Once upon a time, the Corporate IT Department was where the magic happened. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) had recently been promoted from reporting to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) to reporting directly to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The IT department was suddenly cool because it had moved beyond making sure all of the corporate transactions were recorded in the financial system to actually making a positive difference in people’s lives, improving productivity, automating boring tasks, informing and empowering front line workers and providing executives with never-before-available business intelligence. The IT Department created the company of the future, found and procured the best third party software, built what could not be bought, and partnered with third party IT consultancies to add targeted expertise. But at some point, the fairy tale ended.
As a sales executive, I have an old joke I tell from time to time. What is a lawyer’s job description? Answer: Prevent any sale from happening. More recently, I have a new joke I tell from time to time. What project was scheduled to start once the Y2K bug was fixed? Answer: The ERP consolidation project, but that project has no deadline. But perhaps these days the first joke is really about the IT department instead of the legal department.
There was no exact moment. But several forces came together over time that transformed IT’s primary mission from making great things happen to preventing bad things from happening. Today, when a sales executive interacts with a company, IT’s role is to assess and mitigate risk. But within the larger picture, this is a good thing, not a bad thing. Before this pivot, sales executives were always blocked from engaging the business users actually affected by the solution by a paternalistic IT department of so-called experts. But today, the average business executive is far more tech savvy than his counterpart from half a generation ago. The sales executive can now engage primarily with the business user who is feeling the actual pain and now has control of the budget to take action. Likewise, when a sales executive makes a call to a business user who passes the buck with the old line “IT handles that,” the sales executive knows with certainty the statement is false.
Interaction with the IT department is now a solid part of the middle of the sales process. The IT department will influence the final decision and may be able to veto a vendor selection, but they are not the final decision-makers. While each sales situation is different, here is a short list of six things the IT department will assess.
1. Implementation Time and Resources. My ERP consolidation joke above evokes laughter because it is based upon truth. No IT executive with ten or more years’ experience has eluded the enterprise IT project from hell: one that went far over budget and took possibly years longer to implement than expected. Normally, such delayed and over-budget projects do not even deliver anywhere near the originally anticipated business value when completed. Today’s software buyers do not want a repeat.
2. Data Integration and Synchronization. Software silos are a relic of history. The ERP is the company’s system of record and all other software must function in harmony with the ERP. The IT department wants all business software to operate using a single source of truth. In the ideal, data is updated in real-time, but this ideal must be balanced against the need not to tax a production system with data calls from external software. Being able to provide the right balance is essential.
3. Training, Adoption and Ease of Use. Along with software silos, “shelfware” is also a relic of history. IT will evaluate your software on its user interface and track record of adoption. Ease and enjoyment of use will operate in your favor while complexity and frustration will work against you. In my most recent situations when I have displaced a competitor, this was a primary factor in my winning the business.
4. Upgrades, Compatibility and Scalability. IT (as well as business) wants to invest in software that is stable and mature, yet full of great future potential both in terms of upcoming new features as well as the ability to handle its clients as they grow.
5. Risk of Downtime. Software should be stable. And when hosted professionally, cut-over to backup should be painless and as close to instantaneous as possible when the underlying servers fail. IT will investigate this risk and healthy software companies should have this checkbox covered before pursuing serious accounts.
6. Business Intelligence. Lastly, the IT department still has a top level view of the entire IT infrastructure and can spot opportunities to add value across the enterprise that might not be seen by the department who is the primary buyer of your solution. This is perhaps the only remaining sphere where the IT department still operates to make good things happen, rather than preventing bad things from happening. I’m glad they still carry this one remaining torch from the “golden age” of the IT department.
The fairy tale may be over, but reality is still good for the best sales people, selling the best solutions. The IT audit is now a standard step in the software buying process, but the true business stakeholders are now the masters of their own destiny. The result is better solutions and happier customers.
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