How IT services get sold in Nigeria
The deal starts in a network, moves on WhatsApp, closes in a boardroom
Nigerian IT services firms win work through relationships: a church member who manages facilities at a bank, an alumnus in procurement, a satisfied client who mentions you at the right meeting. The first contact is almost always WhatsApp — often a voice note — and the early back-and-forth stays there. But corporate and bank clients then pull the deal into formal territory: vendor registration, documented proposals over email, procurement committees, purchase orders. A firm has to be fluent in both registers at once.
Reliability is the product, cash collection is the job
What Nigerian businesses buy from an IT partner is uptime in a hard environment: power that fluctuates, connectivity that drops, and infrastructure that must keep a banking hall or a logistics operation running anyway. That makes support retainers the best revenue in the business — and makes getting paid the defining operational skill, because delivery-to-payment gaps stretch long enough to sink an undisciplined firm.