The IT landscape is changing. Today, IT decision makers are not interested in seeing products or technologies in isolation. What they want to see is a solution that will solve their business needs. The key here is 'see' and not 'hear' about a solution. They want to ‘see’ a solution in action. Moreover, they want it customized for their setup and requirements. The biggest challenge here is that they don’t have much time.

Unfortunately, the traditional marketing approach is just not sufficient to handle this requirement.

The usual way of selling an IT solution is to first call up the IT Decision maker and fix up a meeting. Usually, the IT decision maker would call in multiple solution providers together and ask them to deliver a presentation. So you would be just 'one of them' delivering a swanky presentation to the IT decision maker. Once this is done, you have to do multiple follow-ups with the IT decision maker to ensure that your solution is remembered. You'd even send in lots of marketing collateral, case studies, etc to convince the IT decision about your solution. If nothing works, then you'd even try to bring the IT Decision Maker to your Proof-of-Concept Center for a demo.

At the end of all this, the IT Decision is only going to chooses one solution, possibly from the lowest bidder. Even if that happens to be you, the IT Decision maker will expect all promises you've made to be fulfilled by your solution. As the buying took a long time, and was based on presentations and months of follow-ups, many gaps might be left in the final implementation. A lot of expectations would have been built up. The end result might be a mismatch between promises, expectations and final delivery, leaving the you with a highly unsatisfied IT decision maker.