My original plan was to follow up on the previous post with a discussion of how Outcome-Based Selling should be a significant part of addressing the shifting of technology sales from legacy IT to the lines of business. However, I’ve gotten a lot of requests like the following from Coralee Torrence: “The big problem is making that shift when all the relationships we have built are in IT. How do we get there?” I’d like to tackle this topic now.

For most legacy technology selling teams, their primary “relationships” are with IT. And we can infer that their conversations consist of “bits, bytes, feeds and speeds” (after all they are trained extensively on product features). However, what many technology selling organizations, as well as IT departments, lose sight of is that the sole purpose of IT is to support their internal business customers and the objectives of the business.