So much of the opportunity for IT service providers lies in selling to good-sized enterprises.
And, if you've ever been in a sales or a marketing role, you know how important it is to understand the psychology of your prospect -- how they think, how they make decisions -- basically the "why" of why they do what they do.
Having sold and marketed to these organizations for over 20 years, I believe I have a decent (although not perfect!) understanding of how decisions get considered and made at different levels of IT.
Unfortunately, I find surprisingly little of this tribal knowledge in many of the service providers I'm working with today.
What Makes Enterprise IT People Tick
If you think about it, working for an enterprise IT organization -- even at a senior level -- isn't usually the most pleasant or satisfying job available. The hours are very long. You're always minutes away from potentially having a really bad day.
You need a good technical background, and need to be good with people who weren't hired for their social skills. You'll find yourself dealing with cranky end users in one meeting, cranky finance people in another meeting, cranky legal and compliance people in yet another meeting -- that is, when you aren't sitting in endless vendor presentations or project planning meetings.
Your skills get regularly obsoleted, outsourced or both. You rarely get praise when you do something right, but will never hear the end of it if there's a problem. Simply put, you've got to really like IT to be an IT professional.
Bottom line for service providers: getting empathetic with what enterprise IT types go through can really help you frame your offering and value propositions to be far more effective. And, based what I've seen so far, there's a lot of room for improvement.
Targeting The Need
So many SP propositions lead with saving money, e.g. use us because we're cheaper. While there's nothing wrong with saving money, I believe there's more to it than that.
For example: offering to do something that the IT organization would prefer not to do itself so that it can focus on other, more worthwhile tasks. Or offering to do something that the IT organization can't do by itself, and has to get done regardless.
For me, the two *killer* propositions are (1) speed and flexibility, and (2) better IT than IT can do themselves.
The Value Of Speed And Flexibility
So much of classical IT thinking is around (a) understanding the potential requirements, and (b) taking your sweet time to deliver something that meets those requirements.
If we deconstruct each of these statements, we can make some pretty safe observations.
First, full IT requirements are rarely -- if ever -- understood. So much of what businesses want these days is poorly understood at the outset.
If you've ever heard me speak, you've heard me tell the story of what happened when I had to stand up a social media portal here at EMC: blogging, wikis, etc.
Sure enough, we had the "sizing and requirements" discussion with our IT team. Given my background in computer science and the industry, you'd think if anyone could supply sizing requirements, I could.
But no. After 15 minutes, I found myself telling well-crafted lies to get them out of my office.
Why? I had no idea whether the project would have 5 users or 50,000. I didn't know whether my users would occasionally use the platform, or pound the living crap out of it. It all was a big experiment.
I wanted an environment where I could start small and cheap, and then dial up service levels and functionality as the program progressed. Sound reasonable? But most IT organizations are hard pressed to have a discussion along those lines.
I call it the "have a hunch, provision a bunch" methodology. Something any service provider can do far better than more traditional IT organizations -- deliver flex-up, flex-down capabilities. And, I -- like most business people -- would pay a premium for any service where I don't have to predict what my needs will be.
An airplane ticket that can be easily changed is far more valuable than one that can't -- especially in a business setting.
If you're a service provider, you have to understand that (a) this flex-up, flex-down is incredibly valuable to the business, (b) most IT people may not understand the value of this, and (c) unless you connect with the business buyer -- or a reasonable IT proxy -- they're not going to understand the value of what you bring.
To make matters more interesting, this sort of well-we're-not-really-sure-about-the-requirements is precisely where most value-generation activities occur for businesses -- the new project, the new application, the new web site, etc. Again, expect a decouple between IT and the business in many cases.
The flip side of flexibility is speed -- getting to good-enough as quickly as possible.
Again, here is where many IT organizations work at cross-purposes with the business. They have existing processes, projects already underway, a host of real and imagined concerns -- and all of this takes time to sort through.
Back to my social media portal example. I was offered two alternatives by the IT team -- a standard infrastructure build that would have taken at least 60 days, or if I were to choose this new VMware stuff, I could have my environment up by that Friday.
Which was followed by a long explanation of how VMware was going to save the company money.
Have you ever seen those Charlie Brown cartoons when the adults are talking?
Wah wah wah wah FRIDAY wah wah wah wah SIXTY DAYS! Guess which one I chose?
Yes, the VMware option was cheaper, but what it bought me was *speed* which was more valuable in this setting than anything else. Businesses are used to paying a premium for speed -- expedited delivery, direct flights, telepresence, bigger networks, etc.
Bottom line: service providers should consider constructing their value propositions to emphasize speed and flexibility.
Both can be incredibly valuable to the business. Both are notoriously hard for IT organizations to deliver.
Better IT Than IT Can Do Itself
Enterprise IT is getting really hard, even for the big shops. The demands for new capabilities are exponential. The core technologies are rapidly changing. Key skills are almost impossible to acquire. Budgets aren't growing. And the consequences of having the proverbial "bad IT day" just keep increasing.
Simply put, IT can't keep up in many situations. They may not tell you this to your face, but the gap between "where we should be" and "where we are" keeps getting wider and wider for many IT organizations. It's an uncomfortable feeling for them.
Imagine a service (largely under IT's control) where you could run on the latest, greatest infrastructure technologies -- virtualization, CPU, storage, network, etc. And that service had better security than you ever could get in your traditional environment. And that service did data protection better than you could do yourself. And you had access to all the cool, whiz-bang technology stuff you need in small drinks vs. expensive projects. Not to mention better run with better tools and processes. And some wickedly smart people who understood how all of it worked.
That'd be a pretty cool deal if you were an enterprise IT person. You *know* that's what you're supposed to be delivering to the business, but you can't get there by building it yourself -- you're going to have to start renting it.
I know for a fact that most service provider environments are better than most enterprise IT environments. I spend time in both, and -- while there are clearly exceptions -- the comparisons are usually stark and obvious.
Yet so many service providers don't seem to drill this point home with their prospects. It's almost like they're shy about telling the plain truth: your IT environment sucks, ours doesn't.
Nothing like truth in marketing!
So, Where Does That Leave Us?
Tax accountants aren't successful because they're *cheaper* than doing it yourself, they're successful because (a) taxes are a big deal, (b) it's really complex, (c) getting it wrong has ugly consequences, and (d) it's better to trust a professional.
Ditto for doctors, lawyers, plumbers, landscapers, mechanics -- all of the "service providers" in the non-IT world. Yeah, costs matter, but you're really buying expertise and scale when you engage their services.
How long will it be before IT service providers start thinking of themselves the same way?
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