At HfS, we’re growing fast in a very competitive and volatile market… and with growth comes change – but change is always good if you ask me! The most fun in jobs is when you have changes – you learn new things, get new ideas and you meet new people to help accommodate the change.
HfS is always on the lookout for serious talent that can help our clients become even more successful. So happy days when I heard that some serious quality was on the lookout for some new chapter in his life. Sunjeet Ahluwalia has joined per August, and today I wanted to give you a little more background about him.
Bram Weerts, Chief Commercial Officer, HfS: Sunjeet, can you share a little about your background and why you have chosen sales as your career path?
Sunjeet Ahluwalia, Senior Director, Global Business Development, HfS: Having completed my Course in Metallurgy and Material Science, I took up my first job in 2001. Traveled all over India and experienced the diversity this great Nation has to offer. Sales were fascinating, and I met various interesting people all during my life.
With a sales career, you have a high level of accomplishment as you are directly the person responsible for making things happen. It is quite an adrenalin rush when you close a sale. You also get the satisfying feeling of providing your customers with products that they truly want and need, and you had a large part in facilitating and meeting their needs. Some jobs can be really redundant, and you might feel that you have not accomplished anything, but with a sales career, every sale is a direct result of your efforts.
Bram: Why did you choose to join HfS?
Sunjeet: While in Gartner, came across clients who spoke highly of this new upcoming company called HfS. I did spend some time to understand HfS and was very impressed by the depth and knowledge they bring to the industry. Two things that stood out were Social Media Impact and premium research that set HfS apart from others in their peer group. I wanted to be a part of this growth and contribute significantly to their success in APAC.
Bram: What are the areas focus on driving in your Sales role?
Sunjeet: Relationship and trust are two key pillars of Analyst and advisory industry. Aligning yourself to your client’s goal and priorities will help you become more credible. Being relevant to what your client needs are and trying to always provide them with superlative value surpassing their investments will be my key focus.
Bram: What trends and developments are capturing your attention today?
Sunjeet: Automation, AI, and Data-driven Analytics Capability are in my opinion redefining the way industries do and conduct businesses. Innovation isn’t mere a fancy term now; rather it is the necessity if you intend to keep the Brand high and retain your clients.
Bram: And what would you like to see different in the research / services industries?
Sunjeet: I wish research / services industries have a wider reach within the audience. It should be able to impact the way people work within their teams and hence enable them to achieve their personal and business objectives. Key decisions are formed using insights and hence its key to be very relevant and objective while we work with clients.
Bram: And, what do you do with your spare time?
Sunjeet:I enjoy reading poetries and listening to music. If I have more time, I probably will go for a swim or cycling.
Bram: If you could change one thing in Sales what would that be?
Sunjeet: People buy from people, and hence we should aim at superior trust based value added relationships. Discounting reduces credibility and hence that should not be a driver for a sales guy’s success.
Bram: Thank you for your time Sunjeet, it’s a real delight to have you onboard and work with you in these fascinating times!
But all is not lost! I see some very powerful paths Procurement can take to become a more appreciated and valuable business function in enterprises.
Procurement is suffering from a reputation problem
Many executives express their frustration with procurement frequently claim, “they just don’t understand what I need, and obstruct me from achieving my goals”. Procurement is often seen as that last hurdle before reaching the finish line like a police officer trying to find holes in your story, looking to give you a slap on the wrist if they can. Everyone tries to circumvent Procurement when they need to buy products or services.
The underlying issue often lies in the emphasis on the transactional side of procurement in enterprises. People are subjected to procurement processes and form-filling that are very time-consuming, valueless and inefficient, feeling like they’re being sent from one desk to the other.
Of course, there is a role for Procurement. Of course an enterprise needs to have expertise and capability in contracting, buying and using services from third parties. And of course rogue spending is an issue for enterprises. But it’s time to take the next step. If being restrictive didn’t bring you the seat at the table you envisioned, if ‘the business’ still doesn’t ‘get’ you and doesn’t take you serious, its time to change the tune. But how?
Guides of the As-a-Service Journey
I want to argue Procurement is in a unique position to reinvent itself and that we should love Procurement.
HfS sees a dramatic shift in services towards the As-a-Service Economy. Key characteristics of the As-a-Service Economy are:
More and deeper collaboration between suppliers and buyers
A focus on business outcomes
Usage of digital platforms, analytics and automation to facilitate the convergence of people, technology and process
Services that are multi-client, leverage new opportunities for efficiency and quality and focus on the customers’ customers.
Procurement can be the enabler of the As-a-Service Journey. Don’t look further…. Procurement should be the broker of capability. Haven’t you noticed how “IT Services” and “BPO” and “software” have become procurement categories in so many buyers today? As services and technology become increasingly commoditized, standardized and commonplace, the greater the opportunity for Procurement to take the lead in adding value beyond merely negotiating price points.
