December 11, 2006. In the fine art of selling technology, having a well-aligned technology sales process is the next most important thing to customers themselves. Process, when mentioned to the average Nigerian technology firm CEO sounds like something the client should be sold but never to be used in-house. You know that feeling about eating your own dog food.

For the average technology sales person in the market, process sounds mostly like a word out of science fiction, good to hear (or read) and enjoy but not to be believed, talk less of being implemented.

The truth is that there is no organisation without processes, for the many areas of its operations. From simple stationery request processes, to complex sub-contractor selection processes, we all use a system of set-rules and logical activities to move from one end of doing work to another. The same applies to selling and without a sales process a company in the ICT business will succeed by only by chance and not likely by design.

Nowhere is this better captured in my opinion than in the statement by the Brooks Group, a respected authority in sales training, that "Salespeople Who Follow A Linked, Sequential Selling Process Stand A 92% Chance of Getting The Sale...Without One Their Chances Drop To Under 43%."

Against this background, I dare to say that the good thing is that all ICT firms, whether system integrators, application vendors, networking infrastructure and services providers…..all have processes, especially in sales. The bad part is that many of them are not aware of what these processes are, and as I have found in the many that had the courage to discuss this, what is most lacking in our technology companies at the moment is the discipline to use a well structured and formal way to determine and design the best sales processes to support their technology businesses.

"Salespeople Who Follow A Linked, Sequential Selling Process Stand A 92% Chance of Getting The Sale...
Without One Their Chances Drop To Under 43%".
-The Brooks Group

I would want to point out at this stage that though there is no one-size-fits-all process available across the broad spectrum of technology selling. As such, the process for a software company may not necessarily be the same for a hardware solutions company or a communications infrastructure services provider. Software solutions (including business applications) by their very nature involves a different sales cycle and involves multiple variables (including the audience you sell to in a single customer account or business opportunity) to warrant that an company playing in this area carefully designs the sales processes to support how its software could be sold successfully.

Typically, all sales (including technology sales) go through the basic 4-step sales process of :

• Finding Business
• Generating Interest (rapport)
• Negotiating
• Closing the sale
  

With due respect to the many research and other works of many persons and organizations overtime, this simple 4-step process can and have been stretched up to a 10 to 12-step process in many cases, depending of course on what is being sold and to whom. If you look at the many versions of the basic sales process above, the things that change mainly include the naming of each stage (people generally exercise their English language freedoms), the breaking-down of some stages into sub-stages, like negotiations being broken down into objections handling as a preliminary stage, and the adaptation to suite every industry space, like Prospecting and Cold calling (and now Telesales) being used as a major tool in finding new business in products and services industries.

The challenge is in consciously and deliberately designing the technology sales process to follow how your target or existing customers buy technology, and practicing with your team and fine-tuning the process until it is near perfect. In this exercise, constantly communicating the process to the team and monitoring adherence to it becomes very essential for success.

Technology selling happens best when the sales organization within a technology solutions company follows well structured processes to approach the market and pursue opportunities. Where processes are in place, technology sales people are conscious of the different sales stages and the efforts or matching activities they need to engage-in with the customer in order to move an opportunity towards closure. If I am selling business application software for instance and I understand the sales process unique to that particular software solution and the customers that buy it, I may not, for instance, try to close a $1m deal at the first meeting with the potential customer, no matter how urgent the customer sounds. I would like to proceed with proper needs qualification, needs analysis, competitive environment study, and the pre-arrangement of the sales resources required to pursue the opportunity from start to finish, amongst other things. All these may not possibly be done well for a $1m deal just on the first meeting. Sometimes, not identifying and selling to the needs of all the audiences involved in the project may well spell doom for the technology sales people.

I had this experience with the sales reps and the CEO of a company selling application software who in one major bid felt very confident that their application was tops on the selection list and they would likely get the contract for a system that would fetch them about $2m in that single sale and a recurrent revenue of at 20% of that amount annually. Company-A, as I would like to call this company, had indeed spent so much energy talking with the IT team, and meeting even with some users and some members of senior management. Early in the game, they had done demos and proofs-of-concept and made numerous presentations to the various audiences they interacted with in the account.

Their competition (Company-B) focused on discovering early what the formal decision criteria would be to select the successful bidder. When the customer said there was none, Company-B advised them that for a $2m investment they should have one in order to minimize risks and get the best deal- a message that reverberated well at senior levels within the customer organization. To summarize, the organization selected an external consultant to manage the selection process. Company-A had spent a lot of money flying-in consultants from all over the world to make the sale and doing all those pre-sales activities that we are all too eager to do as technology sales people. Company-B focused on helping the customer create formal decision criteria which of course included the determination of standards and best practices to adhere to. When the consultant started work, Company-A made repeated reference to the fact that they had gone through a selection ‘process’ a fact which the consultant ignored and set about instituting his process, which of course meant that Company-A had to do the selling all over again within a space of 18 months, at an expense that made winning the deal very unattractive.

The lesson here is that if they had designed and internalized a suitable process for selling their solution, this should flag the lack of a formal (and the very important informal) decision criteria. Not to spoil your day, this lack of suitable sales process cost them the deal. The process they followed was misaligned from the onset with the customer’s likely buying behavior. Enterprise customers have specific buying behaviors and it is in the interest of every ICT company hoping to sell in the Business-to-Business space to know this very well. .

Because many meaningful sales opportunities in the tech space involve more that just bits and pieces, and usually involves significant outlay on the part of the customers, the customers take their time and follow very distinct buying patterns and selection processes to determine which ICT firms are worthy of their business. It surprises me therefore that customer would go to great extents to craft RFP (requests for proposals) even hire consultants to manage the vendor selection process, while the vendors themselves have no formal processes to engage with these same customers and win their business.

Not having a technology selling process is one of the major reasons why Nigerian ICT firms fail to succeed, especially in the large ticket sales that are common these days in the technology space. Having one and not using it is next to that in hurtfulness. To understand the importance of having a well-honed selling process to suit the needs of your business and target industry, ask yourself (and your team) the question, “What happens when someone calls and wants to buy what we sell?” Pose this question to your sales team, ask your customer service and your technical team, then collate your answer and analyze it from one that starts with proper qualification to a logical end state where you have the business, no matter the size. Did all the people have the same answers? Did all the sales people have the same or even similar answers? Is it clear that they know what to do when a prospect comes and ask for some technology that your firm offers?

• Oliver is a senior technology solutions sales professional with extensive hands-on experience selling technology solutions having worked in prominent tech companies including Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard. He can be reached via email on oliver.nnona@mac.com