The Art of Consultative Selling in IT

71

Chapter 8

Getting into the

Details—E-CSF

The success of a project is often dependent on the people, processes, and

capabilities that cut across multiple disciplines. To make this success consis-

tent across other projects that are of a similar nature, similar people, pro-

cesses, and capabilities need to be adopted. However, leaping from a small

success to an organization-wide success is never easy. Businesses that have

tried organization-wide adoption often experience failure in their efforts.

The reason for this is a lack of proper and consistent integration among

dened disciplines and processes. The result is sub-optimization and con-

fusion, as well as potentially unnecessary expenditure. There is a need for

collaborative efforts with incremental and planned adoption to integrate any

new concepts, methodologies, or processes across an organization.

Many individuals who adopt innovative concepts successfully are very

happy with the value they have achieved and they try to replicate this suc-

cess across the organization as extensively as possible. Without the right

organization-wide framework for adopting a new concept across an organi-

zation, turning such small-scale victories to large-scale successes generally is

complex. Many times, they lose the essence of value along the way, which

derails even the most wisely developed policies.

Understanding the challenges and benets of realignment and transfor-

mation, all executives today want to see successful results. Based on a suc-

cessful outcome, they then adopt the strategy across the organization in an

incremental way by multiplying these successful results. The reason to real-

ize this incremental success is not because they lack the desire to achieve

72 ◾ The Art of Consultative Selling

organization-wide results at once, but because they want to make changes

continually based on past learning and incrementally reach a stage where

the success is certain, such that they avoid the burnouts of failures. This is

an empirical process model and is the same approach followed within CSF.

An empirical process model is applied continually in CSF to ensure that

what is learned from the past is used to make CSF themes fully functional

and to generate the desired results.

The enterprise-wide CSF methodology is based on the fundamental con-

cept to validate the success rst, and based on the benets achieved, pro-

vide an incremental strategy to multiply the success across your customer’s

organization. An enterprise-wide CSF methodology is also referred to as an

E-CSF methodology. As the name indicates, it is an approach for adopting

CSF across any enterprise.

Before beginning to understand the E-CSF methodology, it is important

to understand some of the fundamentals of how a new concept is adopted

across an enterprise. We also need to know which entities within an

enterprise are responsible for rolling out such initiatives and making them

a success.

Any mature organization that desires long-term success tries to nd new

ways of managing its organization more efciently. Decisions on adopt-

ing a new concept are never centralized with a certain group of individu-

als for their benets. Only concepts affecting a large number of individuals

are considered for validation. If the concept is determined to provide value

and affects the overall organization, the responsibility for managing such a

change is handled by the executive ofce, often lead by the CIO, CTO, or

CFO. Through decisions in an organization, broad changes are made by the

executive ofce; it is never done in isolation from the rest of the organization

because adoption of change should benet all entities of an organization in

a very consistent manner. The executive ofce takes the overall responsibil-

ity for rolling out a proven concept after validating its success in parts.

As illustrated in Figure8.1, every organization has different business units

(in several organizations, business units are referred to as domains), which

are controlled by the executive ofce, and a proven idea to be implemented

at an organizational level is cascaded from the executive ofce downward.

Although all organizations operate locally within their domains, they are

expected to be aligned with the strategies and goals of the executive ofce.

In CSF, the core responsibility of the consultative seller is to bring inno-

vations to his or her customer, and if your customer appreciates the unique

differentiation you are bringing to them, it is very easy for a consultative