Hunting Black Rhinos – Why Digital Transformation Requires a Massive Change in Sales

A recent news story highlighting a Texas hunter who bid $350,000 to kill a rare Black Rhino generated a heated online debate. However, in the realm of IT services, a similar debate is over. The era of big game hunting is on the wane.

The reason is twofold. First, the massive IT Outsourcing contract is increasingly rare – rarer than those Rhinos – and the few that do come up for bid are most often walled off in a protected environment with limited outsiders welcome in to chase them down. Second, the increasing number of digital transformation deals that are appearing on the horizon require a much different sales model than IT Outsourcing or even traditional SI deals. Gone are the days when certain service providers could target a select number of deals by identifying the most appropriate RFPs that would allow them to meet their target and to step away from the smaller deals.

Today, as the bulk of new opportunities increasingly shift toward digital transformation and away from traditional deals a very different sales model is required. It is one that goes beyond solution selling to one built first and foremost on trust.

Further, that trust is often established slowly and follows the following route:

1. Co-innovate. A formal session is pitched that entails gathering the appropriate IT and business executives from a potential client to sit down with the service provider and brainstorm a solution addressing an enterprise challenge such as a retailers diminishing same store sales.
2. Proof of Concept. Once the solution is identified – often at no cost to the potential client – a proof of concept is created by the service provider again at no cost. This is then presented to the potential client as a follow up to the co-innovation work.
3. Limited trials. Finally, a bit of spending is associated with the activity as a limited trial of the solution is rolled out with careful attention to meaningful KPIs. In the case of the retailer example, this might be attempted at a handful of its stores before rolling out regionally let alone nationwide.
4. Finally. A “full” deal is signed. Only after considerable investment by the service provider to generate meaningful results is a deal signed to conduct a broader roll out at scale.

The implications of this new approach for service providers and enterprises are both quite significant. For the enterprise, it means that if you are not following this model of shifting up front cost to the service provider, you are leaving free money on the table and assuming unnecessary risk. For the service provider, it means you need to be embracing this sales approach or else you will likely be losing more and more deals. To do so, incentives, metrics, and entire go-to-market models must change. In short, your sales model needs to be retooled to go after the deals that make sense rather than the one of the limited number of endangered big “Texas styled” deals that are still out there.