Geoffrey
Phillips / Business Advisory Services
In today’s stagnant economy, technology companies are in a panic about how to drive business recovery. It seems that the markets stalled just as a wave of powerful new technology was emerging. The great new technology is here, but no one is buying.
In order to get sales going again, there are five things that technology vendors can do. They are easy to understand; challenging to implement. But they will unleash sales.
1. Focus on the end-user’s needs. The selling of technology solutions often stresses the unique gimmicks and fails to link them to end-user needs. The fact that a computer talks to you or that bits are packetized into IP formats doesn’t fundamentally mean anything to an end user. End user needs are operational and economic.
Remember also that end users are living in this economy. Needs are critical and cash is scarce. Solutions that can overcome scarcity (of cash, management resource, administrative bandwidth) are of value in a downsizing environment. When properly packaged, positioned and supported, technology-based solutions can provide exactly these values. The key is to address true needs.
2. Provide a Real Solutions Sale. ‘Solutions’ is a trendy concept, but a real solution sale will comprehensively cover all the areas of adapting, designing, configuring, planning, integrating, training and using. It will address process and management. It will clearly link features to business purpose. It will apply the solution to the specific business opportunity. In particular, a complete solution will demonstrate a minimal need for administrative support or process complexity. With many new technology products, the unwillingness to buy is a direct consequence of the end-user’s inability to see the economical and fool-proof linkage between the proposal and his business problems: “If only I could be sure that this would work in my company.”
Creative commercial structuring can tie the solutions even more directly to customer need, and reinforce the completeness of the solution.
3. Provide a Maximum Value Analysis. MVA is a concept we developed several years ago that combines Total Cost of Ownership with Business Value Creation to demonstrate that a given solution maximizes overall value to an end user versus other business choices – including the choice of doing nothing. To effectively demonstrate MVA in technology markets, a vendor must particularly address (a) the true business value of the applied solution; (b) the total cost of ownership – including upgrade, expansion, extension, (c) the avoidance of risk, complexity, uncertainty, and (d) the financial return on investment for the solution.
4. Eliminate Risk and Uncertainty. September 11th isn’t the only reason end-users are re-focused on risk and assurance. They’ve watched the dot-coms come and go. They’ve watched DSL providers disappear, ASP vendors disappear. They’ve lived with the cost of unworkable support systems from vendors that failed to address the true requirements. By offering a solution which ‘eliminates’ operational and commercial risk, a vendor can overcome one of today’s largest obstacles to technology sales.
5. Use Partners. With compressed budgets and downsized organizations, every dollar must be productive. Getting to the market and to your customers can usually be more efficient by leveraging the scale and market positions of established sales and service channels. Another powerful concept, Minimum Economic Scale, can be applied to help find the best partnering opportunities. Business partners are a great way to overcome risk, to lower sales cost, to access existing relationships, to leverage existing skills, to eliminate competition (everyone you don’t partner with, is a potential competitor!).
And by the way, treat your partners as customers too!
In summary, the economy is slow, and undeniably overall demand is down. But technology vendors can unleash the sales opportunities that are available by following five, logical guidelines. Since a number of vendors fail to do this, you can grab an increased share of the smaller market.
Geoffrey Phillips / Business Advisory
Services has helped companies shape value propositions and build sales channels
in order to achieve successful sales advantage.