Beyond the sales pitch: Curtin University CIO on what tech execs want from vendors

“This was a [vendor] that had tried to get into the company I was working with for quite a period of years and had never been successful. But we did business with them because the pitch that came back was very targeted to the organisation and the strategy right there and then. It wasn’t a generic sales pitch,” he says.

Curtin in the throes of a transformation

Like most CIOs, Jason is incredibly time poor. On any given day, he receives hundreds of emails, participates in many meetings and is a self-described workaholic.

“I am working harder than I have in the past and that’s probably because of the size of the transformation that I am working on. We’ve created a big digital destination at Curtin, so I’ve spent a lot of my time on stakeholder management,” he tells ADAPT.

“During the day, it’s about meeting the business and doing my work at night,” he says.

Neck deep in a complex transformation program, Jason has some strong opinions about the numerous vendors that are vying for his time.

Many vendors are introducing themselves by email, writing their messages as if they have already met him in a cheeky tactic to get past his executive assistant.

“They’ll say something like, ‘Jason, thanks for the call, let’s set up that meeting as we agreed.’ I get they are desperate [to hit] their quotas, they’ve got to get market leads. The problem is that they don’t actually know the business, they want to do a cold call and sell me what they are selling everybody.”

Jason says this this approach doesn’t work on business-focused CIOs. What does work is an interaction with a vendor rep who understands what his organisation is trying to achieve.

According to Cowie, there are two mistakes salespeople are making. First, they are sending generic emails to get a foot in the door.

“A lot of these are fake emails… that really upsets me to be honest [because] you are starting off the relationship on a lie,” he says.

Secondly, sales pitches are generic and the same for every customer.

“It’s like [the rep] hasn’t heard, they are not listening to the organisation. I’d be more impressed by someone giving me a very dedicated pitch as to my specific need or saying, ‘it was nice meeting you but what you are doing is not really what we do; thanks for the meeting.’”