Over the final a number of years, I’ve requested CIOs a number of occasions about how they want their efficiency to be measured. One reply has come again repeatedly: They need to be measured the identical means as their Chief Executive Officer is measured. Hopefully, this isn’t information to anybody studying this piece.
This ought to actually matter to expertise sellers. As I point out in my evaluate of “The Qualified Sales Leader,” John McMahon says, “account executives need to slow down to go fast. They need to understand the magnitude of their customers’ pain and environment.”
Today’s expertise sellers present how they remedy their buyer’s actual pains. And sorry, this isn’t about your product or its options. It’s about enterprise issues that create a way of urgency to purchase.
One Simple Question
A couple of weeks in the past, I used to be with a savvy expertise vendor. I requested them concerning the buyer’s drawback. They got here again with a sequence of drawback statements that the client had with their present technical method. All of the statements proved legitimate in a gathering with the client, however they have been technical drawback statements.
The drawback for expertise sellers is that CIOs, who is usually their purchaser, have morphed over the previous couple of years. The focus of CIOs, as they moved from reporting to the CFO to the CEO, is now not about back-office enterprise productiveness and effectivity. CIOs as we speak are targeted upon entrance workplace effectiveness and enterprise mannequin transformation. This by necessity adjustments how they get measured.
As necessary, CIOs have been clear with me that they don’t take out inefficient processes just because they price their agency an excessive amount of cash. There should be a enterprise end result for making any change. Savvy sellers understand this and make it possible for what they suggest attaches to the metrics CIOs measure their efficiency in opposition to.
What Metrics Do CIOs and IT Govern Themselves By?
So how do CIOs measure themselves? To a sure diploma, the reply varies by trade.
When I used to be speaking with the client of the above-mentioned expertise vendor, their sense of urgency needed to do with the transfer to value-based care and the way high quality of care decided reimbursement charges. This meant for this group everybody wanted to align key healthcare efficiency metrics.
Let’s now take a look at the reply by trade.
Financial Services
Financial Services Institutions (FSIs) deal with many points that matter tremendously, from driving innovation, gaining market perception, and bettering compliance. From my interactions with FSIs, the flexibility to construct buyer intimacy is vital to maintaining prospects and constructing new buyer relationships.
CIO Dennis Klemenz says for these causes, “projects get prioritized by customer impact first. Employee impact today is second. Experienced PMs set milestone dates and track timeline, budget, and quality. Most ROIs I’ve dealt with are just as arbitrary as deadlines are. If you meet a client’s needs, money flows.”
CIO Pedro Martinez Puig agrees and says, “for your CEO, IT should be measured by customer NPS; for your CFO, IT spend vs plan and CAPEX ROI; for the COO: Service Availability; for your CMO: customer acquisition cost; for your CSO: Carbon footprint; for all, Revenue Growth Rate.”
Former Banking CIO Wayne Sadin says, “focus on results as seen by the business. How much has IT done to raise the top line and decrease SBU + SG&A operating expenses.” Without query, enterprise affect is what issues most.
Healthcare
As I implied earlier, healthcare goes by way of large change in each space from bettering affected person care to how companies are delivered and paid for.
For this cause, it got here as no shock that CIO David Chou stated that…
