Vendors aren't changing focus, you were just blissfully unaware

My friend Michael Farnum besides being a comic book nerd, blogs over at ComputerWorld. Michael writes today about his opinion that vendors have changed focus from concentrating on the tech geeks to focusing on the business decision maker. Michael's proof is rather subjective, but revolve around the fact that when he was a geek not in management, vendors use to wine and dine him to influence him to support their technology and tell his boss to buy their products. As he moved up to become a geek in management, he noticed the vendors shifting focus away from the technical stakeholder to the business stakeholder. Michael has a theory on some of the reasons for this shift of focus. The dotcom bubble, the evolution of IT, people making decisions on sound business principles, not on what technology is cool.

Michael I say rubbish! I think that sales techniques haven't really changed that much from the 90's. Good selling always involved courting the three stakeholders - technical, business and financial. It is just as a green (meaning new, not environmentally friendly) geek, you were not even aware of the vendors courting you, also reaching out to your management team and the business and economic stakeholder. You were blissfully unaware that the vendors you were dealing with had a full court press going on. Instead you went to a nice dinner, a ball game and got some t-shirts and other swag and thought you were making it happen for them. In the meantime your boss was getting tickets to the game too (I bet even better tickets) and nicer schwag than you were! As you started to move up the chain, you just assumed that everyone must be moving up with you. That Ptolemaic or geocentric model of the sales process, with you at the center is just your view from the inside, but sales people have been multi-threading into accounts for a long time.

Yes during the dotcom era and even before that sales teams used to spend a lot more on wining and dining. I still remember fondly the EMC sales teams of the mid to late 90's partying with their customers like it was 1999 (it was 1999). I was on the receiving end of many of those great dinners and other perks. With new economic times, it became less fashionable to lavish money in trying to buy business. But that more economically austere model did fundamentally shift the focus in sales from the technical to the business stakeholder.

Some companies like Symantec for instance have always concentrated on the business stakeholder more than the technical stakeholder. But Michael in sales there is little new under the sun. Just because you have begun to become aware of it, don't assume it has not always been so.