THE EVOLUTION OF DECISION MAKING
With all the external and internal factors impacting businesses today, it’s perhaps unsurprising that decision-making processes are evolving. From the research, 89% of people polled now say that technology decisions are as much about managing risk as they are about creating value and driving growth.
Tech priorities and spending today are reviewed more frequently by almost half (46%) of IT decision-makers. A similar number (41%) are focusing more on tech that directly supports the customer/employee experience and the same amount (41%) are building agility and resilience into all their strategies and plans.
The time taken to complete a purchase (from initial research through to final decision) is typically 4-6 months (longest for cloud, shortest for collaboration). However, the critical factors when evaluating vendors are crystal clear.
A note of caution about the strength of relationship between the customer and the vendor:
say rising business costs mean they are more inclined to switch tech vendors now than a year ago. At the CIO/CTO level this rises to 83%.
The top five evaluation factors seen as critical:
Seamless integration
Deep understanding of our business
Transparent / clear pricing
Clear product strategy / roadmap
Ease of use / simplicity
It's about them, not you...
Customers are making a clear statement that they don’t need further complexity but transparent, clear communications. They need to know whether they can seamlessly integrate or not, without being bogged down by complexity. 93% of those we asked see informative content as critical/important – not wanting to waste their valuable time on something that won’t give them the answers they need.
However, if you add the critical factors together, having a deep understanding of your customer’s business is the greatest evaluation factor with 99% of all respondents wanting to see it. So, organisations need to think about the construct of their communications and avoid the standard trap of focusing too much on themselves.
It adds weight to Differentiated’s framework for communicating - context, answer and credibility.
Context demonstrates your understanding and ideally empathy with your customer’s situation; the answer is how you can help them with that situation (whether it is a challenge or an opportunity); and credibility is why you are the right choice to do so. See more about this here.
