Strategic IT Sales: Creating A Vision And Getting Buy-In

By Dennis O’Connell, Business Development Manager, HTG Peer Groups

Strategic sales is the process of taking your top few accounts and looking at them differently than you do your other clients. With these accounts, you want to jointly create a vision and a roadmap for the next three to five years. This includes not only what you can provide for them but also some of their other partners including their telecom and physical plant providers. Broaden your vision.

When I worked for a previous employer, one of our larger customers was a local government entity.  For years, we had provided quotes to them to upgrade different pieces of their infrastructure.  They were always grumbling that we were nickel and diming them to death.  They were not IT savvy and couldn’t see where we were going.

After one of our meetings, we decided to listen to what the customer was telling us (a very good thing to do every now and then). We sat around the table and decided to create a three-year vision for them that we could present. The vision included all the upgrades we could foresee, the consolidation of their two data centers along with the needed upgrades to their physical plant even though the physical plant was outside of our scope.

Once we had the vision outlined internally, we began the process of identifying all the needed computer upgrades, understanding their costs and slotting them into the appropriate time frame.  We reached out to our physical plant partner to talk about how the computer upgrades were driving a need to upgrade the UPS and helped them design their offering based on our needs.

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