sascom voices - The sascom magazine blog

I was sad to hear that Roy Scheider died over the weekend. The two-time Oscar nominee was best known for his role as the police chief in "Jaws." What a role it was. A modern Ishmael, confronting forces beyond his control or imagination, he delivers what many believe is the movie's best line: "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

Mike Minelli and I enjoyed quoting that line so much that we included it as a sub-chapter heading in our book, "Partnering with the CIO.";

We were trying to make the point that information technology has become the indispensable tool of our age. It would be extremely difficult to imagine our society functioning at its current level of modernity without the capabilities routinely provided by IT. It would be impossible to imagine our interconnected global economy functioning without IT.

Information technology already surrounds us. It has achieved ubiquity. Like indoor plumbing and central heating, IT is now universally accepted and expected. It’s not going away. Over the next three decades, IT will become so thoroughly woven into our lives that the boundaries between biology and IT will become essentially meaninngless. Barring some worldwide cataclysm, the demand for IT will continue rising for the rest of the 21st century.

So why aren’t IT suppliers jumping for joy? Because their lives are harder than ever! Despite rising demand, it’s more difficult to sell IT products and services than ever before. Here are two primary reasons for the sense of discomfort felt by IT suppliers:

1. Unyielding downward pressure on pricing.
2. Steadily increasing expectations.

Put those two reasons together and you get an environment that makes selling downright difficult. Even as demand skyrockets, IT has become a buyer’s market. There’s a third reason for the pain experienced by IT suppliers. This third reason is far more complex than the first two, and that’s why we devoted most of our book to examining it.
Here it is:

3. A fundamental disconnect has occurred between the IT supplier community and the IT consumer community.

We’re not exactly sure when the gap became visible, but it’s been widening steadily for about the past 15 years. Far from “crossing the chasm,” many IT suppliers have actually been digging themselves into a deeper hole.

Or as Roy Scheider's character says after seeing the shark: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

Hi, and thanks for including us among your illustrious group of contributors. Michael Minelli and I are co-authors of Partnering with the CIO a new book about the challenges facing IT sales organizations worldwide.

The seed kernel of the book was a brief anecdote told to us a couple of years ago by Paul Zazzera, then a senior vice president and chief information officer at Time, Inc.

The story goes like this: Zazzera was traveling on a non-stop transcontinental flight when an IT sales rep sat down next to him and spent the next several hours bending his ear with a non-stop sales pitch.

How the rep tracked down Zazzera’s flight and wangled himself into a neighboring seat remains a mystery. But the story got us wondering if other CIOs had similar experiences with IT reps whose zeal to pitch led them to such extremes.

It turned out that plenty of CIOs had even worse stories to share with us. So we decided to write a book. We planned to call our book Buzz Off. Essentially it would be a compilation of horror stories told by CIOs, a “best of the worst” collection for the amusement of IT insiders.

But when we told our CIO friends about the book, they immediately became very serious. Sternly and solemnly they said, “You know, this disconnect between the buyers and sellers of IT is a significant problem. You shouldn’t joke about it.”

Even the most jovial CIOs used terms such as “fundamentally broken” and “profoundly illogical” to describe the current state of relations between IT sales reps and their prospects.

So we shifted our focus. Buzz Off morphed into Selling to the CIO The new title reflected our sincere desire to explain exactly what had gone wrong with
the IT sales process, and to suggest potential ways for repairing the damage.

After about a dozen interviews, however, we realized that our title needed another revision. Without exception, the CIOs we interviewed said they didn’t want IT suppliers to “sell” them IT products and services.

Instead, the CIOs want IT suppliers to partner with them by understanding the specific business needs of their organizations and by providing technology engineered to address those specific needs. Furthermore, the CIOs we interviewed want IT sales reps to talk less about technology and talk more about business value.

Sadly, many IT suppliers still use sales techniques from the 1990s. And many of those same IT suppliers are left wondering why deals that seemed closed -- deals that were already booked as revenue -- have been held up or killed by CFOs or corporate steering committees.

We'll have more to say about the crazy IT sales cycle in our next post. Meantime, thanks again -- and please feel free to order a copy of Partnering with the CIO.