HP Mounts 9,000 Midmarket Account Mapping Offensive With Partners
By Steven Burke, ChannelWeb
Feb. 4th, 2010
Page 2 of 3

Frank Rauch, vice president of ESSN Channel sales, says the new sales alignment represents a dramatic change in how HP (NYSE:HPQ) views its partners. Using a football analogy, Rauch says in the past it felt like HP was stiff-arming its partners. Now, he said, HP is on the same playing field using the same playbook with its partners.

Hooper, who is on the road pitching the account engagement model to partners, sees the new account planning and mapping strategy as a turning point for both HP and its partners to dramatically increase sales and profits in 2010.

"My entire outside sales team will not show up without you," he recently told the sales reps at NWN Corp., one of HP's fastest growing partners, during the NWN national sales conference. "We want to engage with you."

Fast growing partners like NWN say they expect to see a significant increase in net new accounts leading to dramatic gains in sales and profits in their HP business.

Mont Phelps, the CEO of NWN Corp., which is headquartered in Waltham, Mass., has ambitions to grow his business organically by $50 million this year to a "quarter of a billion dollars in sales" with a "good chunk of that going to HP."

"This is not only different," he says of the new HP go to market model. "It is better. When you are working together you are a lot more efficient and effective than when you are not. The problem (for VARs) has been and continues to be (sales) alignment (with vendors). This just takes a lot of the drama and inefficiencies out of the sales process.

"What we do is we work together in a committed fashion with the vendor, win or lose," Phelps says. "Either vendors or VARs that aren't willing to commit to a program and a relationship to win together or lose together are going to have trouble."

Phelps isn't the only partner pumped up about the new emerging growth, midmarket account engagement model. Some HP partners say they are staking their future on the strategy.

"We are probably betting our company on this," says Simon Palmer, president of STA, one of HP's fastest growing emerging account solution providers, headquartered in Tustin, Calif. "We are certainly betting our growth plan on this (emerging growth) account segment with HP this year. I don't have any other growth plan that I am looking at other than this plan. That is how much we believe in the plan."

Palmer says he expects to grow his incremental business with HP in net new accounts by 20 percent. And that's a conservative estimate, he says.

Of course, that means focusing sales reps squarely on the HP emerging midmarket accounts. STA has six sales reps working "religiously" with HP's inside sales reps and outside sales reps on "coordinated call plans" to win business in 100 net new accounts, said Palmer.

"The HP reps are making cold calls for my reps at my sales reps' direction," he said. "The (STA and HP) reps get together once a week and go through an account call plan. The midmarket account space is all about velocity. If you don't get off your butt and act you are going to lose in that space. That is true for us and HP."

"We have the responsibility of attacking those accounts and working those accounts," said Palmer. "It was made clear that if we don't assume that responsibility and show activity and actions over a 60-90 day period those accounts will be moved to someone else. And frankly we are okay with that."

Palmer says the STA and HP united sales effort is aimed squarely at displacing Dell, Cisco, IBM and Oracle/Sun in competitive accounts. "There is a huge opportunity here for HP to acquire competitive market share," he said. "If I am going to grow I have to get share. I can't do that in my HP installed accounts. What is huge here is what HP is doing to supplement my business. I have never had that opportunity before where HP has stood up and said 'I am going to stand up side by side with you and help you grow your business.' That is huge."

Next: A Channel Structure To Hunt New Midmarket Business
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