Author Archives: douglaswallen

Technical Sales Balanced Scorecard: Internal Perspective

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The second element of the Technical Sales Balanced Scorecard focuses on a view of performance from an internal or business process perspective. It seeks to determine and measure the technical sales organization’s ability to engage in the right sort of behaviors in the right fashion at the right time to ensure that goals are being met. Some attributes of the internal perspective might be:

  • Pipeline, or pipeline opportunity growth/contraction over a given period
  • Employee opportunity identification participation, or the number of new opportunities that technical sales reps have discovered via their prospecting activities with customers
  • Win/loss dollar amounts and rates
  • Employee turnover
  • Number or percentage of reps achieving their revenue targets in a given time period
  • Specific metrics regarding identification and progression of strategic sales plays or brand-new-to-the-market solutions
  • Usage of technical deliverables (architecture overviews, customer project documentation and/or implementation information, etc.) in opportunity wins vs. losses
  • Success & failure rates of proofs of concept and whether those technical wins translated into opportunity wins
  • Number or percentage of closed opportunities featuring more than one product or solution from the organization’s portfolio (i.e. “cross brand”)
  • Performance of business partner & channel-led opportunities vs. those owned by the organization

These attributes may be viewed within a particular time period and, as history provides, it may be valuable to show them with year to year or quarter to quarter comparisons. Success and failure of many of these attributes might be tied to the broader organizational strategy so that they may be used as key performance indicators that contribute to the desired outcomes. For example, the organization might choose to examine how many successful customer proofs of concept were not parlayed into closed opportunities.

Technical Sales Balanced Scorecard: Financial Perspective

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Obviously the principal objective of the technical sales professional is to drive revenue for their organization in the form of new products and solutions sold to customers. However, the first focus area of the Technical Sales Balanced Scorecard – the financial, or shareholders perspective – might also include other aspects of performance. There are many objectives, measures, and targets that might act as indicators of the organization’s financial success and therefore be important. Ultimately, the financial perspective endeavors to answer the question, “how do we look to our shareholders?” Some measures might include:

  • Revenue – including not only new sales for a given time period (quarter, week, etc.) but also year over year and/or quarterly comparisons
  • Profit- similarly, not only for a given time period but also with period comparisons
  • Backlog – committed revenue to be collected based on contracts that have been signed but not necessarily yet performed
  • Losses – aggregated value of opportunities lost
  • Market Share – assuming the market for a given offering can be defined in economic terms, this indicator would demonstrate how well the organization is doing in penetrating that market

Each of the above might be further categorized based on established or “white space” customers as well as by customer industry, geography, product line, or any number of other relevant criteria. Like any company’s financial statements, these metrics will tell a story about how effectively the technical sales team is working with customers and whether their efforts are resulting in the revenue and profitability required to deliver value to the owners of the company. If not, it might provide insight into what product lines, geographies, or customer sets might require more or less focus.

Technical Sales Balanced Scorecard: Overview

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Sales teams in many industries often struggle to determine the optimal measures of organizational performance and health. Enterprise technology sales is no different. Measures such as revenue per rep, attainment per rep, profit per rep, and similar per customer revenue and profit measures are all valid and relatively simple metrics. However, if we consider the mission of technical sales to include a broader set of objectives that include financial performance but also the more nebulous elements such as customer satisfaction, competitive displacement, customer technology adoption, etc., then a broader set of objective and subjective measures must be considered. This is where a balanced scorecard (BSC) may be of some use. A performance management system such as a BSC can be wholly representative of the organizational health of the technical sales force and will link overall sales strategy to planning and control.

Thanks to Kaplan and Norton, the concept of using a BSC as a holistic management tool has been around since the early 1990s. It focuses on distinct views of overall organizational performance in terms of executing strategy from four different perspectives:

  1. Financial, or shareholder’s, which focuses on whether the organization is delivering the expected returns to its owners.
  2. Internal, which includes the organization’s own process objectives and indicators of success.
  3. Learning & Growth, which focuses on how the organization is going to improve and/or evolve for the future of its business.
  4. Customer, which provides insight into customers’ perceptions of the organization.

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Development and implementation of a BSC not only creates the organizational focus necessary to move the business forward, it also helps to gain the appropriate level of buy-in from staff and management as everyone becomes better attuned to the big picture. It provides a line of sight from strategic to operational activities and ensures that everyone is engaged in the appropriate activities that drive organizational success.  Over the next few posts I will present some ideas for how these categories might be represented for a technical sales organization.

