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First, Do No Harm: Decision Making in CIO Bootcamp
I’ve always thought that physicians had it right all along. The first rule of being a doctor? “Do no harm.” That is to say, when facing a medical situation with a patient, the first order of business is to not make the situation any worse. Unfortunately, many Chief Information Officers work in a different direction, almost as if their first [...]
How to Stop Chasing Business: The Advantages of IT Services Specialization
Greg owned a IT Services Provider in Virginia. He’d founded the company out of college with one client and steadily grown his business to employ a staff of nine. One thing Greg liked to do at the end of each year was sit down with his technical director and sales manager to review the previous year’s work. They looked at [...]
Products and Services, Part Three: Making the Change to Enterprise Solution Selling
So, now you know the difference between products and solutions, and you know the advantages of a more comprehensive service and hardware sales solution. But knowing what solutions are and understanding that you should be offering them to clients isn’t enough. Actually putting into practice the process of scoping custom solutions that delight your customers is another task entirely. And [...]
Products and Services, Part Two: The Real Advantages of Selling Solutions
When we left off in Part One of this series, we explored the declining ability of businesses to sell hardware and examined how the technology sector had changed in recent years to incorporate more services into its offerings. While hardware sales in the technology sector still offers an opportunity to establish brand recognition and generate outsized top line revenue, the [...]
Products and Services, Part One: Why Selling Products is a Poor Alternative to Solution Sales
When Dell went private this year, many analysts opined that the company was interested in moving from products to services as its core business model, and being private would make this transition easier. Over the years, Dell had entered into a sales competition with companies like HP and Lenovo, in which units shipped and gross revenue were the most important [...]
Look Who’s Talking: Creating Open and Honest Technical Team Communication in Your Enterprise
Before there was Facebook, there was MySpace. And before there was MySpace, there was Friendster. The story of Friendster’s demise has been rehashed in technology and business circles so many times that its hard to know what actually happened outside of a few key issues. One point that everyone seems to agree on is that management kept the pedal to [...]