Asking The Right Question

Having worked on many consulting projects I’ve come to the conclusion that quite often, at least in my mind, I disagree with my clients in terms of what kind of questions they should be asking me.

It’s good to be asked about something you know the answer to, so why should I worry? But I guess I want to see a point to it all. And asking the wrong questions doesn’t get to a point. I’d rather be challenged to answer the right question, than find it easy to answer the wrong question. That’s why I think I’m drawn to ‘maverick’ companies, even if they are sometimes called ‘cultish engineer sweat shops’, who are absolutely infatuated with their technology. At least they ask the right questions.

So the question that I want to hear more clearly and more often is … “How do I ensure that my technology stays relevant tomorrow, and how do I get the right eco-system of partners around it that enrich it and produce value around it?”

In fact it would be not be true to say that our clients don’t ask us this question. But they ask it in fragments, compartmentalized, diluted with the specifics of the current sales cycle. It does come through, and I even heard it being asked outright once or twice, but not often.

Working on a various consulting projects this is a question that I would not necessarily be able to answer right away, or have the correct tools at my fingertips to scope for. That’s why it is a challenge, a challenge that I like.

So why do I like this challenge? Well, first of all I think that we are very quickly moving away from a world where vendors expect their partners to just sell their technology, to a world where they want their partners to engage with it and produce something incredibly clever and useful for everyone.

Now you might say what’s wrong with just selling? If customers just want to buy. To which I will answer that selling something because you know that people find it useful is clever. Which is very different to telling people that what you sell is useful, just because you have to sell it.

In fact there is a very good story about my grandfather who got stopped in the middle of the night in Ukraine by a traffic cop who demanded a bribe. And when my grandfather asked him why he wanted to be paid, the cop said because he’d been standing for hours in the dark, in the middle of nowhere. Why would he not be paid for that?

Anyway, it’s a change of tone from ‘we are the cleverest people in the room’ to ‘let’s get a room of clever people’.

There is some divergence of thought as to what a ‘clever’ partner looks like. And this is where I feel for the moment the transformation within vendor communities halts, and the sales engine kicks back in, and the vendor start looking for ‘bona fide’ partners that already have well established business and therefore will be able to bring in clients and sell. This is logical as it makes sense to look at partners whose practice has been validated by the market.

However, if these companies already got to that stage without the vendor, the likelihood of them deciding to move on that vendor’s technology looks somewhat unfavourable. And in my opinion by being well established, these companies are less likely to get engaged outside mainstream business and be transformational. Increasingly I find it more and more relevant to look at the efficiency of vendors’ incubation programs, understand their treatment of partners’ proof of concept efforts, and note the presence of technical program managers in their teams. These are indicators and tools that show that the vendor is challenging itself to be in the game tomorrow. These are the tools and indicators that I can use to answer the question that I really want to be able to answer.

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