One former employee of professional services firm EDS says he used to sum up the company's approach to selling IT services in a soft market like this: "Look for the cow in the ditch." In other words, locate the customer's pain points—-those pressing business problems that can't be put on the back burner until the economy improves-—and aim your sales pitch right at the heart of those problems. Offer solutions that provide an immediate payback, in the form of reduced operating costs or lower budgetary expenditures. In a recession, lofty promises to reinvent the customer's business (did anyone say "e-commerce"?) go over about as well as William F. Buckley on the "Jerry Springer Show."
All this is covered in Salesmanship 101, under the heading of "selling ROI" (return on investment). Every salesperson with an ounce of training knows these basic techniques like lawyers know the rules of evidence or physicists know the atom.
But you'll have to forgive the industry's salespeople if their skills are a little rusty. It's been ages since anyone has had to resort to selling ROI. Indeed, in the past two or three years, just about all it took to sell Internet-based solutions was the ability to answer the phone and take orders. Some of the most prosperous solutions providers didn't even bother hiring in-house salespeople—-their leads and referrals came right over the transom from their venture capitalists. It was fat city all around.
And then, all of a sudden, recounts Steve Waterhouse, president of the Waterhouse Group, a sales training firm, everybody seemed to figure out that the "New Economy" was really just the old economy run by people who didn't know what they were doing.
"And once they realised that profit has something to do with keeping an organisation running, we started getting back to fundamentals," says Waterhouse. He notes that the industry's fixation on the top line created enormous month-to-month pressure to book business and ultimately led to sloppy deal-making. But now, that mind-set has been replaced by a clamoring for the "basics of filling the pipeline with good stuff," Waterhouse says.