The 1:1 “Cadence” Meeting

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It is fascinating how we business professionals co-opt specific English language words for our own use. Recently for me, “actionable” and “dehire” have joined phrases such as “leveraging our synergies” in the pantheon of pithy peevish palavers. In technical sales in particular, we have managed to turn “solution” and “architect” into verbs, which has resulted in a few debates regarding the difference between “solutioners who are solutioning solutions” and “architects who are architecting architectures”. I recently read of a middle manager who uses “road map” as a verb. As I consider “cadence” and its use in the sales profession, I suppose its relation to “rhythm” makes it acceptable as a term to describe a discussion of current opportunities, their status, next steps to closure, etc. But like many devotees of Horstmann and Auzenne’s “Manager Tools”, I prefer the even less descriptive but more flexible term “one on one” and its hip derivatives “1:1”, “OoO” and “O3”.

But enough about semantics, let’s talk about regular conversations between technical sales professionals and their managers. Obviously direct discussions between managers and employees help to develop and solidify the professional and personal relationship between the two in the interest of advancing the organization’s goals. For technical sellers, these discussions are critical to maintaining focus on progressing opportunities, engaging in the right activities to increase customer value, career growth, and receiving appropriate coaching on all of the above. For managers, effective 1:1s will ensure that opportunity status and next steps are communicated up-line, potential issues with customers are brought to light before they become problems, that employees are generally doing what the organization is paying them to do, and provide ample information for employee reviews and assessments. Generally speaking, all pre-sales, post-sales, and career topics can be efficiently covered in a short amount of time if both the manager and the employee come prepared to discuss:

Current Opportunity Status: In viewing the near term (current quarter, month, etc.) pipeline, what needs to be done to ensure that we have gained the “technical win” in the eyes of the customer for each opportunity? Are they confident that they can successfully implement our solution in their business and technology environment? Is the customer taking 100% responsibility for the implementation or does other expertise need to be engaged? Do we have the right level of support amongst those who own the infrastructure? Does the customer agree with the business and/or technical benefits of the solution? Does the customer understand the long-term benefits of our solution over the competition? Are you in sync with sales peers regarding any issues that might arise during negotiation of terms?

Customer Relationship: What is the “temperature” of our organization’s relationship with the customer? Have they had any issues in implementing our solutions that are going to result in delayed realization of value to their business? What sort of movement is being observed amongst our competitors regarding this customer? What are you doing to differentiate our organization from our competitors? What benefits does our customer see in doing business with us vs. our competition? How can you be more effective in demonstrating those benefits? What are you doing to ensure that the customer is continuing to receive value from their investment in our solutions?

Future Opportunity Development: What are you doing to bring new ideas to your customers? What new solutions will those ideas require the customer to invest in? Have you given them any ideas on how to make better use of what they have already invested in? What complementary offerings that the customer has not yet invested in are you positioning next to solutions that the customer currently has? What new contacts have you made and in what parts of the customers business? What new business opportunities is your customer engaged in that would require more solutions from our organization? How are you setting the vision of how our solutions can be used to move the customer’s business into the future?

So what about employee career planning and coaching? Over time, regular one on one discussions covering the above topics will bring to light the skills, aptitude, and interests of the employee. As employees experience success in different aspects of the technical seller role, strengths and development opportunities will arise. From there, a natural progression into a “what do you want to do next?” conversations will occur.

If you are a technical sales manager and you are not having regular discussions of this nature with your employees, schedule them now. If you are a technical sales professional and you are not having regular discussions of this nature with your manager, ask him or her to schedule them now. Your organization may have many tools to help document and communicate similar information up and across, but if you are not having direct, 1:1 discussions, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to much more effectively engage in your business, increase sales, and enhance customer satisfaction.

The “Unquantifiables”

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Few people have ever been able to summarize business situations like the late Peter Drucker. I believe I am now on my 5th year of regularly reading through “The Daily Drucker”. And his “The Effective Executive” holds the top spot on many professionals’ lists of best business books ever written. He once made a point about the “unquantifiable” impact that professionals can have beyond the actual measurable activities and objectives of the organization. The high performing technical seller will take the initiative to seek out these “unquantifiables” on their own, but often they are directly presented to those willing to step up and take responsibility.

