Only the shadow knows
In tough times you have to prove there's a reason why your customers need your services.
Recognising the need for instant payback, and identifying where the payback should come from, however, are two different imperatives. Janet Szilva of AJS encourages her solutions provider clients to "shadow" their customers' employees to discover where the time and money are going to waste. Szilva says one of her clients learned from following his customer around that its people were using a toll number for Internet access. After presenting that finding to the customer, Szilva's client landed a contract to implement a cost-saving solution.
Ed Coleman, CEO of CompuCom Systems, says his company is trying to help customers identify the "shadow people" involved in their desktop support operations. These people, who work within the business units, tend to be overlooked when companies formulate plans to reduce support costs.
"Consultative sales are essential when the customer can't see, touch or feel what it's buying," advises Coleman. While identifying customer needs and understanding what drives those needs are critical in a down market, he concludes, a good IT service provider should always be training its sales staff to drill down to the pain points.
After you've identified those pain points, continues Chris Pariseau, VP of business development at Stonebridge Technologies, a Dallas-based Web consultancy, the next task is to "peel back the onion" to find the root cause of a problem and sell the appropriate solution to the right customer executive.
"You can talk to the project managers in the bowels of the IT organisation, but more likely than not, their first concern is whether it works," explains Pariseau. "You need to get to the person who signs the order, look that person in the eye and get that person to 'dollar-ise' the problem, to understand the real monetary cost to the organisation."
One of Stonebridge's Fortune 100 customers, for example, recently called in the consultancy when its users had trouble signing on to a mission-critical CRM application. The services vendor sent in a SWAT team to determine if it was a network glitch, a systems engineering error or a security problem. "We quickly fixed the symptom, which involved the deployment of middleware in the Web space," recalls Pariseau. "But the important question was how and why did they get into this situation in a 24/7 production environment with a zero tolerance for downtime?"
Stonebridge managed to present the issue to the CTO in terms he could relate toââ,¬"-namely, the immense dollar cost of losing clients. The vendor ultimately stuck around to perform a complete application audit, which led to a 90-day job load-balancing the customer's servers, revamping its policies and procedures, and deploying new Oracle database applications.
