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You need to connect with the CIO or IT director, of course, when you are selling a solution. Also, you’ll need to show the CFO the value to what you are proposing. Getting a new system’s ticket punched by these two executives is standard practice in IT sales. But, there may be another angle. If your client has a risk manager and you don’t know him — find a way to get on his calendar.

We’re still pretty early in the millennium, but if the first decade is any indication, the next thousand years will be the domain of the risk manager. Financial busts have become commonplace, and natural and manmade disasters (including those resulting from terrorism) have caused profound loss. With these threats looming, businesses need to conceive of a broader set of business continuity/disaster recovery solutions than they did in the past — while also gauging the systems and applications needed to help them identify, monitor and remedy financial risk.

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After a sale is completed, all attention turns to implementation. Your client is looking to you to help turn its expenditure into an investment. The deployment and configuration of systems is crucial, of course, to the creation of value for your client. At the end of this process, there’s usually a knowledge-transfer exercise, in which you prepare your client to take full “ownership” of the new environment. This is also a sales opportunity: leave your client ready for anything, and the odds that you’ll be the first call for the next initiative skyrocket.

Training and knowledge transfer often become casualties of engagement fatigue. Both your implementation team and the client are eager to reach the light at the end of the tunnel, at which point the disruption associated with an implementation recedes, and everything returns to normal. Succumb to the temptation to rush training and knowledge transfer, and you assume two risks: client readiness and a tainted solution provider perception.

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Datacenter “greening” periodically goes in and out of fashion. Usually driven by broader economic factors, IT professionals tend to mull the notion of going green when the broader public debate over energy prices and climate change reaches a fever pitch. With the recent discussion at Copenhagen again bringing climate issues to the front of the global economic community, talk of green has again arisen in the IT world.

The latest from Forrester Research is that regulation won’t drive the adoption of green IT solutions. In a survey of IT professionals at 600 companies around the world, regulatory compliance ranked #7, garnering only 16 percent of responses. Unsurprisingly, cost drivers were most important. Sixty-six percent of respondents indicated that energy cost savings could lead to the proliferation of green IT solutions, with 42 percent citing the ability to cut IT operating expenses.

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If all you’re selling and implementing is technology, you’re going to have a tough time in today’s market. Your clients don’t need technology — well, they don’t need technology without an attendant business driver. This means that you need to have more than a passing knowledge of your clients’ business, and any solution you are selling should correspond directly to a business need. Of course, the more you know about your clients’ business, the better you’ll be able to make the connection between problem and solution.

The first tier of business-to-technology linkage involves the identification of pain points driven by business needs, but this is often too high-level to become an effective differentiator. Instead, you’ll need to dig deeper, gaining ground-level insights from the people who use the systems that you have to enhance, upgrade or replace. If your client sells shoes, for example, you need to know how the shoe business works. And if you have clients in highly regulated industries, such as finance or biopharmaceuticals, business knowledge becomes crucial.

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