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

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Outsourcing major business processes to major providers, especially offshore outsourcing companies like Wipro and Mahindra Satyam, has been a common fix for decreasing IT budgets in a struggling economy. As these providers support more and more Fortune 1000 and Global 500 giants, many of who are direct competitors, the issue of overuse, and consequently, security, come into play. While working with a more experienced and renowned company may seem more safe, companies like Credit Suisse, who are dealing with very sensitive, private client information are turning to smaller, “less risky” providers to work on their projects.

Initiatives such as risk mitigation and working with niche suppliers is a part of Credit Suisse’s multi-year IT transformation, aimed at creating centers of excellence across India, China, US and Singapore. These centers will specialize in different set of capabilities in the banking domain, such as efficiency, productivity and support. Credit Suisse has been outsourcing its software application maintenance and development projects to Wipro and Cognizant for a few years, but from 2009 forward will work with almost eight smaller, niche firms, such as Headstrong, as the company seeks to mitigate risks associated with two large suppliers. The bank was also reevaluating their contract with HP in the middle of 2009 and was potentially looking to sign a contract with another company for managing their servers and desktops.

Divyesh Vithlani, managing director and chief information officer of Credit Suisse Asia Pacific said, “As part of our second phase of outsourcing, we plan to outsource almost 40 percent of niche projects to around six to eight smaller vendors,” he said. Some of the niche projects would include delivering solutions based on the banking software T24 offered by Temenos, apart from other specific applications. “We want redundancy and do not want to concentrate our risks,” he added.

So what does this mean? For reps at smaller outsourcing companies, this could be a huge opportunity to displace the outsourcing giants that continue to shadow over potential deals with big-time Fortune 1000 prospects. With this competitive insight, you could have a new value proposition to allow you to break into these accounts.  How will you make sure that enterprise IT budgets, like Credit Suisse’s will be spent on your company’s services? It’s all about the competition: these companies compete with each other just as much as you’re constantly looking for ways to gain the upper hand on your competitors. As soon as you mention that one of their competitors has taken action towards solutions like yours, their ears will be WIDE open.

For more current technology initiatives and free technology sales leads in the Fortune 1000 and Global 500, check out our Technology Business Drivers document.

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

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Extractable, modifiable, clean, accurate, comprehensive: in an age of customization and automated analysis in mass quantities, these are qualities that we demand of the data we input so that the output is reliable and useful. Whether you’re running through lists of corporate contacts to add to a database for marketing programs or using metrics on consumer buying data to analyze buying trends to optimize your supply chain, we depend on data for so many different aspects of business.

As technology becomes more sophisticated, businesspeople are demanding speed and ease in their data gathering endeavors in order to save as much (precious) time as possible. In marketing and sales especially, there is strength in numbers; blasting a campaign to 80,000 contacts that may not be good prospects is faster and cheaper than handpicking singular people to spend your precious time calling to pitch your product. Dun & Bradstreet understands it’s customers’ need for fast and accurate data; they know that if they can’t provide a platform that is easy to use in order to extract their “commercial data,” which also needs to be kept clean and updated, they will lose market share.

The company expects to spend approximately $110 million to $130 million over the next two years to strengthen its leading position in commercial data and to improve its current technology platform. According to D&B president and CEO, Sara Mathew, “We will create a new data supply chain leveraging outside vendors who have state of the art technology.” The company has migrated its data management responsibilities to Acxiom, who will provide data center operations, technology help desk, and network management functions, which were formerly managed by CSC.

Acxiom was chosen to focus on increasing speed, data processing capacity and matching capabilities. D&B is investing huge amounts of money to provide customers with a seamless integration of higher quality, real time data through a range of “new age” work flows including mobile solutions, social networks, and text alerts. According to CEO Sara Mathew, “Our current infrastructure can be improved. It has impeded our ability to meet emerging customer needs at a time when customers are demanding an increased space of innovation to cope with the softer economy.”

Dun & Bradstreet is clearly tuned into the most recent changes in marketing and technology, and more importantly, how these things affect their customers’ business endeavors. They realize that they must invest in their platform, or their accurate and comprehensive data will be rendered useless. In this economy, people are choosing the easiest and quickest solutions in order to save money, and D&B knows that spending a little extra to optimize their user interface will more than make up for itself with customer renewals and new business.

