Point Person

Engineering a sale in today's technology market all boils down to politics. The ability to build a grassroots constituency within IT management is key to moving forward and closing a deal, which likely will require the sign-off by someone with a C-level title, such as the CEO.

So it's little wonder that VARBusiness' 2002 IT Spending & Strategy (ITSS) survey reveals that 45 percent of end users point to IT managers as the people in their organizations that solution providers most often confer with. Behind IT management, the combined scores of CEO, CIO, CTO and CFO as the go-to contacts within their companies accounted for 37 percent of responses from end users.

"You have to have an absolute respect for IT management. You have to make them your advocate," says Bill Baker, director of commercial sales for AE Business Solutions, a 53-year-old Madison, Wis.-based consulting and systems integration company. "Help make their work easier and better, and don't forget to make them look good."

The changing relationships with IT management also match changes in how its work fits within the context of the enterprise, Baker says. "IT management is more business-savvy. They have been pulled up into board meetings and into the CFO's office," he says. "Because of this, we're able to deal with them further in the process."

IT managers are also the ones who get solution providers through the door. "I'm not selling them anything,I'm just providing information," Baker says. "I'm empowering them. They perpetuate my name and services through the organization. If I make it to IT management, they go into their meetings with executives and pitch them on listening to me."

Equal Representation

Successfully working through the sales process demands that the solution provider negotiate the business interests of executive management and the technical focus of IT management. True, they both play for the same team, but it's not always an easy relationship.

"You need to find the balance between the business community and the IT community," says Chris Simchick, vice president of business development for Ciber, an IT service provider based in Greenwood Village, Colo. "Your role is to be holding both ends of the string and bringing them together. You've done your job when you tie a knot in the middle and step away."

As with all political strategies, the trick is to sidestep conflict. "Unless you equally represent yourself to the business and IT constituencies, your solutions will have a shortfall," Simchick says. "To the extent you can manage both parts of that equation, you will have solutions that live longer in an organization, [with] less internal opposition and less political infighting. [That] will allow you to achieve the goals set by the organization. It's that alignment between business and IT that makes the kind of solutions we're implementing work."

In practical terms, Simchick's strategy focuses on identifying where the solution is located in the client's organization. "What's the upstream and downstream impact organizationally?" he asks. "We're managing the political environment and the technology environment, and we're managing our understanding of the business problem or opportunity."

Even careful consideration of a client's internal politics does not guarantee a deal (see "The Buck Stops Here...Literally," below). Also, bear in mind that in the wake of the dot-com bust and the recession that followed, how you pitch a project has changed. Providing a convincing ROI analysis and getting the CFO's blessing have become crucial.

According to results from VARBusiness' ITSS survey, end users cite demonstration of a measurable cost/ROI analysis as the No. 1 way solution providers can gain approval for IT expenditures. Close behind on ROI's heels are showing a prototype solution in action, providing references and giving a competitive analysis of similar solutions implemented in analogous situations.

"It's ROI, prove that it works, give me an integration guarantee, give me a 90-day return policy if it doesn't integrate based on these mutually agreed-on perimeters,these are the kinds of deals I'm seeing," says Al Bibergall, vice president of sales at Sayers Group, a systems integrator based in Mt. Prospect, Ill.

Back To Reality

The demand for demonstrable ROI illustrates how seriously customers are taking IT projects,now more than ever.

"It's almost like [in the dot-com days] it was playtime, and now it's serious time," says Bernie Schroeder, chief marketing officer for Stellcom Technologies, a San Diego-based integrator. "In the boom, there was so much money. We never even made presentations to senior management. Now we're back up at the C-level."

Darius Vaskelis, vice president of research and solutions at Inforte, a Chicago-based strategic-technology consultancy, agrees.

"Two years ago, we saw people asking for what we called 'drive-by ROIs,'" Vaskelis says. "They were in a frenzy to implement applications and didn't always do it with what was really strategic to their companies%85The business case was just something they technically had to fill out%85Today, we almost never see that. It's about quantifiable business benefits."

Due diligence, Schroeder adds, is key. "ROI has to be demonstrable because it's going to the CFO for his analysis," Schroeder says. "When deals get funded, it is with very clear expectations of ROI."

But making a deal happen involves more than just demonstrating ROI, says Christopher Formant, president and CEO of Scient, a New York-based solution provider.

"You want to show references in the same or other industries," he says. "If you show that their situation is essentially the same and will probably get the same return, you're in a strong position to move the deal forward."

Formant also points to the importance of reassuring potential clients that the same talent behind the reference projects will be working on their projects. "What they usually [think] is that if they aren't one of your first clients, then they won't get the 'A' team," he says. "They need to know you've done this before, and that they will have the [experienced]team."

Also, typical in downturn situations, sales departments have to work more deals to maintain revenue. Jim McHugh, vice president of sales for Strategic Technologies, a Cary, N.C.-based IT service provider, says he has witnessed the numbers change drastically.

"A year-and-a-half ago, if we had three good deals in our pipeline for a particular month, typically you'd win one, you'd lose one and one would get pushed back," McHugh says. "Today you need six deals in the pipeline. You'll win one, lose one and have four get pushed back." As a result, productivity drops as the length of the process increases. "The sales cycles that typically took a month-and-a-half to two months will now take three or four months," he adds.

Such changes in the IT sales process seem like hard times to those used to the boom. But how hard are these times? "It's more of a return to business as usual, before Y2K and the Internet," Inforte's Vaskelis says. "We've been living in an aberration for the past five years." n

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