Conference 7.286::digital

Well, they might do what they did here for awhile:
merged units containing both sales-support and delivery.
Folks did whatever came up that vaguely matched their skills.

It worked OK, and most folks liked it, but the reporting structure
was pretty much spaghetti...

I wouldn't even hazard a guess as to what will happen to the field org
structure other than that it will probably be in place sometime before
July 1. (Q1 FY94).  The org structure seems to be getting defined top-down
and those of us at the far end of the food chain are feeling like we're
in a game of crack-the-whip.

Kevin

...you are not hallucinating....

Details are coming out right now.  I will post when I can.  A "chat"
session at Network Symposium with Bill Horzempa (US Sales Support)
and John Groh (US Digital Services) addressed the subject also.

They said that the effort to integrate PSS with Customer Service was an
utter failure, and recognized that the Sales Support/Profession Services
division was impacting our ability to be flexible in how we win
business.  They said we need to be able to have the same people craft
the solution and then deliver it if needed.

The net is to expect sales support and professional services to be one
group of resources, details and management not worked out yet.

Bill

Russ Gullotti just announced the merger of Sales Support
and PSS delivery in his DVN.  Is that official enough?

In his words:
"When we split them, it was very emotional, and we got lots
of complaints describing how and why it would never work(to have them split).
Now that we've made the decision to re-integrate, we are getting just about
as much complaints saying that it will never work to have them integrated."

His advice was to figure out how to work with it and prosper, because
digging your heels in and resisting would not be -uh- profitable.

Kevin

Being separate from PSS Delivery never stopped me from designing a solution 
and then delivering it...As a dedicated support consultant for an account 
group, I plan to resist this move all the way. What we have today ain't broke, 
so I wish they wouldn't try to fix it.

Certainly not Politically Correct,

Jim

    could be worse.
    
    couple of us here were almost "forced" into sales positions. the network
    partner (me) and the VMS partner. As it was presented last Nov. we
    didn't really have a choice. Just take the job. Even TFSO was not an
    option. In meetings with management I presented a list of 16 questions
    about the job. Only one was answered - and that one was whether TFSO
    was an option. I summarized my plea to management as follows:
    
        1. This forced move was not in the best interest of our customers.
        2. This move would not allow me to generate more revenue for
           Digital.    
        3. This move was not in my personal career's best interest.
        4. This move only solved internal DEC politics and beaurocratic
           metrics.
    
    I thought number 4 at least would generate discussion. Nope! It was
    concensus by silence. After 17 years of being a technical network type
    i decided i was not going to become an "instant salesman". Since I was
    not going to take the job, TFSO was out, and I wasn't going to quit,
    termination seemed the only option I was leaving. I expected to be
    fired. After several days of waiting for a decision, I was called into 
    the District Manager's office and told a position was created for me in 
    delivery. I thanked the District manager for saving my career at DEC and 
    that ended my 6.5 years in sales support - the last week of which was the 
    most stressful of my entire career.
    
    How it works out in th elong run remains to be seen. However, I am more
    optimistic than I have been for a couple of years. 
    
    Gene Haag, Network Consultant
    Minneapolis, Minnesota

    I didn't see the DVN, so I don't know exactly how the message was
    presented.  However, I think we've been here before.
    
    There was a time when Sales had to rely on a combined Delivery/Sales
    Support organization, and it was a failure:
    
    a.  People aren't interchangeable.  An excellent technical person can
    be an embarassment in front of a customer, and an excellent generalist
    who is great at sales support can fail if assigned to writing code.
    
    b.  Metrics drive behavior, and is subject to the law of unintended
    consequences.  We had instances where you could get no help on a
    project or customer's business problem because there was no software
    project business involved.  Will we see similar behavior if there is no
    chance of selling a body?    
                             

    Deep down in my cynical dark side I think that the few reasons given
    for this move are mainly window dressing.  They sound nice, but there
    were never any insurmountable obstacles to delivery doing sales support
    or vice-versa to begin with.  In my neck of the woods there is no
    problem with the technical proficiency of sales support.  Any problems
    with the proficiency of delivery are not organizational in nature but
    due to the scarce investment in training.
    
