I've noticed a few industry trends that have kept me and my customers up at night.
The first stop for many executives is to turn to their internal teams for solutions. However, these teams do not have the deep expertise to deliver bullet-proof, enterprise solutions, supported with the right technology platform and data. Therefore, they reach out to the vendor community for solutions. After you sign the contract with the vendor, are both of you sleeping well or is it just the vendor?
Our perspective is when you give Kingland an opportunity to solve one of your business needs, you are putting your trust and confidence in us. For the customer organization, their compliance with regulations and avoidance of fines are at stake. For the individuals involved in a project, the decision on who to select can serve as an impetus for promotion if the project goes well, but also career limiting if the project does not go well.
Based on this, we take client engagement seriously, handling them with significant care and attention. Our customers don't just need “more smart people,” “more data,” or “another software license.” Instead, they need a business partner that will pull together these aspects into a solution to their business problem. But, we know it does not stop there. They also need someone that will “lose sleep” with them.
At a practical level, what does it mean to be a business partner that “loses sleep” with a customer? While there are countless examples, the following comparison chart provides a taste of the difference.
| Traditional Vendors | Vendors that "Lose Sleep" | |||
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Ship It & Forget It You get the software and license key, and they wish you well. |
Manage To Success Work with the customer to ensure that the solution fits their needs. |
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Focus On Beauty Metrics Focus on what their system does by providing metrics that don't tie to the business result. As an example in the agreement management space, a vendor may count the number of pages that have been scanned by a system. |
Measure The Business Result Focus on what their customer needs. Counting the percentage of agreements successfully processed to comply with QFC and other regulatory mandates, including the percentage of manual effort required is meaningful to the business. |
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Provide Training They provide a few weeks of training to an internal team on their proprietary software. The internal team is not enabled for the business result and months of pain follow. |
Enable The Business Result The solution delivery model accommodates the result, not the technology. The work is not complete until the business result is achieved. |
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General Purpose Technology They are in love with their technology. It can be applied to every problem in any industry. While a vendor would not say this, listen carefully to the presentation of many – the technology is has a general purpose. |
Specific Industry Solutions Your industry context matters. The most wonderful cognitive solution for health care may not be a great solution to source legal entity actions or automate agreement data processing. |
Most vendors would rather count sheep than “lose sleep.” At Kingland, we think differently. Your success is tied to our success and we act that way. Our customer engagement model is different and serves our customers better because we align ourselves to your business outcomes.
Learn more about what makes us different, talk to an expert today.