The future of the supplier-buyer relationship is collaborative engagement and that starts in the contracting phase. Procurement should have a clear vision on the way the enterprise wants to form relationships with suppliers, what the nature of the collaboration should look like and how contracts facilitate collaborative engagements.
Procurement Brokers of Capability
The key to becoming a broker of capability is to be the spider in the web. In my years as a consultant, I often didn’t have a formal team. I went out into the organisation, identified the people and capabilities I needed to tackle the problem, formed informal teams of the right people and made it happen with them. I was a fixer more than anything, understanding the problem, limitations, possibilities and I knew the right people and brought them together. Not always easy, but a lot of fun. This is how I envision the future of the procurement professional. Identify business needs (you do this by actually talking to these people, understanding what they have to achieve), dive into your network and get the capabilities together that are needed. If you take a partnership approach, look at relationships long-term rather than short-term transactions, people are willing to do a lot for you.
So what is needed to truly become Brokers of Capability?
Be a business function, not a finance function – Procurement should be immersed in business units to understand the business, understand the needs, understand the market. Business executives have to allow Procurement into their world, Bram was right to point to business executives as a source of Procurement’s woes.
Category Expertise – One of the hardest areas to fix for procurement is strategic sourcing and category expertise, especially in the tail of indirect spend. This requires deep expertise of the category and the market, which is a challenge for enterprises to build in-house.
Information – At the heart of every buying decision lies information. Procurement has more data at its disposal than ever before. Information and insights derived from all this data is critical for the evolution of the profession. Digital platforms have emerged and are quickly growing in adoption and capability. Advanced analytics are drastically improving the insights and decision-making processes for Procurement.
Relationships – Building and maintaining relationships, internally and externally, is critical for modern Procurement. Price isn’t everything and it’s definitely not a predictor for the willingness to go beyond the contract and take a relationship approach to the engagement. Time and time again in reference calls for HfS Research Blueprints and in our discussions with services buyers at HfS events, the best service providers are perceived to be the ones investing in the long-term relationship, going above and beyond expectations and contractual obligations to deliver real business value to the client. Incorporate these tenets in your sourcing practices and your enterprise will benefit.
End-to-end focus – Key to realizing business outcomes and benefits of good procurement are closed loop processes and follow through after the ink on the contract is dry. Turning theoretic savings into real ones is still pretty hard to achieve.
Tech savvy – Technology platforms with embedded process automation and advanced analytics are emerging at the core of Procurement. Procurement professionals need to be more tech savvy than ever before to make sure they use and leverage the available technology platforms.
Ok, we agree it’s Procurement’s job to know what is out there, what the quality of products and services are, what going rates are and which terms are acceptable. They are the ‘go to guys’ when you as a business executive need something to achieve your goals.
I’m not naive. I know there are still a lot of people in Procurement hiding behind procedures and forms, terrified of becoming obsolete without them, clueless what your business goals are.
The Bottom-line: It takes two to tango
Friends in Procurement, if you don’t have a vision of Procurement being a business facilitator, now is a good time to get one. And “business”, this asks for different behaviour from you as well.
A year ago, we took our first look at population health and care management business process outsourcing trends and service providers. This year’s update considers the increased focus and impact on health, medical, and administrative outcomes through BPO and BPaaS engagements. We cover the availability of skilled resources, increasingly intelligent automation, analytics, and improvements to and bundling with componentized, cloud-based platforms. It’s quite a list, and there are pockets of momentum that hold promise for delivering more effective healthcare operations for these changing times.
At the Heart of Healthcare
The healthcare industry is looking to put the people, their lifetime and lifestyle, at the heart of the business in order to drive better health and care experience at a lower cost. And healthcare organizations—payers, providers, and others in the ecosystem—are challenged to deliver on this set of outcomes, and bridge the old legacy world to the new As-a-Service Economy. As people take on more responsibility for their own health and care, they want quality, accessibility, and affordability. And every part of a healthcare operation—front, middle, and back office—has a role to play to make it a more “intelligent operation,” one that is consumer focused and results oriented.
A number of service providers are stepping in to help change the game, and partner to make healthcare business operations more effective, with an eye toward impacting these health, medical, and financial outcomes. We hear from service buyers that they are partnering increasingly for resources—to allow local clinicians more time and energy for interactions with healthcare consumers by rethinking what activity can be done remotely, through partners, or even automated.
