engage their assets (including their people), or


• make life easier for the person with the budget.

Positioning

It is one thing to package your offer and align it with already expressed needs of the buyer. I think the biggest shift that will result from working with a line of business buyers is the fact that few of them actually know what they need. It is very difficult to do packaging correctly if the buyer cannot articulate their needs. They rarely will understand the full capability of the technology and are often too busy to have done the core thinking; most are under so much pressure, they just want someone to "fix it", whatever "it" is.

The first act of the sale is to diagnose the need. Then and only then can we position our offer as a solution to that need. Therefore, positioning starts with listening, diagnosis and clarity creation before you actually align your offer to the proverbial "pain point". Your ability to do this well is where you truly distinguish yourself or your team as leaders in the company and against your competitors.

Sit down with your sales people, your engineers and your account managers and develop the following:

• What five questions could you ask a potential buyer that would allow them to come to greater clarity what they newer in their business?


• What are the three technology innovations of which the majority of buyers are unaware, and that if you could have them understand, would generate massive immediate appetite for them to solve a problem they either already knew they have, or would know they had once they understood the technology?


• What evidence from related client companies could you use to build the credibility of your offer, and how could you present those in a more compelling way than you do now?


• For bleeding edge opportunities, how could you paint a picture of the potential of a new technology in the mind of a business buyer. Remember you can't talk about stacks, applications, virtualization or any of the million acronyms that currently define what you do.

Influence

Buyers are human! Humans are emotional. And buyers will buy from people they like, and even more from people they want to be like. Your job is to be one of those people they want to emulate somehow.

You see, every sale is actually three sequential smaller sales. I need what you are selling! I need your version of it! And I need to buy it from you! The first two strategies deal with the first two sales. Influence is about getting the buyer to give the deal to you, and that is more about personality than it is about technology.

Recent research into how humans make decisions has revealed a very interesting distinction: buyers do buy from people they like, but will buy far more from people they want to be like. In other words, in order to influence a buyer, you need to not only create a gap between their current business reality and the future aspiration they can achieve with your help, but you have to do this on a personal level with the buyer as well.

Consider the following insights, and suggested applications to your business:

• People are implicitly attracted to things which are scarce. How can you position someone in your business (potentially you) in such a way that a buyer would be grateful to have an opportunity to get time with them? Perhaps it is an exclusive process or workshop that you can run which you only do with select clients and prospects.


• What IP do you have that you can leverage in a buying situation that creates credibility by association? Maybe it is your past client list, solutions you have created for businesses or insights you have, not just into technology but how to make a project a raging internal success.


• How could you "show up" in a way that makes you an example of possibility, rather than a vendor of technology? One of the most powerful things you can do for your team and your career would be to build your personal brand in a way that not only contributes to the scarcity and gratitude piece mentioned above, but also gives you the confidence of knowing your stuff. This is not about faking it. It is about building real expertise that people gravitate toward. Build a portfolio to support it. Identify powerful case studies. Formulate and measure predictions about the industry. Find inspiring presentations from other industry leaders and present your own. Use it all!

Acceleration

We do too little to leverage the assets we already have. Assets which include existing client relationships, internal expertise and IP generated from your past success. It breaks my heart to see great expertise go to waste. Amazing case studies that are never shared, and gurus that are locked up internally in a company and never rolled out to a client. Only the other day I saw an account executive block access to a massive account, with huge potential for greater share of wallet, for their company’s preeminent expert in the application of cloud to a mobile workforce. Millions of dollars are left on the table, and many client problems remain unsolved because we do not leverage the resources we have and accelerate our growth in the process.

Here are three ideas:

1. What are the five best success stories you have in your business? Now consider where could you share those, say as a presentation, where buyers will be present.


2. If you are really smart, you'll actually make a rock star out of your client rather than of yourself. Take those success stories listed above, and rather than you go and "toot your own trumpet", arrange for your client to be celebrated at an industry conference and co-present the case study with them, highlighting them as the rock star. It will cultivate reciprocity and buzz in the industry and is massively more credible coming from a client than coming from you.


3. If you were to never sell to a new client again, what could you take to existing clients and still double your business? Now get out of your own way and start those conversations! But enter the conversations with the questions you created in positioning, and the case studies you generated above in acceleration.

The world does not need new ideas; it needs people who can execute on them. There is so much untapped market opportunity in IT right now it is scary. To get more than your fair share of it, start packaging your offer in terms of business value. Transform sales into a peer-to-peer exchange of ideas with diagnosis and needs identification as your primary concern. Become the expert in your field, and work to build your profile so buyers feel lucky to get a meeting with you instead of the other way around. And finally, do more to leverage the success stories and clients you already have, including making rock stars out of the clients to which you owe your success today.