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

Be Candid about Your Ability to Deliver Global Deals

About five years ago, many large companies began moving aggressively toward global contracting with key IT suppliers. The general belief was that it would be easier to deal with a smaller number of large vendors than with dozens or even hundreds of smaller vendors.

As a best practice, vendor consolidation seemed to make sense for a variety of reasons: It would save money, streamline the process of managing contracts, and make it easier to standardize technology platforms.

However, there were unexpected side effects. In many instances, vendors couldn’t deliver the truly global deals that their clients expected. Instead of actually reducing complexity, some companies discovered that they had merely shifted the responsibility for dealing with complexity to the vendors.

Almost every CIO whom we interviewed complained to us about the difficulties and hassles of global deals. In some cases, according to the CIOs, IT account teams offered global deals without making absolutely certain that their organizations had the resources in place to fulfill a global contract.

Bob Turner, a partner at Software Licensing Consultants, Inc., specializes in contract negotiation and licensing issues. He urges IT vendors to be upfront and completely honest about their capabilities for delivering global deals.

“Make sure your account team isn’t promising a global deal if they can’t deliver it,” says Turner. “These deals are difficult. There will be areas ...