It is now 5:45am at Munich Airport. There are a few stragglers around and the odd backpacker. Soon the business week will start and the “suits” will commence strutting their stuff up and down the duty-free aisles. I have one more connecting flight to Milan and then a hot shower will jolt me back into state compos mentis. I am very excited about the next few days. Apart from the good food and savouring the European way of life, I will be attending a customer forum, where many customers have the podium and will tell the IT world how it really “goes down”.
Working for an IT vendor is great - working in the engine room and as part of a team of professionals bringing valuable innovative solutions to market. But the reality is - value is in the eye of the beholder. A customer cannot be told that what is on offer is valuable; they have to see it for themselves to believe it. All companies can do is open the door for value to be realised. There is no greater satisfaction than hearing a customer tell other customers what a great solution they have implemented. That is worth a million brochures, Webcasts, workshops and any other vehicle used to convince customers the solutions are real and adding value today.
Let's face it, as much as people try and convince themselves that things are getting easier, the reality is that this is a very complex world and it takes a group of heroes to make things work in IT today. Perhaps that is why people are seeing so many acquisitions of late?
Make a plan
There is no greater satisfaction than hearing a customer tell other customers what a great solution they have implemented.
Clive Brindley is solution architect and pre-sales manager within the BTO business unit at HP Software + Solutions SA.
Customers are looking for more tightly integrated, value-adding solutions that do not take years to implement. A lot of this responsibility is now on the vendors - people like me and my thousands of colleagues worldwide. So when a customer is willing to stand up and say they have realised significant value from their investment in the solution that was sold to them six or 12 months back, there is no greater satisfaction in one's professional career. So how do vendors get to this point? How do they orchestrate the perfect mix of technology, skilled people and appropriate process? One word: plan.
1. From the first interaction with the customer, make sure someone is in the room who can de-risk the journey to a potential go-live. No matter how great the solution is, people are the ones who will sit behind the keyboard, install CDs and build the solution. People are the ones who make it real and having strong engagement and professional services is paramount to success.
2. Stay engaged. My goal for each and every customer is to get them talking about success from the onset, so I plan from day one to build a path to making the customer sing our praises. I am not talking about free lunches, drinks and “business planning” trips. Trust me, that only goes so far. When the chips are down, a real solution is going to make sure everybody keeps their jobs. Vendors need to be true partners with the customer and make their business as important as the vendor's own business. The companies win together and take bullets together.
I guess readers might be waiting for the magic sentence that will ultimately reveal the secret source to happy customers, but I feel people sometimes try and overcomplicate what they do as an industry. Companies simply provide solutions for their customers that help them extract value from IT and ultimately align to what the business wants - business outcomes. So yes, it is great to have happy customers, and it is good to have more “challenging” ones, as they all keep everybody honest.
The customer might not always be correct, but they certainly are king. So let's raise a toast and “welcome back the king”.
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