What you need to do
| At a glance Buyers of complex IT services face much more significant risks than the risks their vendors face. Vendors’ inability to mitigate the buyer’s risk causes delays in deal finalization. |
Ever wondered why those project deals that looked promising are getting stalled? Why is that prospective customer not excited by your sleek presentation? Why is your existing customer considering your competition for the next project? Why did you lose that contract when everything looked normal?
As an IT services company, you might be facing such questions. There may be many reasons for the above kind of situation, but there is one common reason.
Buyer’s risk
“Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM.”
You may have heard of the above maxim. Back then, IBM was the undisputed enterprise hardware and software market leader. The adage meant that the corporate buyers felt that the risk of something going wrong was minimal when IBM was chosen as a supplier.
Even today, the risk that a buyer of complex IT services faces is entirely different from the risk its vendor faces. A vendor may lose a contract, make less profit, or incur a loss if something goes wrong. On the other hand, the buyer faces a risk of incurring opportunity costs should something go wrong. Hidden fees and time overruns come to haunt the buyer. The promised benefits of digital transformation don’t materialize. Such are the risks the buyer faces if stuck with the wrong kind of IT services vendor-partner.
What does your prospective customer look for to mitigate the above risks?
- The project proposal satisfies the stated and unstated requirements. It clearly delineates phases and scope per phase.
- The proposal provides a comprehensive RAID (risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies) framework and mitigation strategies.
- The prospective vendor demonstrates its readiness to provide on-demand and real-time visibility into the project’s progress.
- The project team is equipped with an integrated software system to provide regular status updates, identify emerging issues like resource constraints, give alerts, and give solutions.
- The project team has a robust change management system in place.
- The vendor’s organization can provide billing in full compliance with the contract, eliminating billing disputes.
- The vendor complies with data privacy, security, and integrity regulations.
Needless to add, due diligence will cover the vendor’s credentials, experience, and financial stability.
Mitigating buyer’s risk through enterprise software
Your prospective customer would like to see the above requirements met systemically. The vendor’s enterprise software must provide the above capabilities. The customer would like to see a demonstration of various use cases. The customer wants to ensure that its implementation team is not burdened with tasks like repeated follow-ups and resolving billing errors.
Above all, the customer’s organization would like to focus on getting the benefits out of every phase of the project.
You need a solution
ProductDossier PSA software is your comprehensive solution. It is built on industry-standard workflows and is available out of the box. The software is highly configurable to adapt to your specific requirements.
ProductDossier PSA integrates and automates your entire opportunity-to-cash software and provides you with real-time and actionable ‘single version of the truth’ for proactive and responsive project management.
Reach us at [email protected] for a demo.
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