I used to work in restaurants as a dishwasher and cook when I was growing up. Occasionally when it would get extremely busy (known as a “rush” to those in the industry), the wait staff would ask for assistance in clearing tables (aka “bussing”). The response from those of us working in the back was quite often “not my job, man”, only spoken loudly and rapidly over the din of the kitchen with a slight Caribbean accent, as in “NOTMYJOBMON!”. Typically the requester would simply glare at us and proceed to bus the table themselves rather than deal with some obnoxious male adolescent. (Then again, since many of the requesters were adolescent females, occasionally one would feel compelled to lend a hand, but that’s another story and completely beside the point). Refusing to help deal with a customer’s need is somewhat amusing when you are a high school kid working a part time job for extra cash. Not so much when you are representing an enterprise technology supplier in relationships between your company and your customers that are often worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to both parties.

I always advise technical sales professionals that they should be doing whatever is necessary to develop new sales opportunities and to ensure that the customer’s technology investment is providing them with business benefits. It is often easy to look at a given situation and say, “that’s marketing’s job”, “that’s what the support center is for”, or “that’s not in my job description” even though the individual knows that getting engaged and taking responsibility will lead to a positive business outcome for both the supplier and the customer. It is the technical seller’s equivalent of “NOTMYJOBMON!” and in many ways it is similar to what psychologists refer to as the “bystander effect” – it assumes someone else will address (or at least is responsible or better qualified for addressing) the customer’s need. I have two rhetorical “coaching” questions that I ask whenever I sense this sort of attitude:

1) What if your competitor is the one who steps up to address the customer’s need?

2) How much career growth or fulfillment do you expect to receive by deflecting responsibility to someone else?

Like much of Drucker’s insight, the rejection of “NOTMYJOBMON!” seems both simple and intuitive. In fact, to quote Drucker more directly, he once stated quite simply that, “the purpose of business is to create and retain customers.” Put in the context of a customer-facing sales organization, this translates into two priorities:

1) Generating revenue by providing customers with solutions.

2) Increasing customer satisfaction.

In fact, this is true for those in all customer-facing sales roles, technical or otherwise. It is everyone’s job.

“Service” After the Sale?

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There is an old adage in the sales profession that states, “nothing kills sales faster than post-sales support”. There is an equally old and true adage that states, “nothing ensures repeat business like service after the sale”. So which is it? Does spending time with customers who have already purchased your products keep you from selling more to new customers? Or does ensuring that customers are getting the maximum value out of their investment in your technology increase levels of customer satisfaction, your reputation, and an increase in sales? Certainly, there are many consumer and business to business industries in which time spent with customers who have already purchased products can reduce the time spent acquiring new customers (and by extension, new revenue). For enterprise technology providers operating in the business to business space, however, the answer lies somewhere in between.

Business relationships between suppliers and their enterprise customers often involve long-term arrangements in which the customer has access to a wide variety of the supplier’s offerings. This is particularly true in the enterprise software business. In order for these arrangements to provide the maximum economic and strategic value for both the customer and the supplier, both parties must focus on ensuring that the customer is taking full advantage of the technology to which they are entitled. As the investing party, it is ultimately up to the customer to take advantage of their investment and ensure that they are getting value for their business. But there is much the supplier can do to assist. The technical sales professional is often best qualified to remain deeply engaged in a post-sales relationship with the customer to ensure successful implementation of the supplier’s solutions.

The effective technical seller can categorize their efforts to enable their customer’s success into the following focus areas: 1) Information; 2) Implementation; and 3) Infusion.

Information

This is the most basic of the three categories. The technical seller must ensure that the customer fully understands the products and capabilities that the customer has purchased. This includes not only which products the customer has access to, but the functionality those products provide, how they interact, and how they can best fit into the customer’s existing IT and political environment. This also means partnering with the individuals at the customer who will be responsible for communicating the details of their investment to the rest of their organization. It means spending time with the customer’s business and technology leaders to understand their priorities and how their investment can be leveraged for those priorities. In many ways this effectively means that the technical seller will spend a great deal of time re-selling the solutions that the customer has already purchased, but such is often the nature of strategic business-to-business relationships.

Implementation

This is the true execution phase in which customers often require the most assistance. It is where the effective technical seller can make a significant difference to the business relationship between supplier and customer. The technical sales professional should strive to be a member of the customer’s project teams and ensure that the customer has everything they need to take responsibility for implementing their investment. This means providing the customer with access to education, training, and any additional implementation services (from the supplier or their partners) that may be required to install, configure, and build solutions. By remaining engaged with the customer’s implementation teams, the technical sales professional can provide all of the necessary care and feeding throughout the customer’s implementation lifecycle to address any issues that may arise. The technical seller’s continued involvement also provides a deeper understanding of the customer’s technical infrastructure, political environment, and business history. This deepens the relationship for both parties and leads to a more effective partnership for the future.

