9/24/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
84 percent of sales leaders say they don’t believe they have the sales talent they need to succeed in the future. Why is that? Moreover, what can companies and their sales leaders do about it? I had a chance to speak with Byron Matthews, the Chief Executive Officer of the sales training, consulting, technology and research company Miller Heiman Group about approaches to use to improve sales.
(To read future stories like this one, follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: How has sales changed in the digital age?
Byron Matthews: The reason that sales has changed is that buyers have changed. Buyers have access to more information than ever before; buyers aren’t necessarily better informed, but they’re more informed. What we know for sure, what Miller Heiman’s research has shown, is that buyers are engaging sellers further along in the sales process, and only 23 percent of buyers are looking to sellers as a primary source of information.
Buyers are getting better at buying faster than sellers are getting better at selling.
Years ago, it was enough for a seller to meet with a potential buyer and ask great questions, to get a sense of the buyer’s needs, then come back and present them with a solution. In the digital age, that won’t cut it; you’ll just be wasting the buyer’s time. It is no longer just about providing information to a buyer, it’s about inspiring the buyer. In today’s selling environment, you need to provide a buyer with perspective on something they haven’t processed or thought about.
What inspires buyers are data-backed insights that make them think differently. Once buyers start thinking differently, they’ll start listening and looking to you for information. In a word, selling has become more sophisticated; sellers need to draw on their IQ, their data-backed knowledge, just as much as their EQ, their relationship-building skills.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.
Peter High, President of Metis Strategy, and author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs speaks at XChange Event’s MES Regional in San Francisco, CA. In this video with UBM Channel, he re-caps his CIO IT innovation workshop session on Red Robin.
To watch other Metis Strategy videos, please visit our YouTube Channel.
Visit our book page to learn more about World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs.
Norm Fjeldheim, Qualcomm’s SVP and CIO, shares his views on the company’s approach to “everything as a service” (XaaS), the rationale for choosing this strategy, the challenges he met along the way and the value he has garnered for his company.
by Peter High, in CIO Insight 02-20-2012
IN SUMMARY: WHO: Norm Fjeldheim, SVP and CIO, Qualcomm WHAT: Sharing his views on Qualcomm’s approach to “everything as a service” (XaaS) for its 21,000 employees worldwide WHERE: San Diego WHY: To provide CIOs and other IT leaders with actionable advice and insights about how to optimize the complex infrastructure of today’s IT organizations
Norm Fjeldheim, SVP and CIO of Qualcomm, the $15 billion maker of communication equipment, has had an unusually long tenure as CIO, having taken on that role in early 1999.
A 24-year veteran of the company, Fjeldheim has overseen significant changes to Qualcomm’s IT infrastructure. Roughly 1,400 of Qualcomm’s 21,000 worldwide employees report to Fjeldheim.
San Diego-based Qualcomm, which operates 200 offices worldwide, is engaged in the development, design, manufacture and marketing of digital wireless telecommunications products and services. Its divisions include Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, Qualcomm Enterprise Services and Qualcomm Government Technologies.
In January 2012, the company was named one of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For.
In this one-on-one Q&A, Fjeldheim tells CIO Insight’s Peter High about Qualcomm’s approach to “everything as a service” (XaaS), the rationale for choosing this approach, the challenges he met along the wayand the value he has garnered for his company.
CIO Insight: Norm, you first dipped your toe in the water on cloud computing and the SPI model [software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS)] before those terms were well known or widely used eight or nine years ago. What was the impetus for delving into virtualization?
Norm Fjeldheim: We began a little less than a decade ago when members of my team approached me and indicated that they thought virtualizing would add tremendous value to our operations. They indicated that it would render our operation more efficient, and that it would lead to significant cost savings. I asked the team what they needed to begin this journey. They said they needed a modest financial commitment to get started: a couple of hundred thousand dollars. I challenged them, saying that if virtualization was to be such a cost saver, we should expect that these activities would be self-funding after this initial seed investment.
The team began with Windows—and rather conservatively. (In retrospect, I wish I had pursued Windows and Unix together, so that it would not have looked like a Windows-specific effort in the beginning.) However, the efforts quickly built momentum. In the end, the team required significantly less than the initial commitment before these efforts became self-funding.
Our biggest foray into SaaS came by happenstance. We were a big user of Siebel for our CRM solutions. In 2005, a new business unit of ours was ramping up, and as the unit members planned the deployment of their first product, the software requirements did not include any mention of a need to ramp up Siebel in the process. As we found out about this six weeks prior to the launch of this new business unit’s first product, this led to a short time frame to get the functionality up and running and therefore [ramping up Siebel became] a pressing need. We realized we were not going to meet their needs, and it led us to think about alternatives
We pursued Salesforce.com potentially as a one-off instance for us, but discovered that it had as much functionality, more flexibility, and could be implemented and ramped up in a fraction of the time of our solution. We ended up migrating to Salesforce.com completely, and saved 50 to 60 percent in costs as a result, with improved functionality.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight.
To listen to Norm’s podcast interview with us, please visit Metis Strategy’s Forum on World Class IT.