Hindsight Partnership - IT Vendor Support and Sales Training

IT Vendor Support - Know your clients buying signals

Our extensive relationships across the industry, and our experience as both vendors and clients positions us strongly to support the vendor community. I particular, we emphasise the need for vendors to understand the client’s buying process, his ‘value adds’ and buying signals. In fact the demand for our Vendor Support service has been so strong that we run a tailored sales training course for vendors. This popular course has been given across the range from small businesses to major corporate audiences...

We advise IT Vendors and provide IT Vendor Support in a number of ways...

• Market offerings: Based on our wide and current knowledge of the market, of your clients (and of your competitors) we initially critique your product offering, marketing / sales approach and the commercial offering, and advise according to our viewpoint as experienced buyers.
• Bid Support: We will work with you to critique specific bids, and (within ethical bounds) use our industry and client knowledge to optimise your bid offering and presentation.
• Outsourcing Proposals: We work with a number of the major outsource service companies using our significant operational insight into the typical cost structures of their target clients to optimise the outsourcing proposals for both parties.
• Legal Evaluation: We work with major Law firms to assist them in drawing up informed and ‘operationally sound’ contracts for their clients. This service has now been extended to help Law firms unravel badly drawn up contracts which are being amended or in some instances terminated.
• Vendor Sales Training: As experienced buyers of significant amounts of IT products and services we have formed opinions on how well or badly IT vendors performed in the sales process. We have produced a popular “tailored” training course on the process by which we as, senior executives, reached our buying decisions. Many sales managers do not know how the Buyer’s process works and consequently they misalign their sales resource with the Buyers needs. The course which is given in either a “workshop” mode or conference presentation mode covers the following;
  i. the role of the CFO in the overall business planning process which sets the framework for the whole company including the CIO.
  ii. the role of the CIO in setting the IT planning.
  iii. the timing of this planning process and the need for the vendor to “attach” themselves to it at an appropriate time.
  iv. the Buyers Governance Group and its overt and covert role.
  v. the decision makers and the “shadow” organisations.
  vi. the Buyers “smoke” signals.
  vii. the Buyers RIO criteria and how it has to be “analysed” by the Vendor for its component parts to make the commercial bid attractive.
  viii. the Buyers strategic and / or tactical buying phase
  ix. connecting the existing sales process and how it relates to the Buyers process, key milestones and checklist.
  We have given this course to very large and some very small companies. It is tailored to IT buying but not to one particular sector or product. Our belief is that good Buyers do not arrive at buying decisions by accident. Good Buyers buy – they are not sold to.

Move on to Change Management - Program Leadership, Executive Support and Change Management