techslog

Here’s a tip that can enormously increase your sales effectiveness. Before calling on any strategic customer, take a good long look at the employment opportunities that the customer has posted on their Website. Pay particular attention to any listings that are in the IT area. Read between the lines and you can discover all sorts of information about the internal workings (and pain points) of the IT group.

For example, a company about to make a strategic shift from Windows to Linux (or vice versa) will need additional in-house expertise. If you’re tracking the “help wanted” on their Website, you can actually watch Linux experience become more important as a hiring criteria. If over time you see “Linux experience a plus” turn into “Linux experience required” in the description for key IT jobs, you’d better have a solid Linux story the next time you walk through that customer’s doors.

Similarly, the “help wanted” ads on a customer’s Website can tell you which applications are a corporate priority, giving you the opportunity to pitch services (especially outsourcing) that make it unnecessary for the company to go through the bother of hiring new people.

For example, suppose a company is advertising for programmers with CRM customization experience. If your firm does CRM outsourcing or offers CRM as an online service, that’s a signal that the customer might be willing to let you come in and either customize their existing system or replace their current system with your own.

Needless to say, the specifics of the “help wanted” ads will be greatly different for each corporation. The trick is discovering what’s unique about that customer, so that you can pitch your software and services to match those unique needs.

The best way to discover uniqueness is to know what’s common across a wide range of companies. Gartner, the world’s largest high tech research firm, recently surveyed 188 U.S.-based organizations. The survey indicated that CIOs are shifting their priorities from managing costs to supporting business growth, and this transition is resulting in an expected increase in IT head count.

Approximately two-thirds of survey respondents have projected some level of increase in IT staff by March 2007. At the same time, the survey also reported a 1 percent increase in employee-initiated turnover rate across the board compared with last year’s survey results.

For the past five years, companies have been under severe pressure to halt or decrease their investment in recruitment, retention, and development of the IT workforce. However, changing business expectations are shifting the CIO’s strategic priorities from managing costs to supporting business growth and competitiveness.

Therefore, almost all companies are going to be looking to fill certain positions. According to Gartner, “project manager” maintained the number one spot of the most frequently reported difficult-to-hire position, followed by database administrator, enterprise architect, network architect, and Internet/Web architect. Security analyst dropped from third place last year to seventh place this year. ERP software (PeopleSoft, Oracle, and SAP), Internet/Web-related development skills (for example, Java, J2EE and Microsoft.NET), as well as IT compliance skills are among the most sought after.

If you have software products and services that fall into these categories, you’re sitting pretty. If not, as you look at your customer’s “help wanted” ads, use the above list to better understand what’s unique about that customer’s IT operation and pitch accordingly.
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"Among all things that you expect in life, pay the greatest attention to what you expect of yourself. - Gerhard Gschwandtner

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