Roadblocks : Value selling tech in ASEAN

Have you been in a presentation where you presented your solutions' value proposition and technicalities, only to have customers asking you the most basic questions? Or despite you having an excellent solution, it seemed like the only evaluation criteria was cost (despite the customer repeatedly stating that cost is secondary).

In my years as a tech vendor, I have had too many of such encounters. Sadly, I can only remember a handful of times that I've had a proper value proposition discussion with a customer. In an ideal world, the flow should start with a problem statement, the most appropriate solution, and finally the budget.Even though many ASEAN customers start with the same intent, the flow almost always deviates. Why does this happen so often in ASEAN?

Here are a few observations I have made about this phenomenon.

Senior leadership

Unlike the Americas or Europe, many CIO's or CTO's in ASEAN organisations are not necessarily tech savvy or qualified for the role. Some of them have risen to the ranks through long tenure and nepotism. I've been in discussions where the CIO/CTO regurgitates material they read from an Economist article and passes it off as experience.

Value propositions are extremely subjective and when explaining value to leaders who have limited competency, the challenge is compounded. Hence we often default to the simplest form of value comparison. Cost! (eg; $200,000 is a steal for a solution that does similar functions to a $300,000 offering). It is also not uncommon for these leaders to task their team members to perform technical evaluations of a solution but keeping the budget firmly in mind.

Skilled team members

With the exception of a few end-user organisations, it is common knowledge that tech vendors pay their technical resources way more salary than those in end-user organisations and that usually equates to competency. If you are skilled and aspire to better career growth, you should try your luck as a tech vendor rather than an end-user. This gap is not just pertaining to an individual, but it is also often challenging to have technical staff with skills across various domains (eg; network, storage, compute, containers and etc). Some end-users have tight IT staff budgets and the knowledge gap widens even further. In contrast, well-funded IT teams often have specialized staff in their respective domains of specialization.

"Kiasu" and "kiasi" - Fear of missing out and the fear of failure

This is closely related to the earlier comment on leadership. While tech adoption has genuine use cases, it is not uncommon for decisions to be made just because someone else is doing it. Case in point, moving workloads to the cloud and hyperscalers. I will not detail the pros and cons of embarking on the cloud, but certainly in the early days of adoption many ASEAN tech leaders were sceptical about moving workloads to the cloud. Regardless of whether they understood the value, the most commonly asked question is this.

Who else is on the Cloud? Am I the first?

It doesn't matter if someone else is first or already there. It comes back to the discussion about solving a problem. If they trust the competency of the team that's evaluating it and a leader with great foresight, it should be a decision made in the long-term interest of the organization as a whole. Don't compare yourself to others.

As the region matures, progresses and younger leaders come to the fore, I hope this trend will slowly fade. Having said that, it is not easy to change overnight. From changing pay structures to ousting legacy leaders, it may take years to see significant improvements. It's true that Singapore is often touted as the mature leader of the pack in the ASEAN region. However, there is still a large gap between our maturity and our Western counterparts. I hope that by then, I will be long retired or maybe (just maybe) a CIO myself (although that's unlikely gonna happen).