In this blueprint, we take a look at the role of service providers in bringing together talent and technology to broker solutions through BPO and BPaaS engagements. The scope is:
Population Data Management and Analytics: identifying whom to target with what intervention
Consumer Engagement and Interaction: reaching out, engaging healthcare consumers
Utilization Management: processing authorizations, reviews, appeals and grievances
Care Coordination: coordinating care activity
Performance Management and Operational Analytics: program evaluation and assessment, quality and compliance reporting
Service Provider Landscape and Blueprint Grid Performance
As-a-Service Winners are service providers that are in collaborative engagements with clients, and making recognizable investments in future capabilities in talent and technology. These providers are also leading in incorporating analytics and BPaaS to deliver insight driven services:
Accenture: Sophisticated and innovative thought leader with a wealth of knowledge and experience looking to “change the game” in healthcare operations
Cognizant: Partnering and driving results with an increasing portfolio of BPaaS for population health and care management support
EXL: An operations management and analytics company that partners with the option of platform based and BPaaS services
Xerox: Coming out strong with refreshed focus on research-based population health that taps into healthcare heritage and recent acquisitions
The High Performers all execute well, are investing in future capabilities, but need to gain more consistency and traction among clients in defining and delivering against business outcomes, and using analytics in on-going services:
HGS: Building out a nicely comprehensive capability for enabling “healthy behaviors” and interactions between consumers, payers, and healthcare providers
Sutherland Global Services: Willing to align and invest in resources to partner with clients, creating a strong data-based starting point
Wipro: Using customer experience journey maps as a basis for helping healthcare address industry disruptions and drive outcomes
A new addition to the Blueprint this year, HCCA Health Connections (although not new to the industry) is a solid Execution Powerhouse with energetic, high quality clinical process outsourcing.
Dell has High Potential for increasing momentum for BPO/BPaaS for analytics and unique IP around imaging, social, and telehealth, and a strong ecosystem.
HCL shows innovation in enabling healthcare management through digital channels—mobility and telehealth—for the life sciences that could be used more in healthcare as well.
Picking up the Pace—What’s On the Horizon for Population Health and Care Management Operations?
In the year since the inaugural HfS Population Health and Care Management Blueprint, we have seen an increase in the use of automation, analytics, and software platforms, attention to talent development, expansion in the location of resources, and blending of talent and technology.
But the pace is slower than it could or should be, due to continued concerns about data privacy and security, locked legacy contracts, and “old habits that die hard” in procurement. Compliance both hinders and helps progress, with constant updates and requirements from the government, but also promotions and clarifications that are meant to increase interoperability, transparency, data access, and quality health care. We have to choose and commit to doing something in a different way to get a different result.
In Healthcare, more so than in other industries, service buyers are increasingly ready to switch out service providers that fail to help them evolve to a more flexible, automated, and insight driven operation. In our recent research, 66% of healthcare executive buyers—higher than any other industry—said they would likely look around when their contracts come up renewal. There is just so much at stake in the Healthcare industry now, between the driving forces of consumerism and compliance.
This side of the Healthcare Business Process Services Market—BPO and BPaaS addressing health and care management—is “poised to pop.” We have seen acquisitions and investments to get a handle on structured and unstructured data, change the mix in the workforce towards more use of automation and greater healthcare and analytics expertise, and momentum with one-to-many models and applications. We look forward to seeing how healthcare executives can partner with service providers to reinvent not just healthcare, but healthcare operations, and truly impact the health and care of consumers, driving toward higher quality, accessibility, and affordability.
The HfS 2016 Population Health and Care Management Blueprint covers market trends and direction as well as the analysis of 10 service providers: Accenture, Cognizant, Dell, EXL, HCCA Health Connections, HCL, Hinduja Global Services (HGS), Sutherland Global Services, Wipro, and Xerox. For more detail—including visuals of the market and contract activity and analyses of the service providers—click here to access and download the Blueprint.
The services industry, and technology industry, are full of ideas that keep coming around. And they often fail several times before they finally succeed. Cloud is a great example, as the groundbreaking successor to hosting and before that timesharing. Many pundits saw the value of renting capacity instead of owning it. The market just needed a few iterations before we found a viable technological AND business model for it.
So here we are, in the services industry talking about outcome-based contracts. Again. Outcome based is pretty important at HfS Research: we think it’s transformative enough to be part of one of the eight ideals of the As-a-Service economy (digital plug and play services require an outcome-based model.) And of course, my first reaction when outcome-based discussion arise is “what’s different this time?”
Here’s what’s NOT different. Outcome-based contract negotiations are a mess. Mostly for some really important reasons in order of when you’ll likely come across them if you want to try outcome based:
You have to know what an outcome is. Seems simple, and in some cases it might be. If you want to sign a BPO deal for claims processing, that’s not too hard. There’s a pretty standard definition of a claim, understanding of how to process it, and if it’s actually been processed. But if you’re going beyond basic transactional outcomes to broader issues like improved customer satisfaction or higher integrity in your supply chain, then you’ll need to spend a boatload of time defining an outcome properly.