Infusion

Activities in this category enable the customer to manage and realize the true business value of their investment. It requires the technical seller to have a relationship with those at the customer who are responsible for both strategic IT planning as well as enterprise asset management. For example, the customer’s enterprise IT architects and their procurement or cost accounting organization. The technical seller should help the customer in the planning, tracking, and, to some extent, the financial management of their investment. This is done via regular checkpoint meetings in which both customer and supplier discuss the status of implementation projects, future plans, and how the customer’s ownership of the supplier’s technology is being communicated across the enterprise. The technical seller can help the customer with total cost of ownership and return on investment aspects to ensure that they are effectively managing their investment. If done properly, the technical sales professional can help to infuse the customer with a culture of effective asset management and a focus on the attainment of business value.

“Nothing kills sales faster than post-sales support” may still be true in some industries. But in the enterprise-class information technology industry, long term, business value focused partnerships between customers and suppliers will provide the greatest economic value for both parties.

Hiring: Candidate Testing

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Qualified candidates that emerge from the initial pool of interviewees should then participate in an additional test or series of tests to determine the finalist(s) for the role. These “tests”, for lack of a better term, should primarily focus on the Technical, Business, and Interpersonal skills categories from the Job Analysis phase.

Quite simply, candidates should be required to give a presentation that demonstrates a technical solution to a business problem. The presentation should be given in person to the hiring manager and, if possible, selected peer managers. This exercise will create a realistic simulation and estimate of on-the-job performance as well as a demonstration of the candidate’s capabilities in a selling environment. Preferably, the candidate would provide a solution overview of something that the company currently sells or at least something from a comparable technology or business domain. However, if the candidate has an extensive background in other business technology domains, they could pull from those experiences as well. The management team participating in the presentation should “role play” and ask questions typical of their customers.

Although admittedly very subjective, the candidates will be graded by the management team on a three point scale in the areas of:

  • Business Applicability – what business problem was the customer trying to solve? How is the technical solution going to help them make money, save money, or mitigate risk for their business? Is there a particular broad industry-specific trend addressed by the solution?
  • Technical Clarity – what products, components, and technologies are utilized in the solution? How do these elements interact with each other? How do they integrate and/or fit into the customer’s existing information technology environment? What does the customer need to do in order to take responsibility for the successful implementation of the solution?
  • Audience Engagement – how well did the candidate engage the audience in the discussion? Were they able to expand the solution to include additional technologies (and therefore increase the size of the sales opportunity) in response to questions from the audience?
  • Overall Presentation Style – candidate appearance, speaking ability, professional mannerisms.
  • Would You Buy This Solution (or Anything, for that Matter) From This Candidate? – likely the ultimate question that provides a simple yes/no answer to the audience’s evaluation of the four previously mentioned criteria.

An “audition” of this nature is a reliable and valid method for determining the most qualified candidates for technical sales positions. The pressure of performing a significant part of the role in front of their potential management team will create an environment similar to what the candidate will face when interacting with customers.

A second test for should be the hiring manager’s simple evaluation of some form of technical writing or customer “deliverable quality” document developed by the candidate. Again, although somewhat subjective, this will at minimum measure the candidate’s abilitu to and experience in communicating the business merits and technical specifications of a solution to a customer in order to favorably influence the purchase decision.

Finally, hiring managers may want to consider having candidates construct a personality profile such as DiSC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiSC). The candidate’s DiSC profile will provide an estimation of the candidate’s Interpersonal and, to some extent, Lifestyle skills cateogories. Such personality testing has proven to be reliable across languages and cultures. For technical sales positions, an individual with strengths in the Dominance and Influence DiSC quadrants has the most potential for success. These strengths are typically exhibited by those with extroverted personalities who are driven to emerge as visible leaders and are more responsive to incentives. Such individuals typically thrive best in sales environments.

Hiring: The Initial Interview

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Once candidates pass initial screening for an open role, the next step is an initial personal interview with the hiring manager. Managers should make these meetings a mix of informal discussion as well as specific questions that will enable a comparison of candidates (and obviously within all legal and HR guidelines). The most effective managers will go into the discussion having given some thought to specific questions that they intend to ask and some idea of the optimal answers they would expect from the candidate. Most managers have their own standard or favorite questions and there are hundreds of sources of additional ideas. Below are even more, including what those questions seek to measure and the type of answer that the hiring manager should be looking for. Many of the questions do not necessarily measure specific attributes of the position (see the Hiring: Job Analysis post of this blog), but rather provide insight into the candidate’s personality, experiences, motivation, and how well they will fit into the organization.

