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Many people who read this blog are IT professionals or their managers. Daily you are faced with crushing deadlines, less employees to do more of the work, and a heightened struggle to justify your value to the organization. It’s logical to react with the quick fix or short term budget cut to save jobs, save funding, or save yourself in the short term. I suggest a radical reaction to the current economic storm and one that ultimately will deliver long term value for you - patience. Let me relate how patience will be helping me and perhaps you can apply the lessons to your situation.

We Want it Now

Most of the time in IT sales we don’t want to wait.  We want what we want and we want it now. We are told to make things happen. To shape the future. To influence events proactively. We are tasked to make the deal. We know if we wait, our competition is going to jump in ahead of us and get the deal.

Most management doesn’t understand the sales process of creating a valuable long term customer relationship. They believe in the cartoonish metaphor of the cold calling dynamo that scares up and closes big deals. Product not selling? Fire the sales team! It can’t be the product has no differentiation or the market isn’t there. Everyone wants a ‘water-walker’ sales star. 

Short Term Thinking Sets Up Long Term Failure

If you spend all your energy trying to close deals at the end of the quarter you will get stuck in a trap of your own making.  You can get addicted to the adrenaline rush of making the quarter end push. Through it all, you have built no trust from which to work.

This behavior trains buyers to treat our wares as short term commodities.  They see us as undifferentiated shysters who will do anything at the end of the fiscal year to make the deal. It comes down to who has the lowest price because we are all the same dogs drooling over the same bone. Their response is to pit vendors against each other in competition to get the lowest price, setting up a destructive dysfunctional relationship from the start. Isn’t everybody losing in this arms-length commodity transaction model for mission critical stuff?

The Time is Ripe to Have Patience

Here’s my radical proposition. Set yourself apart from the pack by practicing patience. What is patience in this context? A cycle of persistence, tolerance and acceptance. In order to have a healthy going concern you need to look at the total value of the relationship with a client over 1, 3, 5 and 10 years. Successful companies lock in their customers with long term repeatable value and reap the rewards for years. This can’t be done with quick hit deals and thin relationships.

• Persistence is part of patience. Be proactive and aggressive, just adapt your message to a long term partnership based value message. It may require passing up on some front end revenue and sharing more of the back end value that your product produces. That builds trust.
• Tolerate the push-back. Every sales person knows that when you are persistent with a message that is different you are going to need to tolerate the push-back. Many clients will actively try to discourage you from a long term value based relationship. You are breaking the pattern that you have trained them in and they expect.
• Accept short term setbacks. You can say “I’m not worried about making a quick hit on this.  I’m in it for the long term. I’m investing in you and in the partnership. We are not going to waste time fighting over the pie. We are going to create a bigger pie and we will both win. You’ll have the differentiating message.

Hang in there. Be a rock. Learn a new language of patience and long term value and the smarter clients will work with you - and those are the ones you want.

photo by shutterclicks

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