Midmarket technology and business buyers – must sell to two different groups

Over the past six months, the need for advanced solutions and professionals supporting strategy, implementation, integration, and optimization has become much more acute. Business patterns changed by COVID-19 require businesses to accelerate digital transformation within their operations. Purchasing authority has shifted from IT to business management, requiring solution providers to position their offerings and services in terms that emphasize business metrics, such as time to market and measurable revenue and cost impact, rather than technical specifications and targets. This focus on business outcomes ripples through partner marketing and technical operations: marketing needs to emphasize time-to-benefit, the ability of individual solutions to contribute to overall business agility, and the direct application of IT features to pressing business needs; on the technology side, partners need to focus as much as possible on services centered around pre-built vertical solutions that can be deployed and integrated rapidly, with replicable processes and predictable outcomes, so that delivery matches the vision set by marketing and the requirements of the customer executives.

In a unique survey, Techaisle posed several and the same questions to both BDMs (business decision-makers) and ITDMs (IT decision-makers) and probed to identify what each expected from the other. Techaisle data shows that although BDMs have higher expectations of ITDMs, they align reasonably well in some areas, and there is a broad expectation gap in others.

• 53% of midmarket BDMs say that it is very critical for business success that ITDMs can identify and associate IT solutions with business efficiency, productivity & profitability. On the flip side, only 30% of IT executives in these midmarket businesses say that business executives should be able to associate IT solutions with business efficiency, productivity, and profitability. Responsibility for delivery rests with IT, and BDMs have very high expectations from ITDMs.

• Data also shows that BDMs have high expectations for support in using technology to build customer experience. Over 40% of BDMs believe that IT must understand solutions that enable beneficial customer & supplier interactions. In contrast, less than 25% of ITDMs say that BDMs should understand such solutions.

• Employee productivity is an essential aspect of a business, and in most cases, business management expects IT to understand and deploy core technology solutions to make employees more productive.

• Business process automation is an area where there is better alignment between IT and business. Nearly 40% of BDMs say that it is critical for business success that IT can identify requirements for automation and associate IT solutions with these needs.

• Cross-organizational integration is vital for both BDMs and ITDMs, and over 50% of both groups agree that the other should associate and adopt technology solutions with changing business demands.

Business decision-makers (BDMs) are an intrinsic force in most midmarket organizations. They are the primary decision-makers in some high-growth technology areas, including collaboration and analytics – meaning that increasingly, BDMs are ‘the boss of IT.’ These BDMs view IT as a component of business processes rather than as a stand-alone silo. Techaisle SMB & Midmarket Decision Authority data shows that twice as many BDMs as ITDMs (IT decision-makers) in midmarket businesses say that IT must understand how technology contributes to overall organizational success. These BDMs have specific objectives for technology usage, clear perspectives on adoption drivers and impediments, and tend to be influenced by information sources that are different from the inputs used by ITDMs.

This pressure from business managers leaves IT leaders scrambling to stretch limited budgets to meet seemingly limitless requirements, striving to deliver predictable, secure systems that respond to their business users’ increasingly varied needs and competitive environments. The divide increases because business perspectives on technology are shaped by information channels that are not part of the IT professional dialogue. The different information channels create an environment where businesses are struggling to develop the cohesion needed to promote or embrace new IT capabilities to achieve business objectives within existing IT and business process structures.

ITDM and BDM divergence will continue, and although there is cross-pollination, they may continue to operate from different pods. Although it may be tempting to try to bring the various parties together, IT suppliers cannot successfully act as intra-corporate matchmakers: they have to grasp the reality of selling to two different constituencies with different expectations.

Anurag Agarwal is the Founder and Chief Global Analyst at Techaisle (www.techaisle.com)