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

Remove Complexity from Your Organization

In the late 1990s, when IT suppliers made the leap from selling tools to providing solutions, their organizations became radically more complex. IT suppliers raced for competitive advantages by building larger solution stacks with more features and greater functionality, making it nearly impossible for a single pre-sales resource to cover an entire solution suite.

Recognizing this dilemma, IT suppliers added specialists to cover niche areas such as data warehousing, analytics, and security.

As the shift in emphasis from products to domain expertise continued, IT suppliers reorganized internally to serve the specific needs of vertical markets such as financial services, media, entertainment, telecom, manufacturing, energy, life sciences, healthcare, transportation, consumer package goods, retail, and automotive.

Out of this specialization emerged new positions such as Supply Chain Strategist, Manufacturing, Risk Specialist, Financial Services, and CRM Program Manager, Telecommunications. Some of the titles we’ve all seen recently on business cards really make us wonder how far the trend toward specialization will go. See Figure 5.3.

Figure 5.3. Confusing Business Card

From the perspective of the IT suppliers, creating larger, deeper, and broader organizations to serve the different needs of different customer groups makes perfect sense. ...