Worse than point one, you have to decide what outcomes matter. As soon as someone gets the idea to do an outcome based contract, someone else in your company will come along and ask “why this outcome? Why not that one?” These kinds of discussions bring out some nasty internal arguments. Because sure, everyone can agree that raising the stock price is important and good. But once you get into more operational metrics, every business unit and every executive has different opinions and priorities to get there. Balancing everyone’s priorities to make sure your contract focuses on the right outcomes is a mess.
Then you’ll get into heated discussions about cause and effect. When you start to get into negotiations with your supplier, you’ll get into a debate about whether the supplier can claim victory in ALL instances, or only if the supplier can prove that the outcome was a direct result of its work. If an outcome happens, was it because of the service provider or external factors? Let’s say a supplier offers to reduce your supply chain costs by 15% through a consulting engagement and one of the categories in the engagement is fuel. The cost of oil drops and now your supply chain costs have dropped – having nothing to do with the supplier. This one will go around in circles for weeks.
What does an outcome even cost, exactly? If you’re paying for outcomes with little-to-no knowledge of the supplier’s cost structure then you have no idea what you should be paying for that service. It’s like cloud – take this price or leave it. So maybe the price seems fair compared to what you think you’re spending internally. During the negotiation, your only real negotiation lever will be if the bid is competitive and you can compare across suppliers.
Making services into a “black box” doesn’t wipe out your regulatory and legal obligations. During negotiations and continuously afterwards you have an obligation to vet suppliers for compliance to government regulation, making sure the supplier operates legally and ethically on your behalf, and follows appropriate security measures. You can’t wipe out this responsibility by saying you only get the outcome. If you only focus on an outcome, you can easily play the “I don’t care how you deliver it” card. But if your supplier achieves that outcome by using slave labor or being noncompliant with regulations, then you’re still liable since the supplier is part of your supply chain.
Post contract, you’ll start to resent your supplier BECAUSE THEY SUCCEEDED. Let’s say the contract agrees to pay on an outcome like volumes of sales and then every time sales goes up you have to pay your supplier. It won’t take long for you to decide you’ve paid them enough, in fact probably paid them two times over what you would have paid in a traditional contract structure. And you’ll turn on your provider – who’s doing an amazing job! (Maybe you put in a stop-clause that agrees to pay on outcome up to a certain amount of money, but that’s more likely for consulting/project contracts than ongoing outsourcing ones.)
Good luck during renegotiation. Remember the point about not knowing cost levers? Chances are your bargaining position will be even worse if you just want to renegotiate because without the competitive bids, you have no basis for comparison. Did the supplier use bots and completely automate the process to get the outcome? Are they primarily labor based? Some combination? If the supplier’s costs are going down, how can you know if you’re getting any of that savings back?
If that’s what’s the same, here’s what’s different: The As-a-Service economy depends on outcomes. Outcome-based contracts used to be something leaders did, and even then only in a few relatively rare situations. But now it’s becoming a requirement. Who has time in this fast moving world where everyone wants to just plug into partners and suppliers and go? Part of being plug-and-play means having an outcome pre-defined and ready to deliver.
No one has time for long complex negotiations. And even though today outcome-based contracts are long and laborious negotiation efforts, if we all keep working on them, we’ll get better at them. We’ll find ways to fix the problems I just listed. Just like timesharing, hosting and cloud, the idea is the right one. If we want to change our businesses and build a competitive future, then we need to start our contracts with the end in mind. We need to focus on what has to get done and not micromanage how it gets done. We’re getting closer as an industry all the time. HfS is working hard on research into this space right now. So when it happens, we’ll get there together.
We hear a lot about the cost of healthcare, among these being the high cost of additional treatments or elongated stays when patients fall in hospitals, and of readmissions when people who go home after treatment don’t follow care plans. It’s amazing to think that a solution could involve something as simple, cost effective, and comfortable as clothing, such as a garment made with Hitoe® (That’s hee-toe-ay, not high-toe!).
Hitoe is a fabric that is also a sensor, contributing heart rate and brain and muscle activity to analysis for health and care analysis and plans
Earlier this week, Adam Nelson, VP Healthcare and Pharma at NTT Data, came by the HfS Research office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a shirt. This shirt is essentially “living data collection wear.” When someone wears it, the fabric collects and transmits data such as heart rate and muscle activity. Data transmitted from the shirt shows (as we saw firsthand, thanks to Adam’s clothing of choice that day) posture and movement through a 3D rendering, and heart rate through an electrocardiogram. The system it feeds can be programmed to send an alert, such as when someone makes a sudden dramatic movement like a fall, or even a change in posture that indicates getting up (picture a patient that shouldn’t be getting out of bed), enabling a care giver to intervene or provide help faster. It also shows data on muscle activity, helping to determine movement versus atrophy, as input for rehabilitation plans.
