For IT Sales, Skip the CIO
Forecast for CIOs is cloudy with a chance of extinction.
Marketers have long focused on CIOs for technology related sales. However, as CIO responsibilities and roles change, marketers must carefully evaluate efforts spent selling to these professionals.
In a recent Customer Collective article, author Christopher Koch suggests that in the future, big IT service deals will bypass the CIO completely.
Koch admits that most IT deals already go through the business side for final approval and buy-in. However, he believes that this trend will increase, as technologies like “cloud computing” move technology infrastructures outside of the company and “into the cloud.”
If Kochs’ predictions are correct, many Operational CIOs will disappear from the IT landscape. For marketers this means that:
- Technology sales will become business service sales.
- Idea marketing will become more important that technology comparisons.
- Everything will become a service and the loyalty stage of marketing will become crucial.
Koch presents a wide array of ideas on the possible effects of SaaS and cloud computing in the full, thought-provoking article.
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