Compliance Business Development
Program Overview
Nearly every company’s IT organization is now painfully aware of the impact that regulatory compliance is having on their operations, and of the requirement to implement the proper technologies and solutions to ensure ongoing compliance. Failure to comply could mean severe fines and imprisonment for corporate executives. According to a recent survey of 350 public companies performed by A.R.C. Morgan, over 60% of CFO’s resign or are “pushed” when a significant material weakness is disclosed. And more than 86% of these material weaknesses were discovered by the audit firm (not the company or their compliance consultants). It is critical that companies have the right type of operational reporting systems, technologies and solutions in place to ensure the go-forward integrity of their operations and transactional systems.
For example, Sarbanes-Oxley 404 requirements include ongoing monitoring and risk assessment. Due to the November 15, 2004 SOX compliance deadline, many companies have made progress toward defining policies and procedures, but are now in desperate need of the proper technologies and solutions to identify and analyze the operational data for potential transaction integrity or control weaknesses, and implement proper solutions for compliance archiving, backup, storage, data management & migration, etc. They also need “rapid response” systems in place to fend off potential areas of audit concern. But, they are reluctant to actually purchase technology solutions without validated, respected expert assistance to ensure proper compliance with implemented compliance initiatives.
If asked, what would your honest response be to the following questions:
- Do you have credentialed and industry-recognized compliance business development expertise in-house to open doors into large volume strategic accounts?
- Do your current business development and sales teams have the bandwidth to “go deep” into strategic accounts to “compliance sell” all of the contacts in the decision-making process?
- Have you completed comprehensive compliance-related, detailed, quantified and prioritized compliance-related target customer lists?
- Do you have immediate access to hundreds of current, budgeted, critical and appropriate account compliance-related opportunities that you can deliver to your sales teams?
- Are all of your lead sources delivering fully qualified, volume, budgeted, authoritative, multiple contact, infrastructure & decision making detailed compliance-related opportunities?
- Do your lead development or sales professionals have the expertise to answer complex and tough compliance-related questions from savvy IT professionals?
- Are you ahead of competitors in initiating compliance business development?
If you can’t answer YES to all of the above, then an investment in the BusinessLaunch Compliance Business Development Program may be critical to your success.
As an example, BusinessLaunch recently set appointments for one technology company to meet with the IT Director of one of the world’s largest insurance companies. This IT Director is responsible for all technology decisions for all five of the company’s business units worldwide and had an immediate Sarbanes-Oxley requirement and large budget. The combined compliance expertise and reputation of BusinessLaunch and Parson Consulting helped open the door with this account and most importantly, provided key assurances to the IT Director that our client’s solution would indeed comply with audit requirements for their SOX 404 COBIT framework initiatives.
This made it possible for our client to introduce their solution and move this account rapidly forward to revenue.
To learn more about compliance business development, contact Bill Reed.
