A sales leader I coach at a top IT firm had a deal in front of him. The client wanted to modernize an ageing core system.
The old approach takes seven years. His team had an AI approach that could do it in two.
He knew the math cold. Six dollars a line of code the old way. Four dollars with a standard tool. Two dollars fifty with his team's solution.
He could not get that number through his own pricing team.
The pricing team takes its estimate from the execution organization. That organization does not report to him. They have never delivered it this way, so they estimate carefully. Seven years became five.
Five years does not win the deal.
He has a few hundred people. The execution organization has thousands. He cannot tell thousands of people how to estimate. He does not have the authority. He has the knowledge.
“If I'm going to take three weeks to price a deal,” he told me, “it is gone.”
This is built into the business
Every IT services firm I work with has the same gap. The people closest to the client can see what is possible now. The people closest to the work are not set up to deliver it that way yet.
Everyone in between falls back on what they already know.
None of that is anybody's fault. The estimating discipline that protects margin was built for a business that sold time. That business is being replaced faster than the process around it.
Bodies and outcomes
Selling bodies sounds like this. “I will give you 100 people for this project.”
Selling outcomes sounds like this. “I will modernize your system in two years instead of seven.”
The money sits in the distance between those two sentences. So does all the friction.
What becomes possible
I asked him one question. What would be possible if you could influence without authority?
He paused. He said, “Everything would change.”
He is right, and it is worth being specific about what changes.
The leaders who work this out stop waiting on the process. They get the execution organization curious long before a deal is on the table. They price in days, because the real conversation happened months earlier.
They also stop being the person who fights for exceptions. They become the person whose numbers the firm has learned to trust.
That is a bigger job than the one he has today. Nobody has to promote him into it.
The authority is not coming
Here is what I shared with him. ‘You are waiting on authority that is not on its way. The execution organization is not going to report to you. The pricing team is not going to take your number first.”
That leaves one route. Learn to move the people who control execution. Show them what is possible. Make it safe for them to go first.
Selling bodies is a skill you already have. This one is harder and slower, and it may be what moves you from selling capacity to selling outcomes.
Three questions for your week
One. Where is your best commercial idea sitting right now, waiting on someone who does not report to you?
Two. What would make it safe for that person to agree? Not easy. Safe.
Three. When did you last ask them what they are protecting?
Get your free personalized read. The Executive Leverage Scorecard, 15 questions, 3 minutes. Results are immediate.
Raju Panjwani | Founder of Live Masterminds, Inc.
I was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley for 18 years. I now work with senior leaders in IT services and technology consulting, on becoming the leader the business now needs.