Mar 17 2008

Are Your Solutions Sales Part of the “In-Crowd”?

Published by Ken Stewart at 11:04 pm under Business, Change, Technology

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.

  • Are You Selling Problems or Solutions?
  • Is Your Solutions Business Driving Revenue or Driving You Crazy?
  • Software: Do You Own or Rent?

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    Viewing 4 Comments

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      Hi Ken - well, it's about time ECM/DMS/etc. gets a bit more attention, eh? The fastest growing source of "digital stuff" is the unstructured world of documents, content, information and knowledge, and yet the ratio of database and operations people to the unstructured world is entirely flipped around...

      Great to see a conversation about solution selling, and honing in on the combined needs of both business and IT. Of course, are those teams aligned? Perhaps, perhaps not - so always wise to uncover how the parties involved in this decision interact, and how to affect useful change by being a bridge builder between those parties, and into a solution that will fit their needs.

      Hard work to be sure, but well worth it, all around.

      Cheers,
      Dan
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      Dan, those are great observations to be sure! With printed documents rising at an estimated 11% and reaching a staggering 3,500+ billion (with a 'B' folks) pages in 2006 alone (according to Gartner), you bet unstructured data is everywhere... However, I will be interested to see the evolution of 'tagging' and 'Google-type' search tools become more prevalent as well... (but that's another post).

      Solution selling is key, and even in our very own sales force, the paradigm hasn't completely shifted away from selling 'the box', as it were. We can debate all day long with this, but there is a very viable business model still in play and a lot of palms are being greased so far. Does everyone agree the margins are shrinking - sure, but the transition is a slow, a lot of work, and painful to be sure.

      On the subject of bridge-building, I just ran across an interesting statistic in a fairly recent article of Information Week (I think) that showed more re-alignments of CIO positions under either a CFO or COO - away from the CEO!

      An interesting case might be made that many IT leaders still don't know how to build bridges and bring value to the business operation.
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      Ooph, CIOs reporting to the COO is bad enough, but MAYBE good. To the CFO? Been there, really mixed bag...

      Having sales and marketing skills are awfully handy for any technical role. Completely changed my role, when I took that to hear. Out of the weeds, and into executing on the business vision.

      Bridges don't build themselves - at least not until we get nanotechnology working! :)

      Cheers,
      Dan
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      All I have to say is, Amen! I stepped out of the server closet and into the boardroom as I like to say.
     

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