I conceived the Technical Sales and Delivery Ecosystem (TSDE) as a way to formalize, package, and deliver across the entire organization a methodology for approaching Sustainable Business Development. I plan to lay out the theory and actions that one has to take to embrace this strategy and then operationalize it across the entire organization. As individual strategies and processes there is value in each, but as a complete whole it contains greater value than the sum of its parts, which is due the multiple components creating a multiplier effect.
This is not uncommon in ecosystems where, while on the surface it appears that the relationships are linear and direct, the reality is that the complexity is much greater. This complexity can work against you just as much as it can work for you, and the TSDE is one way by which to address the complexity of achieving Sustainable Business Development.
When one thinks of a top sales-person they think of fast-talking, cold-calling cubical dwellers (FT3CDs) “making their numbers” through volume, but anyone in business development knows the statistics point in another direction. Not to put the FT3CDs out of business, they like everyone have a place in the Ecosystem, but, when it comes to sales, up-selling, cross-selling, and re-selling existing or previous customers are more efficient.
This begs the question: what is critical in up-selling, cross-selling, and re-selling existing or previous customers? If we can master the answer, then we have a leg up on our competition and our market, and this is simply summed up as “customer satisfaction.” Now I don’t want to minimize this because systematizing customer satisfaction is not always evident across all business units in the organization.
The underlying rationale that drives TSDE is:
Everything an organization does to maximize customer satisfaction drives these kinds of sales.
TSDE is a systemic methodology to facilitate sustainable drivers across the business units of the organization by providing formal processes to align practices against the ideal of excellent customer satisfaction for the purpose of generating additional sales from an existing customer.
For some divisions, while this may appear to be a basic and intuitive endeavor, it may not be as ingrained and successful in practice as one might think. As an example, is a metric on customer satisfaction with your Delivery Team one of your Sales Team’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?
Well, shouldn’t it be?
The underlying philosophy of TSDE indicates that if your sales efforts to up-sell, cross-sell, and re-sell are going to be effective you rely on happy customers, and your delivery team is who produces your happy customers, therefore to make your efforts in sales more effective, less costly, and less risky your Sales Team should be monitoring your Delivery Team’s performance in delivering customer satisfaction. The metaphor of the ecosystem should become a little more apparent at this time.
Roy Pellicano, Business Development, Technical Pre-Sales Support
