HP Mounts 9,000 Midmarket Account Mapping Offensive With Partners
By Steven Burke, ChannelWeb
Feb. 4th, 2010
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HP (NYSE:HPQ) has embarked on an ambitious account planning and mapping strategy aimed at working hand-in-hand with partners to win business together in what it has tagged as 9,000 U.S. SMB, emerging growth, midmarket accounts.

The new midmarket account strategy marks what may well be the biggest sales changes in the history of the company aimed at getting HP partners, HP sales reps and HP's top executive team all working together, hand-in-hand to sell more of HP's broad and deep enterprise product line from servers to storage to networking products into what many view as the most profitable segment of the IT market.

The detailed account planning and mapping means significant changes for how both partners and direct sales reps work in midmarket accounts to win business. The long and short of it is HP is going to war with a new sales model to win net new business with an arsenal of sales tools aimed at getting HP and its go-to partners in front of those 9,000 midmarket, emerging growth customers.

The U.S. SMB Enterprise Business Led sales map looks like something out of a war room with needles pinpointing the 9,000 major US accounts. HP has done detailed account mapping focused on size of the IT budgets in those 9,000 accounts with 6,581 of the accounts carrying an estimated IT budget of $300,000 or less and 2,500 of the accounts with carrying an estimated IT budget of $1 million or less.

HP's top enterprise partners have combined with HP's sales managers to do the detailed account profiling and mapping and those partners have been assigned dozens and even hundreds of accounts all over the U.S.

HP's stated goal with the sales changes is to grow at least two times the market growth rate. That means taking share from the likes of Dell, Cisco, Oracle/Sun and IBM by leveraging HP's $115 billion heft as the world's largest supplier of computer products. HP is also taking advantage of a new, more aggressive, nimble and charged up sales team that is willing to make snap pricing decisions on the fly that would have been unimaginable years ago. "We are all about displacing the competition," says one senior HP sales executive. "We are not playing nice anymore. We are taking the game to them."

Taking the game to the competition also means "raising the bar" and turning up the heat on both HP's sales teams and partner's sales teams to win more business. Ultimately, HP's channel goal is to establish and drive what is calls a "focused and accountable" set of ESSN partners dedicated to selling HP's full converged infrastructure product portfolio in those 9,000 accounts.

The strategy already has partners working side-by-side with HP's inside and direct sales teams to team together with an all out sales blitz aimed at getting more wins in those 9,000 accounts. For example, HP is now inviting partners into its Conway, Ark. inside sales operation with a 300 strong HP inside sales team doing call blitzes to get sales appointments for HP partners.

That cold calling is just one example of a combined sales effort aimed at getting the business. HP is also stepping up to offer sales support from top HP executives, including HP CEO Mark Hurd, to win deals and combine with partners to get unsolicited sales proposals to those 9,000 accounts.

"Integrated is greater than the sum" is the new HP mantra, according to HP Vice President, Emerging Growth Accounts, Enterprise Business Sales Kevin Hooper. He says all of HPs direct and inside sales reps, partner reps and enterprise partners are for the first time all aligned under the same sales model.

"We need to be integrated as a team, the inside sales team, the outside sales team and our partners that are going to solve the problems for our customers," says Hooper.

"It's not enough for us all to show up in the same room," he says. "We have got to get paid together the same way. We have got to win together the same way. We have got to be managed together the same way." Hooper says HP's various direct sales teams that are working with partners have a "channel positive compensation model" that allows those sales reps to "retire more of their sales quota" if an emerging market account goes through a partner.

Next: A Dramatic Change In How HP Views Its Partners
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