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CyNexLink Blog • August 8, 2017
There is a direct interrelationship between the sales organization cycle and the company life cycle. The life blood of any business organization, regardless of industry, is its sales strategy, its ability to pull in new customers and profit from existing ones. If a company grows out of its initial start-up stage, where it has turned its idea into operational reality, it faces the potential of reaching four future stages: adolescent, adult, middle-age, and senior.
Adolescent Stage
During this most early build stage, the IT organization is in its embryonic form, refining its foundational infrastructure. The sales engagement model is yet unformed and subject to validated learning from collision with early customers.
It is a time of high risk and high reward. The company can either the seize the market with exceptional pricing and marketing precision or miss the mark completely with misinformation.
The IT company during this stage is dealing with many and varied marketplace protocols – pricing, competition, state of the economy, customer demands, and more.
More than the concrete specifications which make up marketplace transactions and protocol is figuring out just what type of salesperson should be hired and what kind of sales pitch would most appeal to a prospective client. The salesperson who is brought unto the team, besides needing to have a strong native ability to sell, must also have a holistic understanding for how to tackle problem-solution projects within complex IT scenarios.
It is a time of high risk and high reward. The company can either the seize the market with exceptional pricing and marketing precision or miss the mark completely with misinformation.
The IT company during this stage is dealing with many and varied marketplace protocols – pricing, competition, state of the economy, customer demands, and more.
More than the concrete specifications which make up marketplace transactions and protocol is figuring out just what type of salesperson should be hired and what kind of sales pitch would most appeal to a prospective client. The salesperson who is brought unto the team, besides needing to have a strong native ability to sell, must also have a holistic understanding for how to tackle problem-solution projects within complex IT scenarios.
Elizabeth Wasserman at Inc.com remarks that “the biggest mistake many businesses make is to believe that price alone drives sales. Your ability to sell is what drives sales and that means hiring the right sales people and adopting the right sales strategy”.
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Adult Stage
Upon forming its foundational sales strategy and settling its business and operations infrastructure, the company now heads into the adult stage where it competes with well-established competitors in the field. During this stage, the company will be growing its operations with a growing sales team and an engineering staff, which is expanding product functionality and adding ancillary products in order to realize its product road map.
Aha!, a project management software company writes: “Creating a product roadmap should be a continuous process throughout the life-cycle of a product. Requirements and features should be generated by lots of folks including: customers, partners, sales, support, management, engineering, operations, and product management”.
In the field of technology generally, and IT specifically, the demands for continued general learning is enormous, as systems and software engineers must maintain a cutting-edge understanding of the most advanced platforms.
Middle-Age Stage
As the IT organization continues to grow, and market prices between competitors become more fixed, it can now be said to enter the maintain, or middle-age stage, where the market has flattened out around a group of mutually robust and tenured companies. At this stage, companies are concerned with maintaining existing contracts and the contextual marketplace surrounding existing partners.
Senior Stage
The final stage of an organization’s life cycle can be termed the senior stage, where the objective is to amplify current services and extend the market position of the company through strategic disruption of existing contracts. The IT organization must seek to reinvigorate its current involvement with the marketplace by presenting unique and improved differences in its technical execution, as well as tap into emerging markets in order to win new clients.
How an IT organization handles itself during this senior stage will determine whether they evolve into a monopoly or Fortune 500 company, or devolve into irrelevancy, outdated protocol, and a diminished market presence.
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