There are healthcare machines that capture and transmit the same type of data. But a garment made with Hitoe fabric could mean one less “hookup” during care and treatment. It also means that someone could be monitored remotely versus spending time in a hospital for the same reason. Also, compared to machines, the fabric seems pretty comfortable to wear, and is less expensive to buy and use at scale. So it could help address patient comfort, refinements in care plans, hospital and care costs, and even less waste in the environment. Hitoe, a partnership between Toray Industries and NTT, uses nanofiber technology, bringing the threads incredibly close together, with an electropolymer adhered, to monitor vital signs and send signals to the cloud (but it can also be put in a washing machine). Then, using something like the NTT DATA Optimum Exchange integration platform, the data can be combined with electronic medical records and other data input for patient data analysis to impact diagnosis, treatments, and care plans. And, by the way, creating a services opportunity too, for NTT DATA (and eventually, for Dell Services as the two come together).
A solution using Hitoe doesn’t require a lot of adjustment in a person’s life to use it, increasing the potential for engagement in their own health and care
This example of “IoT” caught my attention in particular because it is so approachable—it’s clothing, the most literal example for the new wave of “wearable” technologies that are becoming more commonplace. The fabric can also be sewn into a ball cap, for example, and capture brain activity, for use in diagnosis or treatment. While one version we saw fit snugly, to be used by fitness and sports programs, another looser fitting garment option (nylon) feels like the softest sheet with the highest thread count imaginable. The key is to find the balance of comfort and practicality—it has to consistently capture and transmit data that is uninterrupted by shifts in the clothing, and clinicians needs to trust this new data source. NTT DATA is working with an array of partners, including IndyCar driver Tony Kanaan whose team uses the heart rate and muscle activity data analysis to coach him during races, staving off fatigue and arm cramps. Hitoe-based clothing, worn comfortably and automatically transmitting data that can be combined with electronic medical records and monitored and analyzed, seems to hold promise for increasing the comfort and reach of health and care, as well as the impact.
We’ll wait to see how NTT DATA unpacks the potential that Hitoe represents for healthcare. In the meantime, here’s a video (link) of Tony Kanaan tearing up the IndyCar tracks as he tests out Hitoe in the field—transmitting heart rate and muscle activity that helps his team support his performance—that may provide greater inspiration that any description.
People love status; that’s just the nature of the beast. But wanting something and then going out and getting it can be an insurmountable hurdle. So sometimes people need to clarify what they want and why they want it. If you see yourself as a leader, have a quick look at the “five questions mirror.” If you can’t get past this list honestly, save yourself some time. You’re not a leader. That’s not all bad—you can still do something cool and be popular some place.
1. Honesty: Do you really think that being a leader in business is a popularity contest? Hell no. You are the messenger of good and bad news, so deal with it. Stop sugarcoating the damn thing and just deal with it. Many times, I have lost confidence in “leaders” that say one thing and then, in the end, they do an 180 and act like nothing needs to be done. Don’t lead if you can’t make decisions. And honesty toward yourself and others is a big part of making decisions.
2. Lead by example: You are no exception. If you think you are an exception to the rules, what do you think the rest of the team will think and eventually do? It is a rhetorical question so do not even answer that one. If you don’t do what you expect others to do, why should they even try? If you want results, make it clear from the start why you can and why others can’t. This can be based on rank, income, type of haircut. I don’t care, as long as you make it clear from the start.
3. Be consistent: The moment you feel you can skip your good advice, just keep it to yourself. You’ll look ridiculous, and you won’t win hearts and minds with this approach. Maybe you should think a bit more about what you meant before you say it. Because clawing back is never the way forward. Pick your losses and learn from them. Telling your folks one thing and doing something different yourself? Come on, don’t waste my time.
4. Listen to others: Listen as much as you can, do it for everyone who has something to tell you. Then, among their stories try to find the moral, the lessons that you wouldn’t have had the chance to learn otherwise. Yes, it is your decision, but it does not always need to be your idea. We are now in the land of making money and pleasing customers, so stop your teen attitude and grow a pair.
5. Emotional stability: If you have some issues back home, or you feel people don’t love you anymore, see a professional who’ll listen. But don’t take that baggage with you to the work floor. Accepting help is professional and very 2016, so don’t feel too proud to give in to it. Stop leading for a while and learn so you can pick leadership back up again when you are back on track. Then you can help people that face the same difficulties through this awkward period in their professional careers. Yes, you are never too old to learn. Pride is all between your ears.
Bottom line: People think that being a leader is just a title and a big paycheck. We have seen so many businesses that rise and fall in the past 16 years because of a lack of real leadership. Proud folks that gave it their best, and thought that was all it took. No one is ever a 100% success. But you can do your utmost to achieve perfection—even if it is elusive. People who always agree with you won’t bring you to a higher level. What do we all gain from this sheep mentality? Stand up and speak your mind. Accept periods in your life that we all have to face, then deal with it and come back even stronger. We are not all leaders, so as long as you make your point and do it with decency, you can tell your leader how he can lead better.
