Marching Orders 2016: Sell to Your New Buyer
Editor's Note: Throughout the month of January, we'll be running installments of Marching Orders, our annual collection of advice and predictions from channel luminaries about what to do and what to expect in the year ahead. For this entry, we asked Josh Waldo, vice president of partner strategy and programs at Nintex, to discuss the implications of a Nintex study released last month about trends among IT buyers.
A lot has changed from the time when the modern day IT services channel emerged to what it looks like today. Outsourcing, reselling and project-based services were the key value propositions for decades and the buyers were invariably IT decision makers. IT and the business units became very interdependent and, at the same time, highly contentious with each other.
Throughout all of this, an incredibly large and thriving IT channel has grown and profited with a primary relationship targeted squarely at IT.
Technology has since evolved, primarily fueled by a mobile-first, cloud-first reality. The IT consulting landscape is also evolving because with the innovation in technology comes an exciting and disruptive innovation in business models where consumption, recurring revenue and valuation can be captured in ways never before possible, but where traditional project-based and outsourcing models are challenged.
This disruption in both availability of enterprise-class technology and the new consumption-based OPEX models for procurement have provided an avenue for the line-of-business (LOB) decision makers from departments such as HR, finance, marketing and sales to procure capabilities without as heavy a reliance on IT. We now live in a world where the buyer is looking for capabilities to solve business challenges versus a buyer who is looking for technology to serve a set of constituents within his/her organization.
At Nintex, we are seeing LOB present in core decision making about 40 percent of the time, and that is only going to increase. Our most successful partners have established a value proposition to solve business challenges and find new ways to bridge IT and LOB in their evolving role as advisers and partners to their end customers.
My advice: If you don't yet have a strategy to sell to LOB, you need one now!
More Marching Orders 2016:
Posted on January 22, 2016