The 5 Questions Every IT Buyer Asks Before They Shortlist a Vendor
Let’s look at a typical scenario in IT sales. A potential buyer is evaluating vendors for a significant engagement. Your company is on the initial list – maybe through a referral, maybe through a LinkedIn search, maybe because someone in their team came across your content. The buyer’s team spends 20 to 30 minutes researching you online. They look at your website, check your LinkedIn, and read whatever they can find about you. And then they decide to move on. They don’t share a specific “feedback” or email with you. The result? Your company never even made it to the conversation stage. What happened in those 20 to 30 minutes? What were they looking for? What did they not find? In our experience at Midas Touch, working with 250+ IT services companies, the answer mostly traces back to five questions. These are the questions every serious IT buyer asks before they decide whether a vendor is worth a conversation. They may not always ask them out loud, but they are always looking for the answers. Question 1: “Have You Done This Before for Someone Like Me?” Before a buyer thinks about your team size, your technology capabilities, or your pricing, they want to know one thing: have you solved this specific problem for a company that looks like mine? Not a similar problem or a related engagement in a different industry. This specific problem, for this type of company, and with measurable results. This is why generic positioning tends to damage IT services companies. When your website says “we help enterprises with digital transformation,” you are speaking to everyone and convincing no one. If the buyer reading your website is a CFO at a mid-size manufacturing company looking for a partner to modernise their ERP, they are not looking for a company that does everything for everyone. They are looking for a company that has clearly done this before for someone like them. The companies that consistently make shortlists are the ones that have documented proof -real case studies with named problems, specific approaches, and real outcomes. Not vague testimonials. Not client logo strips without context. So, ask yourself honestly: If an IT buyer in your target segment visited your website right now, would they find a clear answer to “have you done this before for someone like me?” If the answer is no, that is the first thing to fix. Question 2: “Can I Trust These People?” Shortlisting a vendor is a professional risk. The person championing a vendor internally is putting their judgment and their reputation on the line. If the engagement goes wrong, they will answer for it. So before a buyer goes to bat for you internally, they are looking for trust signals. And trust in B2B is not built through advertising or clever messaging. It is built through evidence of consistent, credible expertise over time. What does that evidence look like in practice? It is the founder who posts regularly on LinkedIn with genuine insights. They don’t care so much about promotional content or shared articles. They look for original perspectives on problems their buyers are actually grappling with. It is the company blog that publishes educational content that helps buyers think more clearly, even if they never hire you. It is the case study that is honest about what was difficult, not just what went well. The question a buyer is asking is not “Does this company seem trustworthy?” The question is “Can I find enough evidence of their competence and integrity to justify recommending them to my leadership team?” Question 3: “Are They Talking to the Right People in My Company?” As we know, the average B2B technology purchase involves 13 people across the organisation. The IT Head who is evaluating you has peers, a CFO, business unit leaders, and a management team who will all form views about your company. When your positioning, your content, and your proposals speak only to the technical decision maker, the other twelve stakeholders in the buying group have nothing from you to work with. Buyers shortlist vendors whose communication is mature enough to speak to multiple audiences. The CFO needs to understand the business case. The procurement team needs to understand your vendor credentials and stability. The business unit leader needs to understand the implementation impact. When your company’s public presence – website, content, LinkedIn only speaks the language of IT, you are leaving the rest of the buying group to form their own impressions without your input. The best IT services companies we have worked with understand this instinctively. Their case studies have a business outcomes section, not just a technical summary. Their founder’s LinkedIn content occasionally addresses business leaders, not just technologists. Their website has a page or a section that speaks to the business value of what they do, not just the technical features. It is a small shift in perspective. The impact on shortlisting is significant. Question 4: “What Makes Them Different From the Other Five Vendors I Am Looking At?” Think about what a buyer sees when they research five IT services vendors in a single afternoon. Five websites that all say cloud, digital transformation, cybersecurity, agile delivery, customer-centric. Five LinkedIn company pages with similar follower counts and similar content. Five “About Us” pages with nearly identical language about passionate teams and innovative solutions. How do they choose? Often, they default to the vendor they have heard of most, the one with the most recognisable client names, or the one that a peer recommended most strongly. In other words, whoever has the strongest market presence wins. Differentiation in IT services is genuinely hard. But it is not impossible. The companies that answer this question well have usually done one of three things. All these things are a result of deliberate positioning decisions, sustained over time. Question 5: “What Happens If This Goes Wrong?” IT projects have a well-documented history of running over budget, over timeline, and under-delivering on the original promise.