Solve Problems, But Never Sell Technology

I have some advice that may be completely different than what you are going to hear from many of your vendor/suppliers.

In blunt terms, the absolute worst thing you can do to compete is sell technology. It not only doesn't make sense, it can and is costing you margin—lots of margin.

ROBERT FALETRA Can be reached via e-mail at rfaletra@cmp.com.

The reason is simple. When you sell technology, you sell a commodity that is readily available from lots of outlets. When you sell technology, you put your business in a poor position to compete. You put yourself in a situation where you can be easily evaluated and compared to others line for line.

So how do you avoid this? Selling technology is a raffle. The first thing you have to do is commit to take yourself out of the raffle. Take the discussion away from the technology. Take it away from best of breed. Steer it toward solving a business problem.

When you do that and you supply a bid based around that higher-end sales discussion, the whole final negotiation changes as well. When you are up against a competitor that takes the "lead-with-technology" approach and you come at things from a business-problem-solving angle, it puts you in a better position.

If the customer questions why you are quoting a piece of technology or particular product when your competitor is not, there's an answer. It's very simply because you believe it to be necessary to satisfy the need. You might even suggest that the customer really should be asking your competitor why they didn't quote it. Is it perhaps because they don't fully understand the customer's needs?

Once you have become a problem solver for your customers, they are going to keep asking you to solve problems. One of the tricks to all this is that the customer has to have a need. That need may not always be what it brought you in for, so you have to identify the true issue.

Denis d'Ambroise, president of Infra Solutions in Montreal, for instance, had a customer that called him in because it had a DSL stability problem. But Infra Solutions' examination of what was moving across the network opened the customer's eyes to the reality of a need to do more than simply stabilize its DSL problem. The identification of the real problem resulted in a happier customer for d'Ambroise and a much larger engagement.

All of this works best, of course, if you are selling to the line-of-business manager rather than to IT. But that's not always possible and, quite frankly, in the better customer organizations IT is viewed as a strategic business function. That's a subject for another column.

But no matter what, get out of the raffle and stop selling technology.

Are you in the business of solving problems? Make something happen. E-mail CMP Channel Group President Robert Faletra at rfaletra@cmp.com.