Do you understand the difference between your clients wants and needs?

Great companies address areas of often unarticulated needs.

Great companies make bold decisions about the future, the market, and they double down.

Great companies take ownership of understanding their market, and they feel a strong sense of accountability towards this.

Great companies identify a problem, or a bottleneck and then create big impact solutions, which people can’t help but want.

Great companies see beyond the horizon and take risks, often with huge bets they will be right.

Great companies see it as a duty to serve their customers.

Great companies focus on creating the best customer experiences.

Great companies ask ‘How do we give our customers the edge’?

In one of my first customer meetings, I attended a client site with an Account Manager (AM) and a Solution Architect (SA); The purpose of the meeting was to present a digital transformation strategy to our customer which was still utilising an on-premise infrastructure solution.

The room was small, and the whiteboard was big.

Just big enough for the ideas which were about to be drawn.

The SA went to work, and a migration to the cloud was proposed.

…

There was a moment of silence before the customer said;

’We don’t need all this.’ Followed by some more comments which disagreed with what we had just presented.

Without hesitation our SA responded:

‘You’re wrong.’

Now, despite me not presenting or saying anything in this meeting I got those nervous butterflies… not the good kind. I was shocked at the bluntness and the directness of the response.

But that didn’t last long.

I perhaps forgot for a moment who I was in the room with and the skills these guys had. I remembered why I wanted to go to meetings with them. They were high performers and were always at the top of the sales board. They clearly knew how to close deals, and I was about to find out how...

Irrespective of all the security benefits, support wrap and site resilience that comes with cloud, the SA and AM went straight into painting a bigger picture. That picture was made up of all the answers the client gave in this roundtable session. We started to present how the industry was changing and how the next generation of applications were being deployed faster with newer technologies.

The focus shifted to business objectives, how the customer wanted to be positioned in the market and what type of services they planned on providing.

A vision was shared on the future of the market, and how IT needs to be built in order to support that.

It was a ‘think bigger’ conversation, and I remember feeling so captivated by what they were saying.

If the conversation stayed on the topic of just pros and cons to OnPrem and Cloud, we probably wouldn’t have made any progress on decision making, but looking at the bigger picture, helped make a smarter decision.

After a full day of conversations, the customer knew cloud was the way forward if they wanted to maintain their edge in the market and stay ahead.

Was it a hard sale? No, it was a conversation where all opinions were heard and all questions were answered. At the root of it all was the question;

‘How do we serve our client, unapologetically state what is best for them and make sure we are truthful along the way’

Looking back, the AM and SA could have cut a long day short and simply proposed a refresh of infrastructure on premise, but that wasn’t the right thing to do.

The reason behind decisions like this need to be made with a greater mission in mind.

Sometimes doing what is right, can be seen as wrong in the moment.

It is your job as a service provider to build trust, which allows you to have these candid conversations with your customers.

“Deliver what people need, not what they think they need”

Do you understand the difference between your clients wants and needs?

Great companies address areas of often unarticulated needs.

Great companies make bold decisions about the future, the market, and they double down.

Great companies take ownership of understanding their market, and they feel a strong sense of accountability towards this.

Great companies identify a problem, or a bottleneck and then create big impact solutions, which people can’t help but want.

Great companies see beyond the horizon and take risks, often with huge bets they will be right.

Great companies see it as a duty to serve their customers.

Great companies focus on creating the best customer experiences.

Great companies ask ‘How do we give our customers the edge’?

In one of my first customer meetings, I attended a client site with an Account Manager (AM) and a Solution Architect (SA); The purpose of the meeting was to present a digital transformation strategy to our customer which was still utilising an on-premise infrastructure solution.

The room was small, and the whiteboard was big.

Just big enough for the ideas which were about to be drawn.

The SA went to work, and a migration to the cloud was proposed.

…

There was a moment of silence before the customer said;

’We don’t need all this.’ Followed by some more comments which disagreed with what we had just presented.

Without hesitation our SA responded:

‘You’re wrong.’

Now, despite me not presenting or saying anything in this meeting I got those nervous butterflies… not the good kind. I was shocked at the bluntness and the directness of the response.

But that didn’t last long.

I perhaps forgot for a moment who I was in the room with and the skills these guys had. I remembered why I wanted to go to meetings with them. They were high performers and were always at the top of the sales board. They clearly knew how to close deals, and I was about to find out how...

Irrespective of all the security benefits, support wrap and site resilience that comes with cloud, the SA and AM went straight into painting a bigger picture. That picture was made up of all the answers the client gave in this roundtable session. We started to present how the industry was changing and how the next generation of applications were being deployed faster with newer technologies.

The focus shifted to business objectives, how the customer wanted to be positioned in the market and what type of services they planned on providing.

A vision was shared on the future of the market, and how IT needs to be built in order to support that.

It was a ‘think bigger’ conversation, and I remember feeling so captivated by what they were saying.

If the conversation stayed on the topic of just pros and cons to OnPrem and Cloud, we probably wouldn’t have made any progress on decision making, but looking at the bigger picture, helped make a smarter decision.

After a full day of conversations, the customer knew cloud was the way forward if they wanted to maintain their edge in the market and stay ahead.

Was it a hard sale? No, it was a conversation where all opinions were heard and all questions were answered. At the root of it all was the question;

‘How do we serve our client, unapologetically state what is best for them and make sure we are truthful along the way’

Looking back, the AM and SA could have cut a long day short and simply proposed a refresh of infrastructure on premise, but that wasn’t the right thing to do.

The reason behind decisions like this need to be made with a greater mission in mind.

Sometimes doing what is right, can be seen as wrong in the moment.

It is your job as a service provider to build trust, which allows you to have these candid conversations with your customers.

“Deliver what people need, not what they think they need”