Selling: My challenge - How can I sell my services effectively via an Integrator?
If you read almost any sales related book it assumes that you will engage in a contract directly with the end-user. However this is far from the reality in many cases for smaller companies who have no choice but to provide key products and services as sub-contractors. If you find yourself in this situation, how do you sell effectively, or do you leave this to the integrator?
Before answering this question let’s look at what this means in sales-process terms, because you have some choices but you need to decide early how you want to play the game.
If successful, you will have a sub-contract with an integrator who holds the contract with the end-user. At the business development stage, you do not know who the contract holder will be, or whether they will even include your offerings. Indeed, you do not know if have a tangible opportunity at all.
You are in what we call a Dual sales process, selling both to the end-user and integrator. The only thing you know for sure is that they have vastly different priorities and ways to evaluate you against alternatives.
Pretty depressing stuff, you may think, but you do have choices and potentially more freedom than you think. Critically everything plays out in the early stages of the opportunity, after which you have limited control over events. Similarly, it will depend on you making some difficult calls early on, which may not please everyone in your organization.
So what options do we have? The biggest is to decide with whom you want to work (or not work). Alternatively, you may decide that you prefer being in as many integrator bids as possible to spread your bets. Both have pros and cons.
Picking your partner
The upside of this approach is that it will take a lot less BD effort seeing as you are only engaging with 1 integrator. It also means you can customize your message to them and the end-user for integration considerations. Ideally your offering complements your integrator’s own products and services, rather than duplicate them. The consequences of this are often painful post award when suddenly, having helped your integrator to win, they jettison you or reduce your workscope to nothing, in favour of their inhouse alternatives.
The obvious downside is that your integrator may not win, and you lose the market by association.
Playing the field
This is the polar opposite of everything we stated above. Greater BD effort. Limited ability to customize your messaging, and no guarantee that you will be included in the final package. However you will be less exposed to the risk of a single integrator bid.
In reality your way to change the dynamics of these conversations depends on one thing. How much the end-user decision-maker wants to access your services. Now hopefully you will appreciate why I say that this all plays out in the early stages of the opportunity development. You need to convince the end-users of the value of your offering well before they start to assess their integration strategy. This means going beyond the technical evaluators, accessing the business budget-holders and effectively making your value proposition before the integration machine is switched on. Often it does no harm to remind them of the precarious nature of the bidding exercise as a sub-contractor, and the feedback you get may help you decide your strategy with the integrators.
At this point in time you will also have a new opportunity to try and cut your workscope out of the integration package. If the procurement team see that there is a significant risk that they will not be able to access your technology due to their bidding strategy, they will be willing to discuss the “impossible”.
Knowing the strength of your position with the end-users will influence your negotiations with the integrators, as well as serve to help you maintain control of the process. Don’t despair you have the chance to win on your terms.