    No, the compelling reasons from a business standpoint are probably
    cost-savings in nature.  Look at the opportunity that this consolidation 
    presents to whack a hundred or so level 1 managers and staff and I suspect
    you'd be on the right track...
    
    Al
    

    When I started with Digital, SWS did Pre-Sales, PSS, and Warranty from
    the same pool of people, and the success of the organization depended
    on the flexibility of the SWS specialists *and* the flexibility of the
    PSS manager.  There were many people who excelled at both technical
    support and Sales support, and there were some who did much better at
    one than the other.  Most SWS units were big enough to have a mix.
    But the best personnel in the world can't make up for a PSS manager 
    who was incompetent or who intentionally misused the resources.
    
    There were many common mistakes made in those days, like putting
    techies with poor communications skills in front of a customer,
    and restricting training to a limited technical focus.  PSS managers
    often played shell games with sales reps, favoring Sales reps who
    made the effort to sell PSS over those who just pushed hardware.
    There was very little accountability as to who was funding whom,
    and what benefits were received.  
    
    In the final analysis, I think the accountability problem was the 
    final straw to Sales Management, who felt they would have better 
    control and accountability if they had direct control over Sales 
    Support people.  I'll wait to see if top management has fixed
    this problem before I pass judgement on the latest re-organization.
    
    Geoff Unland in Austin

I don't believe we're trying to place sales support back as part of delivery; 
rather, we want one Professional Services organization providing sales support 
and delivery services for the entire solution life cycle.

I have done both jobs under both styles, and have been a manager of both.

These are the reasons I think this is the right thing to do:

1. The solution life cycle shouldn't be done "over the wall."  Sales support
   can't keep estimating, project management, and implementation  skills 
   sharp unless they get to follow a job into implementation once in a while.
   Please believe me:  There is a big difference between doing a year's
   worth of network integration and management, and spending a week to
   install and set up a PC LAN.

2. We have two groups with the same job code and supposedly the same skills.
   We all know that over time that's not true.  Let's change the job codes 
   and descriptions, or, re-integrate the people. I think the latter is 
   the better choice.  Let's not keep pretending they're same same job unless
   we really make it the same job.

3. When sales support went under sales, in the majority of cases those people
   who aspired to sales thrived; those who aspired to technical careers were
   given 3, 4, or 5 ratings.  I didn't see a difference in performance other
   than STYLE.  Those whose STYLE was more sales-like were considered better
   performers.  Sales management didn't know how to evaluate sales support
   performance, nor were they ever given training or guidance on what makes
   sales support different from sales.

4. Our cost of sales on hardware and other simple product sales is way too
   high.  We need to change the way we apply people to our sales simply to
   get out of the current expectation that you need a sales support person
   always available to work on any opportunity.

To make it work, I think we need to:

1. Really, really, really, fix the metrics.  Goal Professional Services so
   that sales support and delivery are equal in value to meeting goals. Make
   business decisions about how to deploy.

2. Really, really, really find a way to avoid a sales/professional services
   fight over resources.  

3. Make absolutely certain than professional services can't monopolize
   the resources for services opportunities.

I hope it works this time.  We really hurt a lot of people the last time.
My last District Sales Manager wanted to know why my sales support people
could sometimes be found during the day at their desks reading notes 
conferences.  He wanted them to do that "on their own time" (AN ACTUAL QUOTE).
During the day, he said, they should be out at customers all the time.

I know it wasn't like that everywhere, but it was like that enough places
to push a lot of good people out of sales support.

Bill

    re:  .10  I think this is the right thing to do ...
    
    I agree with you totally; I thought the original split was stupid
    and it really impacted by career path and growth potential.  But
    I *do* understand the dissatisfaction that Sales had with the old
    way Pre-sales support was being managed, and I'm waiting to see if
    anyone steps up to the bar and takes responsibility to see that it
    doesn't happen again.
    
    Geoff Unland in Austin

	re .9:

	Right! The old system worked well, where SWS had a pool of people
	who did presales, consultancy, projects, troubleshooting, and the
	occasional piece of training.

	Because of the size of the pool, people had a chance to develop
	different skills, and managers could usually juggle commitments
	and fit in someone who might not be first choice, but could do
	the job.

