How to succeed without really trying - or not

At a recent seminar, IT suppliers were given valuable tips on how to impress - and how not to impress - the top brass of the IT world. Brian Skellyreports

It is not often information technology suppliers get an audience with potential customers that boast combined revenues of €1 billion.

That might explain why it was standing-room only at a networking event organised recently by the Irish Computer Society and the Sales Institute at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin.

Entitled "What IT buyers want; what they really really want", the event was intended to give sales staff an insight into what they need to do to impress a potential customer.

As well as learning how to sell into the corporate sector, they learned how not to sell into it. In turn, top IT executives from Axa, AIB, Dunnes Stores, Eircom, Imagine and VHI reeled off stories of sales encounters that usually left them unimpressed, often stupified and occasionally downright angry.

Top of the blacklist were aggressive cold-calling, glossy sales brochures addressed to the head of IT (which invariably ended up in the bin), introductory e-mails that claimed to be follow-ups to previous meetings that had never taken place and suppliers having scant knowledge of the businesses to which they were trying to sell.

Then there were the pet hates. Paul Williams, IT director at AIB, disliked suppliers going above his head and then ringing him with the killer introductory line: "I was talking to your boss and he suggested I give you a call."

His counterpart at Eircom, Gerry Quinn, gets annoyed when would-be suppliers fail to do their homework properly. To illustrate the point, he read an e-mail he had received from a British-based IT firm, which began: "We are contacting a select group of senior IT executives in the UK . . ." Enough said.

Axa's IT boss Paraic Mills was scathing of those who conjured up mythical old friendships to break the ice. "The number of people who claim to have been at university with me is extraordinary. Especially since I went to university later on in my career - at night."

If these were some of the ways that suppliers commit commercial suicide and have the door closed firmly in their faces, what are the tactics more likely to succeed?

The biggest challenge facing any supplier is securing an initial meeting with a target client and with it the opportunity to pitch the sale. On this point the panel was agreed that cold-calling was the worst approach and a personal introduction or referral the best.

"For a cold call to work, it's got to be pretty compelling," Mick Furlong, IT director at VHI, said.

When it came to virtues they looked for in their suppliers, the IT bosses put "customer understanding" at the top of their list. The supplier who approached a potential client having researched it thoroughly so that it understood its business and its IT environment was definitely getting off on the right foot, they agreed.

Its prospects were further boosted if, instead of selling an IT product or service into the target customer, the supplier identified a business problem it could fix with its technology.

As AIB's Paul Williams put it: "To succeed in IT sales, you need to understand our business as well as the challenges our business faces."

If it could then go on and help the IT director build a business case for the technology internally so that he or she could win board approval for it, an aspiring supplier would be well on the way to making a sale.

The flipside was that if the supplier could not guarantee a rapid payback or return on investment (ROI), the whole pitch was a waste of time, said Vincent Nolan, IT director at Dunnes Stores.

"Try to work towards an 18- month ROI. If it doesn't pay for itself by then forget about it."