The Future of High Tech Sales Lies in Using Technology to Solve Business Problems

For many years, technology and programming seemed like a foreign world to many people, even within their own companies, if they weren’t working in IT. Now that so many kinds of technology have become part of daily life, the idea of these systems and processes are a little closer to home and easier to understand as crucial to the way we operate.

Rather than being a part of the invisible background behind a company, technology decisions now involve the entire enterprise. As Mark Lees, Director of Marketing at CSC says, “Any company is the sum of its business processes.” In this video clip, Lees discusses how the future of technology lies in its ability to solve business processes. In an economy where budgets are tight, technology must be leveraged to “provide a competitive advantage and lead to customer growth,” rather than focused on flashy toys (or “cool features and functions,” as Lees calls them) for developers and IT architects to play with. IT decisions need to be customer driven to emerge from the recession.

For example, American Express has a number of initiatives underway that will rely on technology to enhance the cardmember experience; American Express has created a new Global Services Group that unites their U.S. and international cardmember servicing organizations, as well as most processing and support functions across the company, including among others, technology support and certain key processing functions in areas such as finance and human resources.

These kinds of initiatives are technology-fueled programs that cater to the needs of the customer, ensuring that the investment won’t fail to produce a favorable ROI. Mark Lees notes that IT enables “customer growth, customer service, and customer innovation” through its ability to make these business processes more effective, and this is where companies can gain a competitive advantage. He highlights the fact that these processes are executed by people utilizing technology to manage data.

“A credit card company can be described as nothing more than a database. The credit card company mines that database for information on its customers and offers them products that are most appropriate to them.” This is the conclusion Lees comes to in his discussion; companies essential ARE technology.

Whether it is database management or supply chain efficiencies, technology has become the center of organizations today – and their success depends on their ability to optimize these business processes through technology. Knowing that this is the case, there is only one way to approach selling technology to the enterprise: solve their business problems by optimizing their crucial business processes.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107