Doing business is all about making successful deals happen and negotiating them effectively. Getting deals done right says something about your own personal negotiating capabilities, but most importantly, it speaks volumes for your company’s brand.
By following the following five simple tips, you get a better sense of what to do before entering the process of making a deal.
Understand what you are selling: Make very sure you understand your core business. You can only negotiate what is there and what will ultimately be delivered. Understand what people can do within your firm, or what your software is really capable off. Only when you truly understand your capabilities, can you negotiate the best deals for your firm.
Be aligned with your internal team: Make sure that your team is aware of your progress when entering negotiations. You do not want them to walk into your line of fire because you need to be in control. If you are not aligned internally, then don’t make a deal. If you do not have the support of your team to deliver what you are selling, you are in serious trouble. No one wants to work with a sales person who sells hot air then runs for the hills once the deal is done. You sell a bad deal your firm can’t deliver; you will quickly inherit a terrible reputation that you could get stuck with for a very long time. So make sure your internal agenda is in order before starting the negotiation process. I use the parent approached here. Daddy said no, and so did Mom.
Know your competition: Make very sure you understand the competition in your core business. Know what they offer and their pricing and services that come with it. Never take someone else’s word for it – make sure you know what you’re up against. Deals are often made based on trust, but trust is earned and is never based on assumptions. And really make sure you sell your firm’s value, not just try and react to what your competition is selling (or what your client is claiming your competition is selling). It is not always possible to compare apples with apples, but you need to be able to explain your own firm’s value and approach – and do it very effectively.
Stick to your plan: Never abandon your calculations. This has nothing to do with ego, although people love to play that card. Ego should never be part of negotiations. Only inexperienced people use their egos or job titles, and they always fail in the long run. If you take your clients’ and your own business seriously, your negotiating plan will always back up the numbers.
Make sure it is all about doing business: Don’t you ever make it personal. There is no “me” in negotiations. You deal in the “we” form because it is never personal. Unfortunately, there are many people out there that like to annoy you, but if you follow steps one through four, you will frequently achieve a very positive outcome.
So always stay true to yourself and your company’s values. Keep communicating and only sell based on value. In the end, personal value and business values are the most important aspect of deal negotiations. Value is in the mind of the buyer. If it is not, why are we negotiating?
There was a time when “learning on the job” meant you were an apprentice or a “newbie,” someone with little practical experience. However, today, “learning on the job,” is a critical activity to do all the time, as digital technologies and business models change the way we work, not a little, but quite significantly and often at a breathtaking pace. There is no defined curriculum for the pace of change in today’s businesses—it’s a capability we must all be very adept at—dealing with a constant flow of new ideas, new technologies and ambiguity that takes us outside our comfort zones.
The expectation today to drive faster time to market with new ideas, faster response to queries, and faster results from the work we do is also impacting the services and outsourcing industry. This industry grew up based on a culture of “getting the job done faster, cheaper, more efficiently”… and as those expectations are met… it’s still true. And because many companies can meet the cost reduction baseline, differentiation now depends on quality, innovation, and not meeting but beating expectations. And that means constantly evolving.
Do you need to shake up your outsourcing engagement to redefine the value and create a new way of working together? A way to bring “both sides” back to the table? To build on a trusted relationship, one that is collaborative? Nothing creates a team like solving a problem together. There needs to be some degree of trust in place—either through experience or through reputation and recommendation. Design Thinking is also gaining interest and traction as a way to identify and solve a problem as a team in a services relationship. The bottom line is that the way forward for outsourcing—service buyers and service providers—is based on willingness to learn… experiment… and start over.
On the Job: Learning by Doing is the way forward
To make it work, service providers—and many service buyers too—need to step out of the risk averse and “no fail” “yes” culture. By nature, Design Thinking requires more of a “learning by doing” approach. And it may take awhile to yield measurable results. In one example, a service provider launched a Design Thinking exercise to address a very general interest—to reduce the cost of their collections process. Reducing collections would help the client but also may hurt the service provider as that was their job. But this problem of the cost of collections is not unique to that one client or to one industry, so anything learned could likely be reused.
While the project was focused and undertaken with a specific client, the learnings, regardless of whether they led to more work for the client, would still increase the understanding of the service provider team of the consumers in that industry and the experience they were having at the time. In this way, it became a learning exercise as well. It also focused the service provider on the clients’ consumer base, increasing the understanding of the context of their work.
The interaction between the service provider and the service buyer’s customers brought to light some opportunities and challenges that would not have been noticed without a service provider employee “shadowing” someone living the process that had been in place for years. This effort was not about changing the process per se, but about changing the focal point from the process itself to “who” was in the process—to the experience and the desired outcome. That’s a pretty new way of working in the outsourcing industry.
