It is remarkable how some philosophies have stood the test of time. “Survival of the fittest” attributed to Charles Darwin is one such philosophy. A more modern version of this outlook would be the seminal book authored by Andy Grove when he wrote “only the paranoid survive.” I have always believed that those who reorient with rapidly changing trends and keep evolving outlast the rest. This holds true for every professional, every business model.

The days of evangelizing and selling to the IT department or the CIO are past due given the changes we are witnessing. The “SaaS”ification of apps, the adoption of AI, new players who can take data from anywhere and put it into a data lake which can be accessed by anyone and utilized all demand a rethink on traditional go-to-market approaches.

We already have recent technologies which are designed for specific customer segments like the legal fraternity or the medical fraternity. While the solution is a technological solution the customer persona is not that of the CIO alone. The CTO is chartered with apps that drive their business and the discussions we need to have with them on how we can help across the app development lifecycle. Large companies now have MTO – Marketing Technology Office whose charter is to identify tech solutions which help marketing perform better and scale. Be it automation, buying propensity identification or customer retention the plethora of solutions that is available to the marketing function are many and hence the need for a MTO to evaluate the best fit for the requirement.

It is the actual user of these technologies who have the need-gap, and the sales engine needs to approach these emerging customer persons and showcase the value proposition.

While portability of data across a multi-cloud environment is now established, new tools that allow various businesses to analyze this data on a real-time basis and make business decisions are where the competitive edge lies. Large e-commerce giants have their category managers leverage this to view, map, analyses and decide across the entire product lifecycle be it inventory management, real time fulfillment of changing customer demands and more.

The implications these provide a call to action to every entity of the IT value chain – Vendors, distributors, and partners alike. It is incumbent upon us to move beyond selling to IT and recast our GTM approaches to recognize new customer personas and restructure the whole sales pursuit.

To my mind staying current and competing for the future are the two cornerstones of any business strategy and it is incumbent upon all of us to sharpen our antennae to see changing signs and expand our outreach to these new segments and customer persona’s.

We at Technobind recognize this and are working on re-orienting the organization. This proactive reorientation should help us compete for the future and we are happy to share our observations and learnings with you all.

I would call this a manifesto for change. As cliched as it sounds, change is the only constant.

Those who do not change would then not become the fittest and corroborate what Charles Darwin pointed out in his seminal work, the origin of species.

Let us all become fitter and compete for the future.