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

How Suppliers Benefit from IT Transparency

For Blake, transparency is a two-way street with clear benefits for IT organizations and their suppliers. For IT organizations, transparency translates into a greater awareness of which apps or services are providing real value and which aren’t. That awareness, ideally, results in better management of resources.

On the sell side, transparency makes it easier for suppliers to prove the business value of the products or services they sell. Transparency also creates opportunities for an agile supplier by revealing gaps in a customer’s IT portfolio that, presumably, the supplier can fill.

Smart IT suppliers will put transparency to work for them by pitching services and products that they know will generate measurable and unambiguous business value. Transparency enables IT suppliers to position themselves as strategic partners of the CIO.

When asked to describe a pitch from a supplier who knows how to leverage transparency, Blake offered a hypothetical scenario:

A supplier we trust comes in and tells us that we’re wasting lots of money on a legacy app with a clunky interface that’s sucking up all kinds of processing time. He tells us that his company can save us x-number of dollars over the next x-number of years if we port over to another language and hire freelance talent to write the code.

“It’s that simple,” says Blake. “You don’t need a huge consulting firm to accomplish this. You just need a couple of smart people and some programmers.” ...