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

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Especially in a struggling economy, business needs are at the crux of what ultimately closes a deal and ends in a successful sale. As a sales rep selling technology, understanding your prospect’s business needs enough to align your solution with their specific plights is the key to closing business. As it turns out, sales reps aren’t the only ones that might be overlooking these broad, strategic business pains in the process of their efforts to sell technology.

According to experts at Santa Clara University’s, Information Technology Leadership Program, many CIOs and IT executives lack the ability to think strategically about corporate business initiatives and problems when thinking about the effects of their actions for the short and long term. “It is clear to us that most of them don’t understand, for instance, how to base their work not just on assigned tasks but on a broad understanding of the environment the company is operating in, or how to build the capabilities of their IT organizations with the future in mind,” said the experts in their Wall Street Journal report, Why CIOs Are Last Among Equals.

Why is this a problem for enterprise technology sales reps? “Consider the fact that major corporate strategic initiatives in recent years that rely heavily on information technology haven’t been led by IT people—movements like total quality management, business process re-engineering, online commerce. More recently, the leadership for Web 2.0 initiatives appears to be coming from outside the IT department in most cases.”

There are two equally important and very different approaches that reps need to take in order to make a sale successful, especially if it they are selling enterprise solutions that affect the entire company. A good rep must be able to “plug in” to their prospect’s general business pains and pitch their solution as a TRUE solution to those needs. Simultaneously, they must also be well versed and incredibly knowledgeable about the technical specifications of the product to earn CIO/IT approval and eventually get both departments to sign off on the contract and delegate a portion of their precious budget to the solution.

This may sound like a lot of extra legwork, but in an economy where every dollar spent is scrutinized, you can be sure that both IT executives and high-level execs holding budgets will be involved in the approval of the deal.

Check out the free Top 10 Technology Buyer’s Tips document for insights and tips from top execs about how to go about selling solutions into the enterprise.

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

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

With tech spending finally on the rise again, business needs that may have been pushed aside due to cost cutting initiatives are finally starting to be addressed again. This, of course, means that companies, especially large enterprises and the Fortune 1000, will be investing in solutions that may not be crucial for the day-to-day functioning of the business, but that may increase profitability or ease a (less crucial) business pain.

Wholesale retailer BJ’s has formulated an entire technology revamp project that they call IT Roadmap, which is expected to cost them $20-30 million per year until 2013. The project is meant to pull the company out of the economic depression by capitalizing on opportunities for improvement and updates in their systems and processes, especially ones that may have fallen by the wayside over the last few years. These improvements include their sales reporting, financial and membership systems.

As the economy stabilizes, the BJ’s knows it needs to capitalize on their customers’ imminent increase in spending by catering to them in the most efficient way possible. BJ’s plans to complete their HR system upgrade, pilot new store registers and launch a new e-commerce website in 2010. BJ’s expects these investments will cost approximately $68 million.

As part of the their focus on customer data, BJ’s is taking a close look at product and data management and will also be pursuing a master data management (MDM) initiative. They are looking to link customer “membership” data to their product data so that any patterns or inconsistencies can be analyzed (through an ERP system) and then use this information to optimize their supply chain, product offerings, and e-commerce/point-of-sale systems according to what their customers’ behaviors are.

There are two separate components to the initiative, according former CIO John Polizzi: a business and a tactical project. “We chose the membership and product data management system as the first two areas where we are going to look to externalize our master data from any application. Then, as we choose an ERP system, that will be the data source that feeds the ERP data.” BJ’s is currently in the process of selecting an ERP system, which is to be planned for implementation by 2012.

Clearly, BJ’s and other retailers are finally ready to spend again. They realize that in order to stay competitive, they must spend now. If your organization is already established in the retail vertical, now is the time to refocus your efforts on finding the business needs within these accounts and then aligning you product to become the solution. If you are looking to expand your target industries, retail is a ripe opportunity as consumers are beginning to spend again and retailers, more than ever, need to cater to their customers’ needs.

For more current technology initiatives and free technology sales leads in the Fortune 1000 and Global 500, check out our Technology Business Drivers document.

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

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.