A Vicious Sales Cycle

Like you, I keep reading that these are fat times for the economy. Organizations know they can't cut past zero, so they are spending again to grow.

So why hasn't selling IT suddenly become a cakewalk? At various times in this blog I have reported analyst expectations of low single digit growth in IT spending overall. Exceptions will be technologies where the link to competitive advantage is blindlingly obvious.

I had a conversation about this with one of my clients this morning — in fact, a vice president of sales at a technology vendor. He made a couple of points I thought worth passing along.

1) Decision makers who have under-invested in technology in the past are too busy in the present to invest in technology. It's a viscious cycle. If you are using (for example) Excel for budgeting and consolidations you may simply not have time in your day to think about (let alone manage) buying and integrating a first class financial reporting and analysis system.

2) IT is not as good at selling to CEOs as marketing or sales types are. It's natural that companies that are suddenly focused on revenue growth would invest in marketing and sales. However, it's also true that IT suffers a comparative disadvantage versus marketing and sales in the competition for corporate funds. If selling is what you do anyway, then selling to your own CEO is easy. Again, it's a viscious cycle. The less investment in IT, the less relevant IT becomes, and the harder it is for IT to make a business case.

Until we break out of this, IT will stay hungry even when everyone else is getting fat.