Gartner Symposium: The Future of IT Sales – Tiffani Bova

Started out this morning with Tiffani Bova discussing IT sales especially market shifts (started at 8AM instead of 7AM which was nice). Even though products have innovated and customers have become smarter, there has been no change in the GTM models of selling technology. Product innovation is not a sustainable differentiation. Even the best products and marketing cannot sell themselves – need people that can close deal.

Market forces: first the Nexus of forces (social, mobile, cloud, and information). Need to be able to connect digital sales to real world sales – really combine all channels.

Second, new buyers moving from back office (speed, features, price, etc) to front office (drive for outcomes). Need to get channel and direct sales trying to sell to CMOs – not talking about technical but talking about benefits. Solution selling 2.0 – only 14% can sell to the business outcome. 15% of the sales cannot get there. Channel is even worse.

Third, need a new buyers journey as the buyers are more educated and engaged. Buying is more fluid. Talked about example about selling cars in a new way with one person as opposed to sales, sales manager, finance. Need to be able to talk to the customer in a new way as they may be smarter than the sales person.

Fourth, price and customer service used to be trigger, but the new triggers are experience and how the product delivers business value.

Fifth, sales need a greater alignment with customer needs via the product team.

Finally, new challengers are emerging, like cloud providers, that are able to disrupt with little risks. Need to get channel partners to be able to develop more. New web guys need API’s, data models, web connections, etc.

So the discussion is about moving from lowest price, to reducing IT/business costs, to enabling business innovation (process improvement). The same guys cannot sell even given the best tools. Sales and marketing has a disconnect that they are not giving the right material to tell a story. Need role based and outcome based differentiated presentations. Don’t need to cover it all.

Need to move from a provider “selling” to a customer “buying” – should not have a challenger sales methodology. Sales should not tell them what to do, need to guide them, especially as business value and technical complexity increase. Missing 50% of the top 10 business objectives as they are outcome based projects like expanding customer relationships.

Need to sell differently as a product goes through the hype cycle – need to think about how you need to sell and market as a product matures. In the beginning you need a more technical sales process, but later you need more business outcome.

Have to start touching customers in all the ways they interact – events, webinars, white papers, social, etc. combine them together. The least most valuable interaction with a customer is with the sales person. Sales does not know customer, pain points, what they have done digitally (digital bread crumbs). Marketing needs to feed the data of what the customer has done back into sales. Terrible job of making sure that sales is real to sell into the field. Technical experts pre-sales engineers are the key to customers. Now seeing buying teams – business, CIO, purchasing. Need to have a selling team so that the customer feels value in all interactions.

Sustaining product leadership, customer infancy and operation excellent are not enough. You need to listen to the customer and figure out the business outcomes you can affect. Oracle was one of the first companies to admit sales was an actual issue for missing a quarter. They went back and looked at tools, retraining. Sales is the last mile of a 25 mile marathon. IBM then did the same thing.

Need to figure our how your customers buy. Think about all market slices like demographics, business environment, psychographics, demand, target buyer. Need to customize the criteria to align with the business drivers of your target buyers. Need to have marketing to spend on technology to get more data to do the above segmentation.

But in the end, hard to change because you have to continue to hit numbers, while changing the sales plan. “Delivering today while I anticipate the future”. All the disruption is causing sales to run even faster.

Move from hunter/farmer to guide. Move from reliant on the bowers to empowered by the buyers. Move from pushing message to customer driven buying. Move from protect existing revenue to find future demands. Move from selling back office to selling to Front office. Move from product/solution to business outcome.

Can’t change this with sales team if you are not changing sales model (may end overlay sales group). Rackspace is a great example of selling with best customer experience. Missing a sales model – need to talk with sales. Most important words missing from your GTM = How does your customer want to buy. If you want to be different, you have to act different, put together an innovation team that is different than sales and figure out how to adjust and blow out to sales. Product marketing teams should go on the sales calls.

Bottom line is sales model innovation can give you sustainable differentiation. Unique sales strategies can set you apart from the crowd.