One of my contacts in the health sector told me a couple of years ago that when COVID first hit NZ shores, they were overwhelmed with enquiries from companies they had never previously heard of with offers to solve a myriad of problems.
As Maslow said, "If all you have is a hammer you tend to see everything as a nail."
Salespeople are highly motivated to follow the money. They learn at a very early stage that there is little point in talking to a customer who has no budget, regardless of how much they might need your product. This is known as qualifying the prospect (there are other qualifiers, of course, but money is the big one).
CIOs are always on the lookout for products and services to meet a specific set of business requirements, often organised through some form of enterprise architecture, which is jargon for a broad plan of how all the technology components are expected to fit together.
Technology companies - like most companies - tend to specialise. They may sell one or two components and they will probably do it very well and have a deeply-held belief in their own product. They often have less interest in how their component fits with everything else, which is usually the main concern of the CIO who will be faced with the technology debt long after the sales guy has moved on. It is often the case that an experienced CIO knows more about a particular product than recently-recruited members of that product’s sales team.
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This illustrates the key value of the CIO in any organisation. A good CIO is above all else a discerning buyer. They are to technology what a sommelier is to wine, and they have all of the intellect, insouciance and (occasionally) arrogance that goes with that territory. A colleague of mine made a comment recently about a CIO from a publicly-listed company that we had both had dealings with to the effect of “he may be an arrogant so-and-so, but he’s the smartest guy I’ve ever met”. We agreed that arrogance is more easily forgiven when you have something to be arrogant about.
Business leaders need the expertise of someone who can objectively advise them how to navigate the ever-increasing complexity of the digital world. This applies equally to the generic CIO role as well as the many emerging sub-specialist roles for the technology layer (CTO), digital/data (CDO) or digital revenue (CRO).
This is and has always been an awesome responsibility that is frequently under-appreciated. Pre-COVID, many people in IT functions had a reputation for being difficult to deal with, but when the balloon went up, many companies discovered that these same people were willing and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. These IT people could realise the need to get dozens of staff set up for home working within 48 hours or figure out new ways to keep revenue flowing through digital channels.
Like a hire-wire acrobat, you can’t do this work without a high level of confidence in your ability to get it right – which can seem arrogant to those that don’t appreciate the nature of the challenge.
When I was a CIO in a public-sector organisation, I would get multiple sales calls every day. I estimate that dealing with salespeople in my roles as a potential buyer was about 70% of the interactions I would have with people from outside my organisation. It could easily have been more than that if I hadn't put some processes in place to manage the volume.
Since we were effectively public servants, I would give anyone who made the effort to contact me a first meeting. I would explain what my organisation’s needs were and suggest to them that they could come back for a second meeting when they had decided how best they could meet those needs.
The range of responses was fascinating. The vast majority - I would estimate 80% - I never heard from again. I don't know for sure why, but I suspect it was because they understood that this was not going to be an easy sale.
The most odious of salespeople are those that believe in hierarchy, who think that if they don’t get the answer they want from the person in the seat tasked with dealing with them, the smart thing to do is to go over their head. A major international vendor tried that once with my old boss at Fisher & Paykel back in the day. Not only did it not work, but the attempt also ensured that brand would not be considered by the company ever again – and as far as I know it still has not.
And that is the answer to the question posed in the title. CIOs work pretty hard for their businesses. They have limited time and budgets and they have an almost unlimited set of demands constantly battering away for access to those resources.
They are highly skilled at prioritising and the last thing they need is a supplier who can’t be bothered to do the mahi and prefers to play games. They – we – need trusted suppliers of integrity who can be depended on in the long haul to provide what we need at a fair price.
To quote from To Kill a Mockingbird:
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
To do their job well, CIOs must also be adept at understanding things from the other point of view, whether they are external customers, or internal end-users. They expect nothing less from those that they work with, especially those that want their business.
Why do CIOs hate salespeople?
They don’t really; buyers need good salespeople as much as the salespeople need people to buy their products. The good old-fashioned sales values of patience, persistence and product knowledge are highly respected and valued by buyers - when they are undertaken with integrity.
The best salespeople have incredibly high levels of that integrity and are no longer thought of as “just” salespeople, but as genuine trusted partners.
An effective CIO will be the second half of a vendor partnership, taking away the hassle of dealing with the salespeople from you. If you don’t have someone like that already, we can be there on your behalf and work with both sides to create win-win situations.
Ray Delany is Founder of CIO Studio, a tech strategy advisory with hundreds of combined years driving strategy and dealing with tech vendors. Drop Ray or any member of the team a note to talk through your digital challenges.
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