How much did you pay for the drywall in your house? How about the bricks? The doors? What about the windows, how much did those set you back?
Some people might have answers to these questions. I do not.
At the end of the day, I want to buy a house that is in a desirable neighborhood and within my budget. And I see IT and our customers in the same light.
The amount of energy the Channel spends on advertising who has the best drywall price is laughable. If you’re selling to the internal IT department who view themselves as “general contractors,” then maybe those customers do care about the specific line item cost associated with bandwidth, memory, storage, and software licensing. As time goes on, I bet those types of customers are waning.
Supplying transactions and facilitating those transactions is a race to effectively scale and also a race to zero. I believe it’s only a matter of time until IaaS providers will be offering compute services for free.
Stop competing on line items. No one is going to remember your name, because you got them the lowest cost drywall. You need to get to an outcome, solve a problem, and you might get a call back!
People ask me all the time, “What is Quest’s core competency?” or “Adam, what is your niche in the technology market?”
My answer…Quest builds houses!
- We don’t sell virtual desktops, we empower a mobile salesforce. Read: JMAC Lending’s story
- We don’t “position” next generation security appliances, we review security policies from the social to the SAN level of IT and assist in the implementation of standards and practices to safeguard the enterprise. Learn about: Quest’s Security Assessment
- We don’t broker data center real estate deals, we customize a Disaster Recovery solution under an SLA that encompasses the initial build all the way through implementation to annual testing. Check out: Quest’s DR for the Day Review
Move from selling product to business outcome
Focus on the business objective your client is trying to achieve and be prepared to go beyond the traditional IT buyer to the LOB managers who are buying cloud services outside of their IT department’s purview.
Finding Partners who can assist in delivering business outcomes that are coupled with IT services will give you sustainable differentiation and set you apart from the crowd.
