Conscious Development

A while ago I attended an evening organized by Tietotoviikko. They had a few presentations and an ending panel discussion having members from both client and supplier side and also a researcher.
The topics of discussion were IT-suppliers ability to keep their promises, customers’ expectations towards their suppliers and what makes real partnership.
Customers expect commitment and understanding

The most important thing that customers expect from the sales of their it-partner is the understanding of customer’s business. They want to be treated well and salesmen should be active. Customers are usually willing to listen the opinions of it-suppliers. The biggest expenses usually come from massive customizations that are often done to fulfill all the listed requirements from customers’ side. But most often these are not absolutely necessary. Suppliers should be interested in knowing what are the real needs of customers – and how they can be reached with minimum cost.

In the long run customers want that their supplier can fulfill their contemporary requirements. You should always solve the today’s problem, not tomorrows. And the solutions of today should always scale both up and down according to changes in customers’ business.

One of the biggest problem (from the customers’ side) it-suppliers have is their lack of decent account management. A good account manager is not a salesman, but a person that understands customer’s business and problems thoroughly and is able to suggest solutions. Add to that the fact that usually sales and supply organizations are separate, it’s no wonder that suppliers most often supply solutions that the customers are not satisfied with.

A surprising fact was to hear that now that the economy is low, the actual quality of sales work has lowered significantly! That is wrong direction: when the are less customers and less cases to compete on, suppliers should especially concentrate on the quality of their sales.

For real partnership to break out, suppliers must commit to improve customer’s operation. Suppliers must be willing to take some responsibility from the results.

There’s no free lunch

Of course, these services are not free and are often the first things to cut when customers want to lower prices. Way too often new projects are tendered and the lowest bidder gets chosen. And after one supplier gets chosen, usually it has only one incentive: to maximize the profits from the project.

So what eventually happens is that the supplier cannot enjoy the long-term profits from whole lifecycle and the customer suffers from inferior service. One could say: you get what you pay for. Real partnership is always most profiting to supplier and best serving method to customer. Why is it so hard to form real partnership these days? Toyota found it out on 70′s that it is most useful to count on real partnership instead of tendering all the suppliers every year.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Conscious development, Project work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.