Sales Campaign for Sun Microsystems
Client Requirement
Sun Microsystems, a major IT company that had traditionally sold through resellers, decided to sell direct to its major users. One of their new account managers discovered that his customer was planning to spend £100m over the next five years on IT infrastructure, mainly on servers. Sun Microsystems, however, was not on the tender list as it was perceived to be a workstation rather than server manufacturer. The organisation, inexperienced at handling direct sales opportunities of this type, needed assistance to remedy the situation.
WPM's Involvement
WPM was asked to act as consultants for the sales campaign on the company’s behalf. WPM secured the customer’s agreement to a presentation as a pre-qualification exercise to determine whether Sun Microsystems was worthy to be considered for the tender list. The customer had to be convinced that servers, not workstations, were Sun Microsystems’ prime business and that they would deliver the required solution.
WPM Delivered
WPM orchestrated the preparation for the presentation in detail.
- On the day of the event all references to workstations were removed from Sun Microsystems’ reception area, corridors and conference room to be replaced by collateral on servers
- WPM arranged for another customer in a similar industry that had a server-based solution performing a similar function to that required, to present their own case study to build confidence in Sun Microsystems’ ability to deliver - they explained the benefits they were gaining and why they had chosen our Client as their supplier, giving, crucially, independent answers to the customer’s searching questions
- WPM arranged for Sun Microsystems’ top server expert to be brought over from the US to discuss future developments and reinforce credibility in this area
The customer was won over and Sun Microsystems was included on the shortlist. The customer, however, was concerned about the ability of any system to cope with the particularly high usage and throughput requirements. WPM arranged for a benchmarking exercise to demonstrate that all the acceptance criteria could be met. This was so successful that the customer decided to embark on an accelerated procurement activity for which Sun Microsystems was the only tenderer.
Benefits
- Sun Microsystems won a £5m pilot for the infrastructure project
- The customer took 3 months out of their procurement plan and, by getting their system sooner, achieved early benefits from their investment
Summary
WPM managed a sales campaign which transformed a sales opportunity from a near hopeless position, to ousting the incumbent supplier with a £5m pilot, for which there is enormous potential for on-going business at a low cost of sale.
