Selling in a Slow Economy

Shahzad Khokhar, Founder of Digident-Solutions, takes a look!

The one line that never fails to get you attention from your customers, “We can help you reduce your information technology spend significantly!”, “Okay, I am interested, what’s your story?”

Sales coaches always emphasize the importance of finding the “right” buyer. Just because you are ready to sell, does not mean that customers are ready to buy. In the early days of offshoring, the shear factor of cost (and a large talent base) drove businesses to relocate development centers and outsource engineering work to South East Asia. Such, was the excitement over lower cost that process and quality were ignored to a large extent, and offshore technology grew at unprecedented rates.
Now, in all fairness to the manufacturing industry, the idea of creating and exporting a well-documented, tested, and repeatable process to a part of the world where it could be executed at a fraction of the cost was not new. Clothing, for example, had been doing this in South America and China for a long time.
As we look back today, we can see that it took several years for the Information Technology industry to iron out its unique challenges, and embrace this distributed development model that could repeatedly produce good quality software.
When you meet prospects today, you learn that most of them have experienced working with an offshore vendor in some way and seen varying degrees of success. Some of the common complaints I hear include limited collaboration time due to the time zone differences, lack of expert level knowledge on specialized products, high iteration costs, insufficient business continuity plans, and security. Okay, so that’s the bad news right? The good news is that if you can address these challenges and showcase your successes around them, you can do very well.
If this has not become obvious as yet, let me state for the record that just “doing the same thing cheap” may get you in the door, but it will not help you close business if you cannot address the challenges I mention above.
Now, the second game changing idea to hit the Information Technology market in a big way was Open Source. Linux, and then its commercialization in major part my Redhat, opened a whole new way for enterprises to implement technology. Again, selecting, implementing, and selling Open Source requires you to change the way you think technology is deployed. One of the key successes of Open Source solutions has been the ability to try the software without paying any license cost, for as long as you like. IT managers like having the ability to test the software in their unique environment and buy only when they are satisfied based on their success criteria.

The Words of Wisdom
Selling in a down economy requires you to bring all of these ideas together in a way that is both creative and speaks to the unique challenges of your customers. Of course, cost will be on every prospect’s mind, let them know that you can do “the same thing cheap”, but do not forget to emphasize that you can deliver it while (at least) maintaining quality (if not improving it). Research and build parallel capabilities in Open Source-based solutions that are mature (have a company behind them, have enterprise grade customers etc.).
All intelligent enterprises realize the importance of maintaining their information systems during rough economic times and will continue to fund projects that help them stay ahead of their competition. They know that they cannot be very far away from the cutting edge when the economy turns around. Yes, they may keep low, but they will come out ready and swinging when the time is right. You can help them get up there and stay there.
To the companies, I’d say that this is the time to regroup and rethink strategy. Take a step back from your day to day operations, identify areas of improvement, and start making incremental improvements. Review your licenses, explore alternate technologies, expand upon your service offerings etc.
To the vendors, I’d say don’t be afraid to make investments into qualified prospects. Offer POC’s (proof of concept) at little or no cost where appropriate. Get creative with technology products you have expertise in and think about building and selling packaged service offerings around them.
At the end of the day, remember that your customer will not want a cheap solution that does not work.
Regardless of what side of the business you are on, remember that this is a passing phase and that the market will rebound. It always does. You must ensure that you sustain yourself through this rough period by staying creative and be ready to leap when it comes around.