In past articles I have talked about building your IT-business alignment efforts, credibility and relevance by basing your IT priorities, budget and conversations on the things that the business cares most about. Critical to getting this done is to have conversations with your business stakeholders to understand what is important to them. You then need to translate your language about what IT is doing to relate to their critical initiatives, in their vocabulary.
So, how do you do this?
If you engage your business counterparts in a discussion about their area, what should you talk about? Here I’ve assembled a list of those questions to learn about your business and engage your peers in discussions about their part of the business.
Money
1. How does your company make money?
2. What are your sources of revenue? How much does each provide?
3. What are your sources of profit? How much does each provide?
4. What things are your company’s fixed expenses?
5. What things are your company’s variable expenses?
6. Where do you and your department fit in the expense picture?
7. Where do you and your department fit in the revenue generation process?
8. What can you do personally or with your department to impact revenue or profit?
Geography
9. Where in the world does your business operate? What things happen in which locations?
10. How is the revenue split among geographies?
11. How is the profit split among geographies?
12. What are the advantages that geographically dispersed workforce offers your company?
13. What are the biggest operational challenges the company faces with geographically dispersed teams?
14. What are the cultural considerations that impact how you operate in each geography?
Market
15. What markets does your company compete in?
16. Are your markets growing, shrinking or flat? Why?
17. How does your company’s growth compare to market growth?
18. What are the risks of your primary market changing and being less available over time?
19. How will you know? What are the most important triggers or changes in your markets to be watching for?
20. What is your primary advantage in the markets you serve?
21. What is your biggest competitive disadvantage in the markets you serve?
22. Where are the biggest opportunities for new markets?
Value Proposition & Strategy
23. How do you measure if your customers are successful? For them? For you?
24. How do your customers define whether or not their purchase was successful?
25. How much does your product cost the customer over the lifetime of owning it?
26. What is the most important thing the customer relies on your product or service to do for them?
27. How well do you do what is most important to your customer?
28. How does the customer measure the ROI of your product?
29. Who are your most successful customers? Are they profitable?
30. Who are your most profitable customers? Are they successful?
31. Why do customers buy your product (or service)?
Competition & Market Perception
32. Who is talking most about your product space externally? What are they saying?
33. How do prospects in your market talk about you verses your competitors?
34. What is being said about your company and products on message boards, blogs, and other social media?
35. What can you do personally to improve the discussion about your company and offers?
36. Who are your direct competitors? What are your indirect competitors?
37. How do your competitors answer these 100 questions?
Sales
38. How is your product sold? What are the steps in the process? How long does it take?
39. How much of your product is sold directly by your company?
40. What partners and other channels sell your product?
41. Which are the biggest sales channels?
42. What is the cost of each sales channel per dollar of revenue? Which are the most profitable?
43. Which channels provide the biggest source of referrals and new customers?
44. How are your internal sales people measured and paid?
45. How are your sales channel partners measured and paid?
46. How can they each make the biggest bonus or commission?
47. How do you get information from sales into your team?
48. How does your company train its sales channels?
49. What could you or your department do to make the sales team more successful?
Marketing
50. How much do you spend in marketing relative to others in your market?
51. What are the most important things marketing is doing this year?
52. What are the key marketing messages that are being promoted?
53. How does your company use the Web and social media to connect with customers and prospects?
54. How is the marketing organization measured?
55. What are the most and least successful marketing programs?
56. Who are the key industry analysts, mavens, spokespeople for your market? What do they say about you?
Finding Customers
57. How does your company find new customers?
58. What does marketing do to find new customers?
59. What does sales do to find new customers?
60. What makes your current customers refer new prospects?
61. Do your customer support or services organizations uncover new leads? Could they?
62. How can you personally help find new customers?
Service and Support
63. How do you provide support and service to your customers?
64. Which types of support do customers prefer?
65. Does your company invest to provide service as a competitive advantage or treat it as only as a cost?
66. What is the cost of support for each product line? Which have the highest support costs? Why?
67. Does the cost of support align with the profitability of the product?
68. Are there any bad support practices which damage customer relationships?
69. Are there any product issues which create too many support and service needs?
70. Do you make money on support? How?
71. Do you make money on service? How?
72. Do you give away service and support to generate new business?
73. How are the service and support teams measured and paid?