From the observations and interviews, and studying data collected over time from its call center, the service provider came to the table with the client with an informed, but different, perspective, and with some ideas on what to do next. Some of these ideas were ones that interested the client and led to further plans and projects. Some were not, and others were simply put on hold. The point is, the service provider took the first step to say, let’s try this—with the client’s permission and participation—and invested in those first steps.
The Bottom-line: It’s about courage, budget and stories
This exercise tapped into the three partnership “Power Ups”—the courage of the service buyer to let the service provider get close enough to their customer base to interact with them personally; a budget for the shadowing and testing ideas; and stories—those of the consumers that drove the next steps toward change and business impact—and that of the project overall. Are you ready to tap into your inner “gamer,” and partner to Power Up to drive real, impactful innovation?
Superhero movies have been particularly popular over the past several years, but long before then they’ve been a staple of our culture. We love the hero coming to save the day, helping fellow citizens and making the world better. In the movies (and in real life) there are superheroes who save countless people from human trafficking, sweat shops, and other dangerous conditions. I want to be a superhero and do these things too. And guess what? I’m going to do it. How? By helping companies buy IT products and services ethically and by helping suppliers create new opportunities for themselves and their people.
Will you be a superhero with me? Here’s what we can work on together to make our world a better place:
Buyers, make it your mission to use sourcing for the good of your company and all workers/locations touched by a deal.
Source ethically. Searching for the lowest cost labor (and then negotiating even lower rates) often can lead to firms ignoring warning signs of poor ethical labor practices. Don’t be one of the companies that will choose the lowest price over a supplier that treats it workers fairly and gives them good working conditions.
Don’t rush through compliance and treat it as a “check the box” activity. Use compliance and regulatory requirements to shine a light on where your value chain can be improved. Try to exceed regulations on supplier ethics and work practices.
Monitor, test, and remediate on supplier compliance obligations. It’s expensive, annoying, and time consuming to audit whether suppliers were telling you the truth on their security, compliance, and other obligations. Do it anyway. It’s important for your legal and regulatory obligations. It’s also important for you as you try to make the world better. Hold your suppliers accountable – make them fix what’s wrong or pick different suppliers.
Suppliers, use new technology to create opportunities. Don’t just settle for doing the same thing with fewer people or for less money.
Use automation to find new ways to employ your talent and spend more on retraining before choosing staff reductions. HfS’ latest research shows automation taking away about 1.4 million jobs. Will you just take those jobs (and people!) out of your company, or will you find new things for them to do, new places to invest, new frontiers to explore? Don’t get lazy and settle for doing the same thing faster and cheaper. Find new things to do and create more opportunities for your people and your clients’ people.
Show clients your worker conditions and how you’re making the world better for your people and the communities where they live. Clients need to know you’re following legal and ethical practices. Go beyond that to proactively showcase the programs you have in place to enhance the lives of your workers. Turn corporate social responsibility into a differentiator.
Follow compliance guidelines in practice, not just on paper. Just like buyers need to make sure they’re not just “checking boxes,” suppliers need to make sure they follow the spirit of these regulations and use them to drive business and worker improvements.
Influencers (analysts, deal advisors, self-proclaimed evangelists,) Find and expose areas where the market is hurting workers and communities, and talking about ways to fix those areas.
Educate the market on opportunities coming from new technologies and service models. Many of us in this space are automatically attracted to new things and shiny objects, so this one might not seem difficult. But as you look at these new areas, get beyond the sunshine and roses to discuss downsides and how to avoid them or to balance those negatives by positives in other areas. Explain to buyers why ethical sourcing is important for their specific engagement and for the market.
Help buyers find suppliers who can collaborate on the superhero-mindset of the market instead of road-blocking it. Clients that want to find suppliers who are legitimately invested in avoiding issues like poor worker conditions need help from advisors who feel the same way. Make worker conditions, people issues, and other similar areas a more explicit part of selection criteria and educate buyers on how to validate supplier responses to those criteria.
Guide suppliers to find ways to deliver services that treat employees fairly, serve market needs, and create growth opportunities for both suppliers and clients. Just as suppliers should find ways to expand the market as new technologies emerge, influencers should work with them to discuss how suppliers can operationalize their ideals.
With no physical danger to ourselves, we can help stop poor working conditions, human trafficking, and a host of other challenges affecting the world right now. We only need to do our existing jobs well. I want to do that. I want to be a superhero. What about you?
At HfS, we’re growing fast in a very competitive and volatile market… and with growth comes change – but change is always good if you ask me! The most fun in jobs is when you have changed – you learn new things, get new ideas and you meet new people to help accommodate the change. Nine months ago, we needed to add more firepower to our sales function. To be precise, we needed top sales quality that could thrive with the HfS mentality and culture. We found that person in Samyr Jriri (see bio), and today I wanted to give you a little more background about him.
