CTOs extend sales reach

Whatever it takes. That’s the current mantra among enterprise chief technologists when it comes to supporting their sales units. With competition growing ever more intense, IT leaders say they are ready, willing, and able to give their company an edge by leveraging new technologies to back the sales team and by going on sales calls to offer their expertise to prospective customers.

In a recent survey of the InfoWorld CTO Network, 79 percent of respondents say they are working more closely with sales than they were a year ago; 69 percent say they are also working more closely with marketing. Shifting their focus outward, these IT executives are looking at their companies’ business strategies to decide on the most effective way to lend support. They say they are working with executives from throughout the company to execute aggressive sales plans.

“These days, the competition is extreme. And cross-functional integration of roles is going to add to the productivity of a company,” says Larraine Segil, a founder of Los Angeles-based management consulting company The Lared Group and a professor at the California Institute of Technology.

Successful sales strategies now often involve chief technologists cooperating with any number of groups within a company, Segil says. “Cross-functional integration skills add to the productivity of the company, because if a company doesn’t utilize all available skills and technologies, they are going to be noncompetitive. You can’t look at sales just as sales, but [rather] as technology in sales and finance in sales, etc.”

Leveraging better solutions

If the market demands it, a CTO may focus the bulk of a company’s technology infrastructure to support sales. At RE/MAX, the Engelwood, Colo.-based real estate franchise network, CTO Bruce Benham uses a variety of technology fixes to give more than 55,000 real estate agents the information they need to close a sale.

Benham says he has set up a special team to evaluate products that RE/MAX could use to help its far-flung agents.

“In our IT department, we want to work with third-party providers to give value to agents who couldn’t get that on their own,” Benham says. “I’ve got a staff of people who specialize in enabling these products and services. They are strong, not only strong on IT, but are very knowledgeable about real estate. We saw technology becoming an important part of where real estate was headed, and we decided there is so much coming out in technology tools related to real estate that we had to have support to enable [the agents].”

In recent weeks, RE/MAX has started to arm its agents with Research in Motion’s BlackBerry wireless handhelds that support customized software from Retrieval Dynamics. These handhelds allow agents access to real-time information about listings and related data, giving them specialized, local information about real estate in every region of the country.

“It’s not a standard BlackBerry by any means,” Benham says. “They have the ability to integrate into multiple listing services. They have a team of people that do custom applications for BlackBerry and other PDAs.”

Benham says agents need specialized information to give them advantages

over rivals. “Generic products aren’t helpful,” he says. The company has a Web services XML feed to its portal, RE/MAX.com, from the national real estate Web site, Homestore.com, which provides about 250,000 real-estate listings daily, Benham says. “Had we tried to do the same type of service on our own, it would have been horrendous because these sites are not our core business,” Benham says. “We went to people who do these things very well.”

Finding an advantage

Credibility matters in sales, and CTOs have cachet with customers, says John Jordan, a principal in the office of the CTO at consultancy Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in New York.

“With technology driving just about every business interaction, there’s a growing understanding that implementation details embody the economics of the deal,” Jordan says. “Who’s going to have to modify interfaces? Who’s going to expose what data? Those activities come at a cost to someone, so we’re seeing more and more technologists involved in the negotiation phase both to protect their company’s interests and to ensure that everyone has realistic expectations.”

Some chief technologists say they are spending as much time away from their offices as in them, as they personally meet with customers to improve sales. These sales calls act to reassure prospective customers about the company and to gage customer opinion, essential to product development, they say.

Geoff Barrall, CTO of San Jose, Calif.-based BlueArc, which sells NAS devices, spent two weeks traveling on the East Coast and in Europe to meet with customers. Barrall says half of his time is spent on the road with sales-related activities.

On such a trip, “I’ll see a bunch of customers and explain the product to them and we see how it fits [their needs],” Barrall says.

The tough economy has led to intense focus on each call, Barrall adds. “We were focused on high performance, and price didn’t matter as long as we delivered a benefit,” he says. “But now the market is much more price-sensitive, so we need to meet the price point of customers.”

Barrall also uses the meetings to bring back information to the engineering department to ensure that BlueArc products match customer expectations. “The CTO is a good broker between marketplace customer and internal engineering, because we want to focus on each camp,” he says. “It’s not good for us to sit in the dark in engineering. BlueArc is fundamentally a product company, and a lot of our time is spent on understanding what our customers are feeling and bringing that back to engineering.”

Through discussion with customers, Barrall gets insight into how to change BlueArc products for the better. “It’s often very easy to make relatively simple changes that make their [users’] lives easier,” he says. “Everyone’s so busy doing product development [inside the company], it’s sometimes necessary to build a bridge between them and the customer.”

Barrall says his frequent conversations with customers and company executives representing manufacturing, marketing, and sales divisions gives him a special

status as an information provider about the product. “My coding days are behind me, but I do get up on the whiteboard and draw a customer environment, or if necessary, rig up a demonstration,” he says.

Similarly, John Kopcke, CTO of business-intelligence software provider Hyperion Solutions in Sunnyvale, Calif., says he meets with representatives from about 50 companies a year. His participation adds to the sales effort by allowing customers to talk with a true expert on the product.

“Customers are very interested in not only the version they may be using or thinking about using now, but also about the development of our technology and our products for the foreseeable future,” Kopcke says. “Not only are they interested in our product but in the application of our product in their organization. They want to understand how Hyperion’s solutions can be used across multiple departments and business units.”

Kopcke says he can go talk in great detail about the technology application of Hyperion products as well as about the business needs of the customer.

In the final analysis, the chief technologist offers himself as a kind of super salesman, able to answer more questions and provide a heightened sense of satisfaction for a prospective customer. That’s a competitive advantage in itself.

“[Customers] are looking for credibility and looking to build a relationship, which I can provide,” Kopcke says.