Three Conversations Customers Must Have with Their Digital Solutions Vendor - Part 1

The next two posts are not a treatise on healthy vendor-customer relationships, nor will they cover every aspect of the sales/discovery process. Instead, I intended to provide high-level examples of how customers can engage their vendors by structuring their digital solutions discovery into methodical productive conversations (and avoid insufferable stacks of PowerPoint slides).

For the next two posts, we are going to break down this discovery approach into three conversations:

Why a Digital Solutions Discovery Process Is Critical to Success

Evaluating digital transformation solutions can be a complicated process. Customers are not procuring a commodity; they are procuring products and services to gain a business advantage. Customers should not start these conversations by asking for product overviews, demos, sales presentations, or proposal requests, nor should they ask their vendors to do so. Treat the discovery process as a strategic, mission-critical component to gathering the right information for decision-making. Cornerstone recommends starting your vendor conversations with a Technical Discovery.

During the Technical Discovery, customers should expect an old-fashioned, face-to-face conversation with pens, pads, and notebooks. Treat it as an investigative meeting, based on Q&A and driven by both parties; it is a conversation that helps the vendor (and sometimes the customer) gain a holistic understanding of the operation and the challenges. First, divide the technical discovery into five parts:
 

1. Introductions (roles, responsibilities, what is each party seeking from the conversation)
2. Situation Summary (customer-led conversation about the problem and present-state)
3. Technical Review (vendor-led Q&A session with the customer)
4. Technical Visioning (led by customer or vendor, about what the future-state could look like)
5. Action Items (mutually agreed-upon homework or next steps for follow-up workshop)

The vendor will likely have, at minimum, a sales and subject matter expert in attendance. The customer should have all the appropriate technical stakeholders and at least one (if not more) business influencers or sponsors present. (It is okay if the customer's team is larger than the vendor's.)