Discover the Secret to Successfully Buying IT Services: 25 Years of Experience
Hi. I'm Max Clark. I'm the founder of itbroker.com, an IT adviser and brokerage firm. Put it really simply. We help our clients buy IT services there's a lot that goes into that but I'm gonna tell you all of my secrets right now and it's not a long video because there's not a lot of them these are the 3 secrets to what we do the first secret right the first thing what business problem or need do you have like oh it'd be really cool if we had this fill in the blank whatever it's like what business need do you actually have we want to interact with our customers in a better way we want to figure out what our customers need we need to message our customers better we've opened a new plan we've got a new office coming in we need to meet a compliance mandate for a regulatory requirement from an government oversight.
Speaker 1:We have ace a supply chain requirement that we have to meet from our customers. We have remote users that we have to protect with intellectual property that we need to maintain. We've got an ERP system that we rolled out but our manufacturing in South America can't connect to it and it sucks we've got remote I mean like the list goes on and on and on and note that I say business problems businesses spend money to solve business problems they don't spend money to solve like, oh, this thing has like a faster processor problems or this thing does 4,000,000 packets per second through it. Like like that's a cool thing for us nerds to talk about and debate whether or not we should get, you know, all of green blue box or the black box or the purple box. Right.
Speaker 1:But this is the when you're talking with and discussing with a executive that's making decisions and trying to improve and fix things within the business, what are the actual business problems and business needs and how do you actually express that and then solve those business problems with technology so the first secret what is the actual business problem what is the actual business need right so this can be we've got a problem or about to do something it's really one of 2 things we've got a problem or we need to do something second secret what do you already have what you already have like you already have stuff you're not a startup you're not literally somebody didn't just give you $10,000,000,000 and you're out in the process of hiring 500 people this month by the way if you are call me because I'd love to help you but chances are you've already have stuff you already have applications you already have a SAS tool you already have locations you already have computers you already have you know like you already have something you've already made some decisions and maybe your problem or your objective is replacing a system but that system still has to interact with another system there's still something happening what do you already have intersecting the problem that you have or the objective that your goal with what you're already running right off the bat is going to narrow your options way more than you would ever imagine simple examples maybe your problem is customer service and customer service interactions and unifying your channels for interactions so that way you can give a better customer experience they can maintain data with you regardless of whether they're chatting with you, emailing with you, on social media with you, sending you a WhatsApp, calling you when you have a unified profile.
Speaker 1:You can now do workforce optimization and workforce management, and you can start overlaying it and glean data information. Like, everybody's calling in because they're having a problem with this issue. Right? Can you aggregate that at scale? Industry, you know, Gartner calls us a CCAS contact center as a service tool.
Speaker 1:We also see it like CX as a service, you know, because people now wanna brand everything as CX. But, you know, like, well, what's a good question? Are you running Salesforce? You know? Oh, you're not running Salesforce.
Speaker 1:Okay. Great. Here's all of these tools that have phenomenally cool demos that do really interesting phenomenal things. But guess what? In order to get that really cool thing, you need to be running Salesforce and Einstein AI.
Speaker 1:You don't have Salesforce and you don't have Einstein AI. Boom. That's gone. Like, it doesn't matter where they are in the Gartner quadrant. Doesn't matter that your friend told you to run them.
Speaker 1:It doesn't matter that you're neck deep in evals with them because you've been demoing them forever. Because guess what? What you need and actually, this is a true story. And we've seen this happen before. But the reality is you just you're not running Salesforce.
Speaker 1:You can't run that tool. Like, you already made that decision. You just didn't realize it. Right? Like, you just you didn't know to ask the question.
Speaker 1:You didn't know the decision was already made, but you've already made the decision. That decision has already been made. You can't run it. So that's number 2 what are you already running now secret number 3 is after you've gone through and figured out number 1 and number 2 you end up with a list of who's left so what's your problem what you need what are you already running of that filter of 1 and 2 who's actually good I don't care where they sit in the magic quadrant I don't care where they are in the Forrester Wave I don't care where they are in G2 analytics are they absolute complete dysfunctional disasters or are they good by the time you get down to that selection and you figure out number 1 number 2 number 3 and you figure out and you know are they good or not and by the way this is probably our secrets because we can you know build this Venn diagram out for you very quickly that number 3 you should be down to really just a couple of options I mean like we've got solution sets where maybe there's 80, 90, a 100 providers.
Speaker 1:And by the time you do 123, you're down to, like, chew. Now, how much time, you know, like, will that take you? I guess our 4th secret is we do that very fast because we do this. This is all we do. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna boast around for a little bit. Like, we do this really fast. It's gonna actually feel freaky because it's gonna happen in probably 2 phone calls, and it's not gonna make any sense to you. But once you understand, like, what these actual things are, like, the filter in the down selection process is crazy fast. Now the 5th secret here is is what should it actually cost you?
Speaker 1:Publish pricing versus actual list pricing versus, like reality pricing are very different things. Like, I don't care that they advertise on their website that it's $20 a user. Right? Like, what you need to know and understand in that sales cycle is are they in control of their cost end to end or are they based on somebody else phone system? Are you using a service provider who is paying Cisco money for their broad soft phone system okay they've got a floor price because they are spending money to somebody else to license that infrastructure to run it like they just can't go under a certain dollar amount because guess what?
Speaker 1:That's what it costs them. And they have to have margin on top of it in order to count for all of their costs and their operating expenses and make profit. Are you dealing with a provider that owns their stack end to end and wrote it and is invest in r and d? They might be running north of a 90% margin. Do you know if they're running a 90% margin?
Speaker 1:If they're running a 90% margin, where can they price you? Right? They can price you completely differently depending on whether or not they want your business and what is the competitive environment that they're in in order to win your business. Like, okay. Secret number 5 is also no secret.
Speaker 1:Like, run a competitive bidding process and actually know what the costs are and what other people have paid for in the past. You know, like, the secret is there is no secret. The secret is just knowing how to do the work and doing it well and just understanding how these things layer into each other and what they actually mean. Anyways, enough posting bragging around here. I've been doing this for more than 25 years.
Speaker 1:I've contracted thousands of contracts at this point. There's more similarities and there are differences, which has also been, you know, I learned this lesson twenty 2 years ago the differences between at that point it was an AS 400 and Novell network and n t4 and SCO UNIX they all come from the same place they have the same history the same lineage the same fundamental system constraints Right? Like, we're carbon based life forms breathing air. Like, there's only so many variations that can exist within that system. The same thing is true with technology and infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, you have, you know, our our see that's published for how things work. Right? Like, we're constrained by certain fundamental laws of computers and networking and the Internet so there's way more similarities in these platforms and there's dissimilarities and what your goal should be is understanding as quickly as possible a what are you trying to solve you know based on that what you already have who can do what you need based on what you have right who can do it well and what should it cost you and when you put all those 5 together you have a successful outcome so the secret is just you gotta master those 5 things super simple right I I'm Max Clark. I hope that helps you.
Speaker 1:Do you have any questions, comments, or you just want to vent and rant at me because you have somehow found my inner video on the Internet. Do so below. I hope this helps. Have a great day.