Question: What is your greatest strength and how will you use it to benefit this organization?

Measure: Interpersonal; Business; Gives the candidate permission to sell themselves and their best attributes. Also enables the interviewer to get a better understanding of how much research the candidate has done into the company, organization, etc.

Preferred Answer: Specific examples of what they are good at and how that applies to selling the supplier’s solutions or products, including some specific knowledge of those solutions.

Question: What brings you the most professional joy? Name a specific instance and why.

Measure: Interpersonal; Lifestyle; Technical; Business; Understanding what motivates and drives the candidate to be successful.

Preferred Answer: Specific examples pertaining to the candidate taking responsibility for closing new business (driving revenue) or successfully solving customer business problems via technology.

Question: What was your favorite job and what did you like about it? Describe a good day at one of your previous positions.

Measure: Interpersonal; Lifestyle; Technical; Business; Understanding the candidate’s perception of “work” and the sort of tasks that they enjoy the most.

Preferred Answer: Examples of the candidate engaging in activities that drive business results with customers as opposed to less difficult and/or solitary “desk executed” activities. Demonstration of the candidate’s control over the type of day they had.

Question: What brings you the most professional frustration and how do you get through it? Name a specific instance and how.

Measure: Interpersonal; Understanding how the candidate deals with the frustrations that will inevitably arise. Paying extra attention to any shift in attitude, as it provides insight into professional maturity of the candidate.

Preferred Answer: Any activities related to the execution of a previous role that, although challenging, are necessary in order for the organization to perform its function. Candidate must demonstrate an understanding of the business necessity of the activity.

Question: Tell me about a business technology solution that you implemented? What was its business purpose? What tasks did you perform?

Measure: Technical; Business

Preferred Answer: Demonstrated understanding of the business reason for investing in the solution (make money, save money, mitigate risk) and the technical solution that was implemented. Possibly including a graphic representation of the solution (whiteboard, napkin, etc.).

Question: What decision do you wish you could do over? Name something that you really messed up and how did you rectify it?

Measure: Interpersonal; Professional maturity and introspection. Willingness to evaluate their own performance and adjust their behavior.

Preferred Answer: Specific examples of both the negative outcome of the decision and the specific actions that the candidate would perform differently. A professional decision do-over, rather than a personal one, is preferred.

Question: What do you think people like about you? Why? Can you provide examples of others’ feedback regarding these traits?

Measure: Interpersonal; Lifestyle; Self-awareness, ability to interpret other’s perceptions.

Preferred Answer: Personality traits that are most applicable to success in the sales organization that serves our customers. Examples include outgoing, courteous, interested in others, knowledgeable, charitable, etc.

Question: When have you ever disagreed with your management and how did you handle it?

Measure: Interpersonal; Business; Professional maturity.

Preferred Answer: Example of an incident related to the operation of the business and specific actions on the part of the candidate. Demonstration either of the acceptance and understanding of management’s position or if/how the candidate was able to influence change to the practice, policy, opinion, etc. in question.

Question: If you joined our organization and it works out, where do you see yourself going from there?

Measure: Lifestyle; Career aspirations, professional maturity.

Preferred Answer: Anything that would lead the interviewer to believe that the candidate has spent time thinking about their professional future and why they are interested in a particular path.

Question: What business or management book are you reading right now? What business or management magazine or newspaper do you read most often?

Measure: Business; Lifestyle; Anyone involved in the sale of enterprise-class business technology solutions needs a firm grasp on the business climate, industry-specific issues, etc.

Preferred Answer: Any specific examples will do. Follow up with additional questions about content, authors, columnists, recent articles, etc.

Question: What do you think are the key components in the enterprise business technology solution sales process?

Measure: Business; Provides insight into the candidate’s understanding of a typical enterprise sales process and what it takes to move through the cycle.

Preferred Answer: Components such as validating the realities of the opportunity and key business drivers; developing a plan for working the opportunity; leading the team in engaging with the customer; determining the steps to closure; communicating them to the team and customer; and engagement.

Question: How would you respond if one of your customers said in your first meeting, “we dislike your company and “will not be using any of your solutions anytime soon”?