Bram Weerts, Chief Commercial Officer, HfS: Samyr, can you share a little about your background and why you have chosen sales as your career path?
Samyr Jriri, Vice President, Global Business Development, HfS: Next to having owned a small restaurant and antique furniture business, I started out working in the Telco sector here in Belgium. That was just at the time when the monopoly held by the – at that point – state-owned Telco provider, was broken up, and I joined it’s first big competitor. After spending about five years working for the two largest Telco providers in Belgium, I joined Microsoft where I focused on the upcoming Dynamics platform and later on became a generalist, managing a portfolio of top and mid-market clients. In those days I wasn’t too familiar with the research industry yet until I moved to London and joined Gartner. There I spent seven years, mainly working with startup and midsized tech providers, as well as helping set up the account management team for their Supply Chain business in Europe post the AMR acquisition during my last year there. After that, I went to Kea Company, a consulting business in the analyst relations industry, before joining the HfS team. Sales were always in my blood I guess, I always had an interest in this multi-faceted discipline, from the perspective of an individual contributor as well as from sales leadership point of view. It’s one of those arty sciences that touches upon many principals that are applicable in daily life. I also always enjoyed the meritocratic character of a pure sales role, where I think this philosophy had a motivating effect on me.
Bram: Why did you choose to join HfS?
Samyr: Being active in the research industry for quite some years, I was already familiar with HfS before joining. I guess HfS had a high likeability factor as a new upcoming brand, but my sympathy for HfS went further than that. The As-a-Service Economy really isn’t covered by any other analyst firm in the way that HfS does it, and it profoundly resonates with where the market is going. On top of that, I liked watching this ‘new kid on the block’ who came to challenge the conventional business models of the bigger analyst firms – and successfully so! Everyone talks about change, innovation, sharing and all that good stuff, but in practice, we often see the low-risk safety approach. So for a young research firm to put out 70% of their punchy and high-quality publications for free, shows a great understanding of how information and insights should be treated these days, as well as courage to do so in today’s economy. That was all before I got to meet the team here, where I discovered the pleasure of being part of the HfS family.
Bram: What are the focus areas on driving your revenue?
Samyr: The research and advisory business are all about the relevant exchange of information and insights that fuel business decision making. What we sell is not transactional, nor is it tangible, so relationship and trust are essential. In our efforts to grow the business, we focus on matching our capabilities against our clients’ priorities, as well as ensure that the ecosystem we build up is compatible with the trends we see happening in the market. Sales are the growth engine, which fuels the investments in talent and content, which in turn fuels business growth and market influence. This principal needs careful discernment.
Bram: What trends and developments are capturing your attention today?
Samyr: I think that we are living in great times, there is great insecurity of course, but great opportunity equally balances that. It’s a cliché sentence, but it seems that the fabric of our current organizational structures is being pressured so much that we will start to see real change in how people organize themselves from the bottom up. It can be observed in the business world as well as socially and politically. The automation trend is a great example; there are many doomsday predictions of disappearing jobs and the redundancy of human labor. This only used to be true for mechanical processes, today it is almost equally applicable to cognitive processes. It’s the organizations’ actual choices that will determine whether we will experience the automation continuum as positive or negative. One thing is for sure, at some point, the entire organizational premise on which automation solutions are built will need to be revisited. This will initiate the real change.
Bram: And what would you like to see different in the research / services industries?
Samyr: We already see the beginning of an important trend that I would like to see move a little bit faster: companies should refrain from taking a directive role towards their service providers by just telling them what they want from them and move towards treating them as equal partners, which allows for more dialogue leading to better solutions. Only when this dynamic is truly in place from both sides will we see real innovation. But it takes some time to learn to let go. It remains hard to let complete control slip through your fingers in exchange for projected innovation and improvement.
Bram: And, what do you do with your spare time?
Samyr: I love cooking; I am a bit of an audiophile, and I enjoy traveling as well as hiking.
Bram: If you could change one thing in Sales what would that be?
Samyr: I think a lot of sales efforts across markets have created a dynamic that is seen as normal when it comes to negotiations. If you can get a 50% discount on a deal, you might be happy with that cut. However, I see that as a total loss of credibility. Every company is trying to create customer loyalty, meaning no matter how transactional your business is, you need to build trust. A correct pricing strategy should therefore not allow for ridiculous discounts, which in the long term only creates unnecessary confusion with the buyer, as well as often cannibalizes long time opportunity for the seller anyway.
Bram: Thank you for your time Samyr, it’s a real delight to have you onboard and work with you in these exciting times!
The services industry, and technology industry, are full of ideas that keep coming around. And they often fail several times before they finally succeed. Cloud is a great example, as the groundbreaking successor to hosting and before that timesharing. Many pundits saw the value of renting capacity instead of owning it. The market just needed a few iterations before we found a viable technological AND business model for it.
