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

©2012 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

©2012 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

©2012 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Crafting rock-solid positioning statements is essential to qualifying and closing a sale. The statements should also incorporate your product’s value propositions; they must relate to the problem or opportunity you’re trying to solve for the company. Creating positioning statements can be very difficult if you don’t have correct knowledge about the account you’re trying to close. Utilizing sale intelligence resources and asking the right questions are the best ways you can collect information about a company. In 2010, companies are increasing their technology spending. Therefore you must understand what they need to deliver to their CEO, so you can align your positioning statement with their current problems or initiatives.

A positioning statement cannot be just a statement about your product or company, its benefits and why it is better than your competitors’ offerings. A great positioning statement will convey a story to the audience and trigger a connection with them, so that they have to immediately act on it. Understanding what is currently driving their business is critical to creating a powerful positioning statement. Sales intelligence data and sales enablement resources help you paint a picture of accounts that includes past, present and future information. They will enable you to uncover your prospect’s relevant problems or initiatives and help you align your product or service so that you can create a compelling story with factual information.

The positioning statement should include who you’re targeting, what their problems are, your differentiator and value proposition. The alignment with their problems and how your solution solves them must be at the heart of the positioning statement. They need to align, or there isn’t a chance high probability for making a sale. It should be crystal clear to the buyer why they should choose your solution over someone else’s. If this is proving to be difficult, try going after another prospect. You don’t want to be kicking the tires with a prospect that isn’t a fit, and the positioning will help you determine what tires to attack by identifying the company’s business drivers and aligning your solutions with them.

- Mark Kilens
mark . kilens@salesquest.com
978-749-9999 ext. 118

Iqbal Rashid, a lead generation specialist, discusses how to develop a powerful positioning statement.

©2012 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.