Understand Buyer Motivations to Build More Opportunities

Jason Meshberg

We are at a tipping point in the U.S. economy following the coronavirus pandemic that caused severe economic disruptions over the last year. However, the most recent projections from the U.S. Congressional Budget Office are encouraging. And, Gartner predicts that worldwide IT spending in 2021 should increase by 6.2% over the previous year.

These predictions help those of us delivering consulting and services feel more comfortable about the future, but this growth will depend on customers making investments. For the partner ecosystem, customers will want help deciding what to do next, and where their enterprises should focus. It will be an even more competitive market for everyone.

To succeed here, we must be able to reassure customers that their IT spending will lead to success over time. To do this, we should look at buyer behavior and what is motivating projects. This motivation generally falls into one of three groups: things they want to do, things they need to do and things they have to do.

Finding Opportunities

The first category is the most forward-looking and aspirational. It includes projects that should deliver new revenue streams or implement digital services in new ways. These projects are exciting, and they have been a priority for the past year. For example, many companies had to develop new applications to cope with COVID-19.

Initiatives in this category can be difficult to sell if the business case isn’t clear. For example, if a technology or service is new and unproven in the market, building the case to invest can be harder as there are no prior examples. While we might want to carry out these projects, we have to find the right approach to deliver them.

Open source can help here, as costs are lower to acquire the technology as it is “free.” This makes getting something new up and running, especially projects that were previously unbudgeted, more accessible for more customers. Once a trial is running, these implementations can scale up and prove their worth. If your customers need support with projects like this, open source solutions should make it easier for them to keep pace with databases, analytics, and application component technologies.

Reducing Costs

The second category is less innovative and will make up the majority of IT project work as it involves reducing costs. These projects focus on finding opportunities to save money over time, which all organizations need to achieve. For many teams, implementing open source solutions can provide an opportunity to reduce spending.

For these projects, support and service are critical. Channel partners can offer consulting services that enable customers to look at moving to open source databases rather than running proprietary versions. This can help with both on-premises deployments and cloud installations, where spending is less predictable. For example, many IT teams are used to scaling by credit card in the cloud. They assume that the only approach is based on implementing the next tier of cloud service to solve their performance challenges. This isn’t always the case. Providing independent advice on how and where to save money on implementations can help.

Many organizations today lack specialists in-house with database skills and understanding. Providing support and advice in this scenario can be a good opportunity over time. Projects like this rely on strong relationships with customers, so look at your existing relationships and bring in …