Hearing that sales is back into industry verticals and not with offering any more ? atleast in US. Is the offering team now toasted ?
4 replies (most recent on top)
Again! Has the music stopped yet?
Accounts, sectors, industries, whatever you want to call them, demonstrated their inability to sell 4 years ago. They couldn't balance operational delivery and growth in the same job at the same time. So they took delivery off them. They couldn't manage growth. So they took growth off them and built a global sales teams. Then they got rid of the Global sales team and had just 1 person. Then they didn't. Then they had someone else. Then they decided to give sales to delivery folk, twice removed from client.
But delivery folk could only talk techie-talk to clients. Clients didn't like that. So they added another layer of folks to translate what the techies were saying into rich value propositions. Turns out the client didn't understand what they were talking about either!
So now we're full circle.
Why not just outsource Sales to a group who knows how to converse with customers to find those areas where DXC can add value; A group who knows the business capability and how to match the two loose ends together to start to actually GROW the business? We all thought growth meant GROWING the customer base with NEW offerings to meet NEW demands. But it turns out that is just meant growing earnings per share.
What about customers, what do they want?
- Value for money, price, cost, competitiveness?
Bids often lost on price and credibility. Let's blame staff costs. That or the fact there is no coherent pricing model and huge variation occur according to which side of the pond you approach.
- Customer service?
When it works. Providing there are no sudden, unnecessary, disruptive changes to your delivery streams or the operating model itself.
- Keeping promises, reliability?
Not easy as there are currently so many confused delivery dependencies along the way and the customer might see something at the end or it could end up where most stuff ends up, somewhere between Bangalore and a Puerto Rico.
- Quality ?
A bit difficult to apply when you have no defined end-to-end process.
- Ease of doing Business?
There is an opportunity here through automation but they can't seem to find a way of exploiting bionics in a way that makes sense and we don't need any more of that "I am sorry I didn't catch that. Did you say cluck off?" They want cloud consultants and delivery people who are cheap yet have vast experience from their gap-year.
The answer? Throw piles of money at Seigel+Gale PR to create a brand to break old perceptions; throw more at McKinsey to re-engineer delivery. Leave it 2 years then rip it up and start again when you realise ROI didn't work (costs went down, but client anger went up causing a panic reaction of creating co-located teams for the angriest clients)
Does the company have a solution? No. Sorry, but no. More cuts until 2020 until all the grain has gone, then move on.
So does this mean we don't have standard offering's anymore and are doing custom support again? Not very repeatable
It feels like this happens every six months or so. It's beyond ridiculous at this point
Wow - These 180 degree turns get quicker every time - Just shows how agile DXC is.
....OR...
The ship has dipped at the bow, we need to rearrange deckchairs :)