(Stay tuned for Part Two on Monday.)
This time I’d like to relate a story that took place back in the early 90’s at a large French business intelligence software firm that’s now part of IBM — and how success got me fired.
My current passion is story-telling, so sit back and I’ll tell you a story.
I won a sales job with this firm and was given a list of 25 accounts or so. Working very hard, I got a bunch of prospects and won them all. At the next sales kickoff meeting, I was shocked when they announced my name as Top Rookie.
One of the names on my list was a GE division. I noticed that we were not doing a very good job on GE. Very tactical and vendor centric approach by this lady named Judy C. I decided to take a chance and ask if I could handle GE. They didn’t exactly say yes, but they didn’t say no either. If I was to get this opportunity, I’d have to use a lot of political license.
My idea was to use a very customer-centric approach. GE would be my employer, not the software company I worked for. Also, I needed reps all over the world empowered to sell GE. Though I had all of these ideas, my compensation plan still said “Regional Sales Manager.” But I got business cards that said “Global Account Manager for GE.” But there was no global accounts program, so I was making it up as I went along.
(In fact, the VP of the East and the VP of the US met with Mark M., head of purchasing and a notorious bad-ass. When these men shared their business cards, Mark threw both back at them, stammering “GE is a GLOBAL company. You can’t help us!”)
Another of my brainstorms was that in order for others to sell GE, I had to make it easier to sell than any of their other accounts. So Rory in Australia and Barbara in Italy needed help selling GE in order to focus on them.
The first thing I did was go to Amazon.com and buy books on GE. I read and read till I really understood the company. Then I started looking at our products through the eyes of GE.
Case in point, we sold business intelligence while GE was buying Digital Cockpits. This had to change.
My big break came when GE Capital decided to buy a digital cockpit. They gave us a mock-up of what the cockpit should look like. My presales person, John C. found a programmer down in Atlanta who in a matter of days, mocked up their vision.
Everyone wanted this deal. Oracle. SAS, SPSS, Cognos, etc. But I had the mock-up and, more importantly, the deep knowledge of GE. We won.
I didn’t stop there. I called the GE product leader, Egidio L., and shared my belief that it was up to him and me to make this work. A lot of programming was needed and they took six of our programmers and six GE programmers from India. So Egidio and I set a weekly conference call every Thursday at 2:00pm. We got right to the chase and fixed problems immediately.
I was blessed to have a superb project leader, Chirag Shah (he now works for Microstrategy.) Chirag was sharp and dependable.
The project was a huge success — GE had planned to roll it out to 14 — instead they deployed it globally to 144. Even more interesting, my fame across GE grew substantially.
Next big project was a Six Sigma Quality Management System at GE Appliance in Louisville, KY – coordinated by GE Fanuc. We had no such product in our price book. But we had a new analytics product that seemed to do a lot of what they want.
I contacted the product development team and they agreed. But how could we make the product fit their needs? I finally decided I’d need GE to sell the idea and contacted GE Fanuc. I explained that I needed their help. We flew to San Jose and met the product team. GE presented to us. The deal was done and in a few months, the client was delighted. My fame grew even more.
(On Monday, how a great job turned sour due to politics)
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