Are Your Solutions Sales Part of the “In-Crowd”?
In a recent article in ImageSource titled Top 10 Industry Trends, authored by John Mancini, the President of AIIM, outlines what he believes to be the top 10 drivers within the DMS space… Being in the business of documents, I found the article compelling. Tonight we discuss the number 3 influencer in the DMS space this year:
3. Document and content management supplier consolidation driven by the movement of ECM to the infrastructure stack. Enough said.
Wow, short and sweet. This is fairly cut and dry… While this references consolidation of vendors, however, I wanted to focus on the movement of DMS into the “infrastructure stack”.
Corporate IT departments build budgets around their expected costs for the year related to various business metrics, namely expected maintenance costs, on-going projects, etc. Infrastructure is a term used to refer to those pieces and parts of the IT landscape it will take to keep the day-to-day business operational.
Infrastructure can encompass various line items depending upon how a company wants to classify it, but for our purposes we will consider infrastructure to be an expected and budgetted cost each year. By moving the DMS solution to the “infrastructure stack” it now gets ranked right up there with the Exchange server or Line of Business (LOB) system. That’s pretty important, let me tell you.
As a cost related to infrastructure you increase your importance to day-to-day operations and decrease the likelihood of being killed like a special project might during cost-cutting initiatives. Additionally, you might even consider that infrastructure issues are now assigned a place and priority within the corporate helpdesk ladder, so there is a technical person watching to ensure the solution stays operational (I could write a whole book on failed projects due to lack of ownership by IT).
With DMS moving to the infrastructure, it is getting more scrutiny with IT and business professionals; they are becoming more sophisticated. Your solutions can’t be second rate and must play with the rest of the infrastructure! Most CIO’s and Directors won’t even review a solution that isn’t blessed by their LOB vendor’s approved list, that is a HUGE strike against you already… unless you have strategies to work around this, like image-enablement without custom code (for instance).
Be prepared for a tougher sales process. The realignment is helping to drive some sales, but competition is stiff since every dealer out there wants a piece of the action… so if you aren’t careful and practice those solutional sales techniques you could become just another dog in the dogpile.
From personal experience, I can tell you that we are still seeing resistance to this realignment, but thankfully the education process is occurring and more executives see DMS as a need rather than a want.
The key is to understand DMS is becoming more important, your customers are becoming more sophisticated, and (now more than ever) you need to show how your solution brings value to their business problem.
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ChangeForge... a catalyst to affect the paradigm by Ken Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.changeforge.com. -
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