With Timothy Chou

Do technology firms think there are ways to change the system to benefit both sides? Or are they solely concerned with expanding their margins, upselling, etc., as many CIOs believe?

Being a technology provider requires running a successful business.

I’m sure the CIO of every company in the world thinks about improving the margins of their company and selling more to your existing customer. This is true in everything from financial services to retail. Technology companies are no different.

What needs to change is, technology companies (or perhaps all companies) should move to thinking about a paradigm of “educate and select”—or what some consumer companies are calling ROPO (research online, purchase offline). If we thought of sales not as “selling” but educating, then in time the customer will purchase from the specialist that knows the most.

Think about big-screen TVs. It’s a decision process, which requires more than one participant and is for a fairly expensive product. I would conjecture that no one has been or will be “sold” a big-screen TV. Instead, each individual gets educated from a variety of sources, talks to their friends, and/or engages with their spouse (hopefully) so that by the time they walk into the retail outlet, they are asking for the 52” plasma display from Sony, model KV-980.

If we were to organize our selling around educating the customer, maybe it too would become merely a matter of selection.

This is the final entry in a series of four.

In between stints teaching at Stanford University, Timothy Chou served as President of Oracle on Demand, where he helped pioneer the concept of cloud computing. He serves on the board of Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB) and continues to invest time and treasure in a few young Silicon Valley companies. Timothy is the author of the landmark book, "The End of Software" as well as "Cloud: Seven Clear Business Models".