Gartner: Go-to-Market Strategies Must Change as Customers Change

Some of the discussion last week at the SAP AG (SAP) Americas Partner Leadership Summit revolved around go-to-market strategies, and how partners can bring the SAP’s solutions to the market. A new report from Gartner takes this further, indicating that a change is underway in how customers buy, and vendors and MSPs should change their go-to-market strategies accordingly. 

The IT research firm said that the traditional sales model for technology providers prevents innovation because it lacks the flexibility to reinvent without placing quarterly revenues at risk. IT providers need to take a more customer-centered approach to sales and create buying processes that are more suited to how today’s customers want to buy. Customers are taking over the sales cycle, and forcing providers to adapt to what customers want to buy and how they want to buy it.

“The existing ways of selling, based on specific segments, high-touch, often face-to-face sales, with a select few channels and heavy investments in lead generation marketing, are beginning to be less effective as people’s buying behavior changes, and the expectations of IT shift,” said Tiffani Bova, Gartner VP and analyst, in a prepared statement.

The IT research firm suggested that technology providers need to focus their efforts around the following key areas to compete successfully:

• The products and services they offer (and what need they fulfill for customers).
• Their target customers (beyond standard segmentations).
• The sales models they deploy to sell to customers (a combination of direct and indirect activities).

“A connected sales model can’t be created overnight, nor will it be a one-off task,” Bova said. “Making such, sometimes significant changes takes time and will continue to evolve with each new product introduction and new market considered. But, increasingly, providers that fail to make changes now could find themselves in a worse situation in two to three years, when technology and its buyers have advanced even further.”

According to Gartner, businesses fail when they neglect to stay on top of their industries when technologies or markets change. These changes will cause a split of focus among providers, causing them to either cling on to old models of selling to protect their installed bases, evolve their products to compete better, or take a revolutionary approach with radical new products and business models.