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

But we do tend to find that certain implementations go more smoothly than others and we’ve done a little soulsearching about why that is. The conclusion we came to was that, for whatever reason, we – and our customers – walk away from the implementation with the most satisfaction when there is a certain make-up of people on the customer side. In fact, if we were to build our model customer from scratch (say, by putting bras on our heads, hacking into a secret government computer and feeding it pictures of customers we admired) then there would be, at the very least, four key individuals in key positions.

We thought it might be interesting to share with you each of these four archetypes – the Process Guy, the Tech Guy, the Budget Guy and the Department Head – and see if they ring any bells. We’ll start with the Process Guy and get to the others in the coming weeks.

*disclaimer: while I’m referring to all these people as “guy” and will use masculine pronouns, it should not be inferred that there is any gender bias to our depictions of the ideal customer. I’m just not prepared to write “he or she” every time, and – rightly or wrongly – the accepted workaround is to default to the masculine.

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The Process Guy

The Process Guy is usually our first point of contact at any given customer. He’s the one who has a problem to solve – either he’s not able to get any reporting out of his ITSM platform at all, or, if he is, it’s a laborious process that usually means he has to ask someone on the BI team to generate a report, and wait a significant amount of time to get the report back.
Process Guy has a fire in his belly! He’s interested in process improvement, he’s familiar with ITIL and he is desperate to drive forward solid initiatives that will make a real difference to the way the IT department is run.

Interestingly – and perhaps surprisingly – the Process Guy often knows a lot more about the tech side of things than you might give him credit for. Maybe he used to be a ServiceCenter admin, maybe his background is in IT and he’s come latterly to the process side of things. He may well understand the problems with the ServiceCenter / Service Manager database with regard to reporting. He probably understands what an ETL layer does, and have experience with BI tools. In the instances when he doesn’t have all the technological details himself, you can guarantee that he’s buddies with the Tech Guy (who we’ll come to in part two) and makes sure that between them they know everything there is to know.

The Process Guy is the visionary. He can see not only the problem at hand and the potential solutions to it, but also the bigger picture and the reasons to want to improve the performance of the IT department.

He wants to take control, not rely on a BI team to generate his reports when he knows that (with the right tool) he could do it himself. And while he’s technically savvy, the thing that drives him is the end-game: the ultimate benefit to the business of process improvement.

Next time: the Tech Guy

Tom