	This stuff about "techies with bad communication skills" is total
	hogwash. I've known some techies with poor interpersonal skills,
	many with good ones, and some with superb. Likewise, I've known
	non-technical people (including some aggressively non-technical
	Digital managers) with the charm of Attila the Hun. 

	Communication cannot be considered in isolation. That is, on the
	whole there are not "good" and "bad" communicators. It depends on
	the subject matter, the situation, and the audience. A bishop who
	may communicate well to a church congregation might not go down too
	well with a bunch of cynical Marines. The jargon a manager might
	avoid could be essential to efficient communication between
	programmers. Well, some programmers are customers.

	I prize the memory of a presentation by a senior Digital manager
	to a DECUS leadership audience. At least six times he emphasized
	"we have to save DECUS from the pointed-headed techies and target
	the decision-makers". Eventually a well-dressed guy in the front
	row couldn't take any more. He got up and said "I'm a pointed-headed
	techy, and I'm a decision maker - in fact I'm managing director of
	my company. I speak for a lot of us. Would you kindly stop this?"

	Ironically, the latest management fad is the "competency approach".
	This was written up by Alastair Wright, Human Resources Director
	for Digital UK, in the latest issue of "Digital Today" (Europe only).
	He says "People don't then have jobs, they apply their skills where
	they are needed at a particular time. That might, for example,
	mean working as a technology consultant for six months, teaching
	for one year followed by three months helping draft a marketing
	plan and so on... Under this approach job titles disappear. After
	all, what do you call people who are capable of doing all the
	above tasks?" 

	Great. We had all this ten years ago, before all the clever managers
	in what is now "Digital Services" got together and screwed it up.
	Who benefitted? Well, there are now lots more jobs for managers
	running all these different groups...

	/Tom

    Let's review the motivation for the separation of sales support from
    consulting services (oh, how I hate "delivery", that's something I did
    with newspapers when I was 10 years old).

    Does combining the two roles again bring back the problems that led to
    the separation of the two?

    "Money" is the root of the problem.  Sales support thought that they
    were not getting value for what they paid for.  They had "out-sourced"
    in a manner of speaking.  "Software Services" had two agendas to serve:
    helping sales reps sell, and delivering advisory and project consulting
    to customers.  (Several years ago warranty and packaged consulting was
    out of the hands of the field offices Software Services managers).

    Over time, the metrics of the Software Services managers became greatly
    biased towards the hard dollars of the customers, and away from the
    soft numbers of sales satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

    Accountability was a problem as well with parallel management chains
    that would reach up as high as Jack Smith.  "Stovepipes" as a concept
    come from the original organization charts that showed the functions
    of world-wide sales, world-wide field service, and world-wide software
    services coming together only at the level of "Vice President of Sales
    and Service".

    The question of accountability is going to come back.  Digital still
    doesn't know how to structure account/function relationships.

    That fact that individuals from the field don't seem to be engaged in
    the process seems to me just another example of fixing a problem
    according to some management agenda as opposed to finding out what the
    problems are first-hand:
    
    Flat organizations are good and stovepipes are bad.  Don't go
    backwards.

    Flat organizations are great unless you just stomp on it to make it
    flat.  This is what I see happening.  As far as sales support and
    delivery being seperate thats stupid, plain and simple.  Why should
    the delivery person look like an idiot when he delivers the solution to
    the customer!  Uh sorry Mr./Ms. customer, what did sales tell you??
    It's even worst when sales support told them something that can't be
    done with what they bought.  No actual experience just training.
    
    We tend to look like we don't know what we are doing! Plain and simple!
    
    Thats why the person who delivers the solution should be the one to
    help sell it! IMHO.  
    
    - Mike

Re: .5

Yes, sales never minded windfall profits, but if they didn't have the 
resource, forget it.  I've worked on a number of proposals over the past 
several years where it was weeks/months after I worked the opportunity that 
all the internal accounting was finalized.  Some of the most intense pressure 
I felt was not from the "proposal/benchmark stress", but from the "who's gonna 
pay for it stress."

Windfall, fine, reverse windfall, no way buddy.  We'll sell it if we don't 
have to spend any money.  But if we need someone qualified to help make this 
sale, forget it.

