Well, we’re back after a festive period of eating, drinking and crying like a big old girl at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life (“Zuzu’s petals! Zuzu’s petals!”… gets me every time).

Before the break we gave you part one of our “ideal customer” profile pieces, the Process Guy, who is usually our first point of contact within a company.

The Tech Guy is usually our second point of contact, although we sometimes find that the Process Guy and the Tech Guy are one and the same. It’s not as unusual as you might think for one individual to have the broad abilities and knowledge required to be both process and technology oriented. Indeed, even when the Tech Guy is a new individual, there is as much crossover as we generally see with the Process Guy; that is to say that our Tech Guy is as well versed in process matters as our Process Guy is technically aware.

Whenever we’re getting into a sales cycle with a new customer, it’s always the Tech Guy that first poses the really tricky questions. Where the Process Guy wants to know the broad strokes of what SMI Suite does, our Tech Guy is often more cynical, less ready to believe and, above all, concerned with the minutiae of how SMI Suite does what it does. He wants to know every last detail about every piece of functionality that SMI Suite offers. Often the Tech Guy takes some convincing because he hears from the Process Guy about what SMI Suite claims to do, and flat out doesn’t believe that it’s possible.

The flipside of that challenge is that once we have convinced the Tech Guy that our methods are sound (an hour spent with our extremely knowledgeable and passionate pre-sales consultants usually does the trick), he becomes a powerful advocate for SMI Suite within his own organization. In most cases, of our four Guys, it’s only the Tech Guy who is in a position to truly understand the power of what SMI Suite does as well as the technical mountains that we have had to climb in order to bring SMI Suite to market.

Next time: the Budget Guy

Tom