The old “Voice of Customer” Model is Dead, and sales success will be Determined by CIO’s relationship with the customers’ C-team, according to iManage CIO, Van Richardson.
Van Richardson said the old VOC model and quarterly meetings where the vendor meets with the customer to run through a PPT presentation aren’t going to cut it anymore.
“Instead, the conversation needs to be flipped to the value that was brought – and this value should not be presented at a quarterly board review: it should be a shared value that organisations will be able to say Yes, we did these things together.”
Van Richardson said Flexibility and speed of delivery were key, but tech provider CIOs will need to have more involvement with customer CIOs or C-team to ensure buy-in and partnering to maintain CIO perception of value, and ongoing support.
“The customer CIO needs to see the value of the product and the product CIO can provide insight into what’s happening, and the value being delivered. Expect success in 2021 to increasingly be judged not just on the product doing what it says it will do, but on the relationships between the CIOs and other leaders.”
Next year there will be a tech explosion as increased remote working has taken hold during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of new tools, software, and capabilities has skyrocketed to meet the demand of users.
“People working from home might see an application or tool that their spouse or college-aged child is using and think to themselves: “I could definitely use that for my own day to day work.” IT teams will need to strike a careful balance of looking at ways for team members to be more efficient via tools that may not be available within the traditional corporate environment while still maintaining a level of appropriate enterprise security,” Van Richardson said.