Patrick knows where all this BS is rooted.  It's stupid and counterproductive. 
If I sign up to sell it, I'll deliver.  If I can't follow through, boot me out 
the door.  It takes "no excuse management" one step further.  And if sales is 
forced to come to delivery for support, we won't have sales reps sauntering in 
saying, "I need so and so on Monday for 3 weeks at the ACME Company."  And 
this is the rep that didn't bother to consult with us, sold a 3 month project 
for a couple weeks of pay, and didn't check about the availability of 
"resources".

Q.E.D.

    My observation from this forum, conversation and personal experience is
    that the results of the merger of sales support and sales were
    different in different groups.  Some groups had no problems working
    with Services to form a 'virtual team' of technical resources; some had
    problems.  Some support groups had difficulties working for sales; some
    didn't.
    
    Given that there were clearly different experiences I find it curious
    that there seems to have been little or no effort to study the
    successes and failures and make a decision on what to fix based on this 
    research.
    
    The problems that management has stated they are looking to fix by this
    change are not problems that I see in my group (sales support in NYC). 
    I can't help but wonder what percentage of the sales support groups in
    the US experience these problems and what percentage don't.
    
    Peter Dillard

    A rare rebuttal from Sales...
    
    OK, there are a lot of stupid sales types out there who will recklessly
    sell resources they don't have.  Tiff-so them.
    
    Let me tell you from my experience what didn't work when SWS and
    Delivery were combined.  The managers tended to chase only SWS content. 
    Legitimate requests for help got shunted aside.  If you want to see
    problems, let Sales sell with no technical support.  Even those of us
    who are technical can't keep up with a fraction of what's going on, and
    for us to personally research everything means we'll close two deals a
    year.
    
    There are a lot of technical people who are great but are only
    interested in working on things they are interested in.  Lots of times
    that's not what the customer is buying.  They are buying boring stuff. 
    Like trying to hook PC's together.
    
    There are a lot of great technical people out there who can talk to
    customers.  There are a lot who don't want to, and some who can't.  I
    have found that you get better by repetition.   If you meet the
    customers regularly, you get more comfortable; then you get to be more
    effective.
    
    Most important, you get to know the customer and what they want.  My
    greatest fear in some of the strong responses to this notestring from
    technical types is the reinforcement of the idea that what they do is
    pure, and sales is messy.
    
    Real life is messy.  It contradicts itself.  It isn't pure.  But it
    pays the rent.  And Sales is the part of the company that touches Real
    Life.
    
    This is not a technician bash-note.  I worship at the feet of the ones
    who are serious about furthering the fortunes of our common company,
    and not their own baliwick interests.
    
    I'm just pointing out that the reason the separation was made in the
    first place was because THINGS WERE BROKE.  If we put everything back
    that way and don't fix what was broke, none of will be able to log on
    here and be self-serving and all-knowing.
    
    In some places, things worked fine the old way.  However, there was a
    critical mass of places where it didn't work, where we couldn't sell,
    and that was the reason Sales wanted control over the resource.  
    
    We needed consistency in the people that the customer got to know, the
    ones who worked with them day-to-day, the ones they trusted.  And
    customers especially liked not having to re-explain everything
    constantly to new people all the time.  There were people who
    understood their technical environment.
    
    If we can give the customers that, then fine.  But it didn't work
    before.  We been there; we done that.

    re .1
    
    I agree that THINGS WERE BROKE before. I'm in Sales Support, been
    through SWS, EIS,... and all that. I've done delivery as well as
    account focus. I don't think that what was broken is whether techies
    sales support do or do not do delivery. What's broken are their
    managers' metrics. 

    RE .last
    
    The cost of unintended consequences.....
    
    It's cost us plenty!
    

    O.K., it's not theoretical anymore.  I ran into the problem already.
    
    They're already making noises that sales support won't be forthcoming unless
    we can bill the customer for it.   
    
    I've recently been re-assigned to a big account team that I worked with
    before.  We have been static in this accoount for the last couple of
    years, in terms of introducing new products and strategies.  We have
    been living off a big outsourcing contract where we centralize their
    procurement of third-party network components, and act as the single
    point of support for network problems.  
    
    We need to work on a strategy that will give us part of the desktop,
    which we are being frozen out on.  One of our other sales reps came up
    with a good idea for a sales strategy.  To do that, we need to put
    together a plan -- figure out where our products are and will be, where
    that will match with the customer, etc.  Then we need to put together
    an integrated demo, which we plan to show to a VP who is a Macintosh
    bigot who we hope will latch onto our solution for integration.  Then
    we want them to get involved in a big Field Test of an upcoming
    version.
    
