Partnering With the CIO: The Future of IT Sales Seen Through the Eyes of Key Decision Makers

Introduction: From Selling to Partnering

 

The seed kernel of this book is a brief anecdote told to us by Paul Zazzera, a former senior vice president and chief information officer at Time, Inc.

A tall, solidly built man with silver hair and a thick mustache, he is passionate about the need for IT to be perceived—and to behave—as a business.

Zazzera was traveling on a nonstop transcontinental flight when an IT sales rep sat down next to him and spent the next several hours bending his ear with a nonstop sales pitch.

How the rep had tracked down Zazzera’s flight and had wangled himself into a neighboring seat remains a mystery. But the story got us wondering if other CIOs had similar experiences with IT reps whose zeal to pitch led them to such extremes.

It turned out that plenty of CIOs had even worse stories to share with us. So we decided to write a book. We planned to call our book Buzz Off. Essentially it would be a compilation of horror stories told by CIOs, a best of the worst collection for the amusement of IT insiders.

But when we told our CIO friends about the book, they immediately became very serious. Sternly and solemnly they said, “You know, this disconnect between the buyers and sellers of IT is a significant problem. You shouldn’t joke about it.”

Even the most jovial CIOs used terms such as “fundamentally broken” and “profoundly illogical” to describe the current state of relations between IT sales reps and their prospects.

So we shifted our focus. Buzz Off morphed ...