CIO Talk Radio Blog

There is irrefutable evidence that companies cannot flourish without integration of IT and sales-force functions.  According to Peter Ostrow (Research Director for Sales Effectiveness, Aberdeen Group), “Companies that use co-browsing or screen-sharing solutions within their sales organizations typically see about 73% attainment of the annual sales quotas (as against 60% for companies that do not use it) ….Companies that use real-time Web visitor tracking have representatives that hit their numbers annually 54% of the time (as against 40% for companies that do not use this technology)” (33:30-34:41). It isn’t just that sales people need good, relevant information readily available while making the sale.  Good sales is much more than persuasively informing a prospect, and it is not the art of mastering a discrete relationship, that of the sales situation.  What is not sufficiently appreciated is that sales efforts are contextual and that IT plays a major role in context formation.

John Goodman (author of Strategic Customer Service, Co-founder Tarp Worldwide) estimates that only one in ten companies provides the kind of IT-informed support for lasting retention of customers.   He claims that almost 50% of companies are lulled into the unverified belief that good support obtains due to the fact that the company gathers its general impression from the small number of aggrieved customers that call.  However, it is just the case that only about 10% of customers are sufficiently motivated to act on their complaints.   Additionally, 50% of companies, says Goodman, view customer service almost exclusively as a cost to be minimized.  In other words, there is nothing like widespread enlightenment on the positive relationship between good support and the bottom line.

What’s not to love about bargains… for example, getting more IT at a lower cost!  There are a plethora of new technologies that seem to offer the tantalizing but risky promise of IT bargains to be had.  These new delivery models signal a paradigm shift from IT constructing to IT acquiring and deploying (Sunoco CIO Peter Whatnell, The new delivery models and the economics of IT, August 4^, 2010: 8:12 to 8:51) IT is now in a difficult place, responsible for providing and utilizing services to help business that may be delivered in environments over which it has little control. There are serious issues at stake, including security risks, irretrievability/retrievability of data from the cloud, and tradeoffs. So what does it take to get IT and business to dance together in sync?

Every day we take for granted things like voice mail, email, chat, and texting, but it might be interesting if we could get into the “Wayback Machine” with Mr. Peabody, and go back to that one crucial moment long ago at some corporate board meeting, when (theoretically at least) some management executive might have asked, ‘Well, Mr./Ms.  CIO, give the board an estimate of the ROI for this email thing you’re proposing. What productivity does it offer? What kind of return can we expect? What are the negatives? What could it cost us, if it’s a flop?’