Selling to the CIO is a relationship sale as CIOs are typically not involved in buying commodity products. Their role has become quite strategic and requires a sales approach that reflects this. While 10 years ago, CIOs were mainly expected to cut IT costs and make sure the system was running, today they are expected to significantly contribute to creating corporate competitive advantage and enabling business strategies at the highest levels. As a result, CIOs are increasingly procuring technology from vendors who act as trusted advisers and participate in solving the CIO’s technical and, often more importantly, business problems. The CIOs want the vendors to stick around after the purchase and participate in implementation and integration. As the CIOs’ role becomes more strategic, the buying dynamics and the decision process for IT procurement becomes more complex and fragmented. For large IT decisions such as purchases of enterprise software packages that are procured with the objective to enable business processes (BI, ERP, PLM, etc.), many decision makers are involved (typically at least COO, CFO but often also external consultants and/or systems integrators). Navigating through the decision-making process becomes a challenge. How do you influence such diverse group of people, and, how do you influence the influencers (typically SIs, SPs and consultants)?
Here is a few points that will help you get started:
- Demonstrate to the CIO that you understand the company’s business and the market in which it plays (what are the key success factors, what are the sources of competitive advantage, what are the needs of top customer segments, etc.)
- Develop a specific (vertical, segment, business problem) value proposition to the CIO based on your thorough understanding of his/her objectives and pain points.
- Map the decision process and understand the motivations of all the key players. Understand the buying dynamics: what are the key drivers, what are the evaluation methods, what are the steps in the selection process, where are the decision points and criteria on which the decisions are based?
- Develop a strategy for influencing the decision process at each critical step.
- Become a trusted adviser to the CIO. Talk to him/her about their business problems and contribute to developing solutions, hopefully supported by your product. This entails arming your sales force with knowledge specific to the CIO’s business and sales tools that are relevant and appropriate. For example, while ROI calculations can be effective if bottom line is the focus, they don’t impress decision makers that are concerned about gaining competitive advantage by improving customer and supplier relationships.
- Design the right sales coverage model. This includes incorporation of channel strategy and working with key influencers (again, e.g. systems integrators, consultants, ISVs, SPs, etc.) to effectively influence the (prospective) customer indirectly.
- Assure that your sales force is equipped with knowledge that’s relevant to the CIO and other key decision makers, and that the compensation structure reflects the fact that this is a relationship, consultative, solution-driven sale, as opposed to transactional sale. Importantly, design the compensation structure to promote behavior that will result in cementing a long-term business relationship based on trust, not on achieving quarterly quota.
- Collaborate with your channel partners on developing value propositions and influencing the key decision makers. It is likely that you don’t have the internal capabilities and skills to cover the entire solution. Even if you do, scalability is an issue.
- Intentionally develop a BC (behavior control) system in managing your Sales function. BC systems are much more effective for relationship sales than are OC (outome control) systems. This couldn’t be emphasized enough as the BC/OC systems affect the way salespeople perceive business challenges, how they approach the customer and what message do they send to the customer by their interaction.
- For large accounts, involve top management. The personal involvement of C-level executives in the relationship-building signals commitment and goes a long way in gaining customer confidence and trust.