    In trying to get some resource, the first pushbacks were that this
    isn't Q4 revenue, and it will be sticky to get people to support this
    effort unless the customer agrees to pay for the customization and
    support we'll have to provide in order to show them what we can do for
    them.
    
    This was depressing, since it was the same orientation we had four
    years ago when SWS was part of Delivery.  Sales people will wind up
    begging, pleading, and spending all their time in internal
    justifications.
    
    I've seen this lead to bad things.  Sales people, left with no
    alternatives, resort to loan of software agreements with no local
    guidance -- we mail them the stuff and ask them to evaluate it.  It
    often fails because a frustrated customer gets lost in the complexity,
    or can't make it work with his other systems.
    
    This is already starting to be the SWS reaction, even though they don't
    yet have their new metrics.   
                                       

    re. .-1
    
    
    been there. done that. and it's not good. it all depends on what
    management is "pushed" into doing. we'll see. i fear another round of
    "metrics" and "funny money" wars. brutal. ugly. and totally
    non-productive.

	re .17:

>    If you want to see
>    problems, let Sales sell with no technical support.

	Yup. In the UK they do, and we do.

	In most accounts, there are no technical people - the best account
	teams have some people who used to be technical, and these can
	last for a year or two as they gradually get out of touch.

	In general, all technical people are kept in "resource centres"
	which hire them out to customers at about $1-2K a day, and to
	account teams at perhaps half that. So in order to have a meeting
	with an expert to discuss what's available from Digital, or to
	take her in to visit a customer, the salesperson has to invest
	$750.

	But that ain't all folks! To make sure that salespeople don't
	disturb the concentration of those people (who are preferred
	to pass their days doing consultancy and projects) the salesperson
	has to spot the opportunity and request the appropriate skills.

	Let's see how that works. A salesperson visits an insurance
	company or a factory, and spots an ideal opportunity to sell
	an object oriented database system. During a discussion of the
	insurance company's need to keep lots of pictures and plans etc
	on file, and to bring new "products" up to speed very quickly,
	the salesman immediately sees the answer. "Aha!" he cries. "This
	is just what an object oriented database can do for you!" Or
	rather, he doesn't because he doesn't know that such a thing
	exists.

	Thus it happens that salespeople keep in close touch with their
	customers, come to understand their business better and better,
	and unfortunately remain unable to see how Digital's products can
	help that business - because they don't know about Digital's
	products. So they don't ask resource centres for those skills,
	so the resource centres can truthfully say that there is "no demand".

	Bring back sales support! Please?

	/Tom

    re -1
    
    Locking up the technical resources sounds like exactly what they have
    in mind.
    
    The sales person has a responsibility to know things about an inch
    deep, just deep enough to be the bird dog.  The sales support person
    knows things about 8 inches deep.  This is enough to pull together the
    technical threads and develop a rough solution.  
    
    The sales support person has the toughest job, in some ways even 
    tougher than Delivery.  It is a creative job.  You have to be so broad
    in your scope that you can skate over miles of technology, yet still
    drill down when necessary to the guts of the problem.
    
    I have joked that our future in sales will be to charge for sales
    calls.  Say maybe $150 per call, or sell a package of ten calls for
    $1250.  So you walk in to a sales call:  "Good morning, Mr. Customer. 
    How are you?  Before we get started, do you have your coupon book with
    you?"
    
    Already in this company one of our big problems in Sales is that
    ultimately you're responsible for everything:  selecting the right
    solution, configuring, quoting, pricing/discounting, maintenance
    response, customer satisfaction, fielding complaints about product
    function and reliability, billing, collections...oh, yes, and you're
    supposed to also get to be friendly with the customer, learn his
    business, develop sales strategies, give presentations, make sales
    calls, have friendly chats, be professional, do forecasts, and submit
    your expenses on time.
    
    In India, the professional big game hunters used to send out rows of
    natives to beat the brush and drive the animals toward the line of
    hunters, who would shoot them.
    
    Sales people rapidly learn one sad truth about Digital:
    
    No shooters.