Measure: Business; Interpersonal; Professional maturity

Preferred Answer: Inquiring the customer about specific experiences that have colored the customer’s opinion. Asking the customer what the ideal relationship would look like.

Question: Give an example of how you were able to develop a business relationship and what was the result?

Measure: Business; Interpersonal

Preferred Answer: Description of specific networking activities that the candidate has performed, how they found common ground, how they developed the relationship and how it was mutually beneficial.

These are obviously just some ideas for managers to add to their repetoire. Effective technical sales managers should consider a similar mapping in their preparation for initial screening of qualified candidates.

Hiring: Job Analysis

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Hiring the most qualified technical sellers requires the hiring organization to perform some analysis of the position prior to posting, recruiting, and hiring. Technical sellers use consultative tools and techniques to assist their current and prospective customers in the design and deployment of enterprise-class business solutions based on the suppliers’ offerings. Therefore, this responsibility can usually be broken into the three following objectives:

1) Influence the stakeholders and sponsors at customers in favor of purchasing the supplier’s offered solutions and technology.

2) Own personal relationships at customers in order to advise them on the optimal use of of the supplier’s technology to run their business.

3) Ensure that customers are fully enabled to take responsibility for the successful implementation of the solutions and the realization of value for their business.

With these objectives in mind, the hiring manager can explore what sort of skills, abilities, and experience that they should look for in the most qualified candidates. These attributes might be divided into the four categories below, each with their associated attributes.:

Technical Skills

  • Experience implementing multiple types of enterprise-class technology solutions and products across several solution domains
  • Understanding of customers’ enterprise-class information technology environments and deployment practices
  • Understanding of new developments in the supplier’s own business technology domain (business analytics, CRM, cloud computing, etc.)

Business Skills

  • Understanding of business models, customer practices, and industry trends in specific business and industry segments
  • Understanding of customers’ buying behaviors
  • Ability to tie customers’ investments in technology to specific customer business outcomes (make money, save money, mitigate risk)

Interpersonal Skills

  • Ability to lead and/or influence a sales team in the planning and execution of opportunity pursuits
  • Ability to effectively engage with customer business & technology leadership as well as rank and file information technology professionals
  • Ability to effectively work with product development teams to improve offerings based on customer requirements and real world usage scenarios

Lifestyle

  • Ability to travel by air or auto, often at short notice, up to 50% of a typical work week
  • Ability to put in the required effort outside normal working hours to take responsibility for business results

Although often requiring coordination and teamwork in pursuit of sales opportunities, this position is largely based on the concept of pooled interdependence. This is to say that the qualified candidate must be internally motivated as an individual performer and not reliant on others to contribute substantially to his or her success. Typically, incentive compensation (i.e. commissions) is based on the individual’s specific contributions in driving revenue. These contributions may come in the form of customer technical deliverables, customer implementation readiness assessments & advice, key customer relationships, and opportunity prospecting. A full analysis such as the above will help the hiring manager arrive at the most accurate profile of the ideal candidate.

Helping Customers Introduce New Technologies

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Enterprise customers typically acquire new information technology products and solutions in order to:

  1. Implement and/or expand new and/or existing capabilities for a specific project or business initiative.
  2. Replace or upgrade an existing IT capability or service, either to displace a different supplier or due to an evolution of technology.
  3. To explore the business application that new technological capabilities can bring to the enterprise.

As always, the business case for doing any of the above hinges on the customer’s need to make money, save money, or mitigate risk. Regardless of the customers’ motivation for acquiring new technology, the effective technical sales professional can do a great deal to ensure that the customer is equipped to successfully exploit and implement the new capability for their business. In all of the three cases mentioned above, technical sellers can propose that customers adopt a Center of Excellence approach to foster the usage of the new technology. This is particularly true in the third case, which is somewhat of a “build it and they will come” approach to business technology strategy. An organizational structure and high-level execution plan for creating such an organization is discussed further here: http://soa.sys-con.com/node/2028482

The exploration and addition of new IT capabilities in a domain (for example, business intelligence or big data) that is new to the enterprise is best accomplished via a disiplined approach that covers all aspects associated with the implementation of enterprise-class IT solutions. It also requires the customer’s IT staff and leadership to act as internal consultants for their company, marketing and seeking opportunities with their business leaders for the new capabilities to be exploited. As strategic partners to their customers, the technical sales professional can do a great deal to ensure that the customer is successful in these efforts. Helping customers establish a CoE by sharing best practices, recommending training, assisting in solution support planning, etc. are crucial to the successful adoption of new solutions.