Technically-intensive » companies base their development on their legitimacy, their operational and technical excellence, their capacity for innovation (technologies and processes), and their ability to manage technical, financial and even safety risks.

Their first culture is very often a technical one. This culture is a strategic asset, but it can lead to a lack of commercial performance and customer focus.

Sucked in internally, sometimes to the detriment of the customer’s concerns; More of a « technical response to technical needs » than a value proposition to meet the customer’s business challenges;

Sometimes insufficiently attuned to the customer issues that drive their needs;

Commercial relations with technical decision-makers at customers’ sites and insufficient relations with senior decision-makers;

Sometimes defensive, drawn towards risk management, to the detriment of a fair balance between delivery risk and possible commercial gain.

They can make progress by adopting value-centred attitudes and sales methods that are both commercially effective and perfectly suited to their technical culture.

You offer services and innovations with high added value, but your customers don’t recognise this value, and unfortunately this is reflected in your sales prices.

You have only two options: either you really lower your added value, your R&D, your ingenuity, and you try to maintain your prices to hold your margin, and you seek to succeed like a « commodities » pro, or you enter into a demanding « high value » dynamic and must have your value recognised by your prospects and customers.

But raising the level of perceived value of your activities, as perceived by your customers, will require you to adopt a « value » orientation in your communication with them, to focus more on their business issues upstream of the AO, than on their technical needs, and to implement a « Value Selling » communication and sales model.

You will be developing new offerings and new delivery methods in order to grow or even survive (digitalisation, our services and products, AI, turnaround, more structured managed services, etc.).

But the trajectory is going to be difficult. You know you have to maintain your historic business at the same time.

To succeed, you will need to seek out new « quick wins » that are emblematic of your strategy, and then communicate strongly internally to convince people and spread success.

 The old sales model probably also needs to be adapted or supplemented, and you need to be able to make several sales methods coexist, and to select internally, recruit and make successful business developers (synchronised sales and technical managers) with new skills.

You innovate (technologies, including digital, new processes, new business models, etc.), with a « save money » or « make money » focus, or ideally both. But for this to make sense, your customers and prospects must not take 95% of the profit you generate as their own!

But if your way of selling is « cost margins », in other words, if your communication with your customers is based on « how » you do things (with a price), then when your cost goes down, thanks to a relevant innovation for example, your customer will demand the gain and concede a tiny part of it to you.

And in highly innovative companies, particularly on the technical front, the overall mind set may focus more on the « how » than on the « why » and the value for the customer.