The mission
Support HP's strategy to develop as an enterprise solution provider.
Enable sales staff to identify and qualify the full range of potential new business within the manufacturing sector.

The solution
Commission Cambashi to lead a series of workshops to brief and coach the sales team and identify new sales opportunities.

The results
Sales representatives gained the confidence and knowledge to approach prospects from a business perspective.
HP identified new areas of opportunity within 12 accounts.
The sessions initiated projects that HP expects to lead to significant increases in revenue.

The customer: Peter Elms, Sales Manager, Manufacturing Industries
"We completely achieved our aims. In both the short and long term we are looking to build revenue in every account we have by making customer relationships higher and wider."

HP is a world leading provider of products, technologies and services for IT infrastructures, personal computing and access devices, global services, and imaging and printing. HP supplies both individuals and businesses with solutions ranging from single user PCs to the largest data centre machines; and from simple break-fix to strategic consulting.

One of the company's long term objectives has been to move on from its image as a hardware provider and position itself more as a solutions provider.

Peter Elms is responsible for the sales team which addresses the UK manufacturing industry. "After the merger with Compaq in May 2002 we had to combine two sales teams, one from HP and one from Compaq. However Compaq never had a specific manufacturing focus; it had been organised more along geographic lines. We had some excellent sales people, but there was a general lack of manufacturing sector expertise."

In addition HP knew that its sales people typically spent their time speaking to IT department contacts instead of talking to business managers about projects within a business context. Peter Elms continued: "We already received detailed product training. What we needed was training from a business and industry perspective so that we could understand who we were selling to and what they were looking for."

HP had prior experience of working with Cambashi and decided to ask for some input. "I outlined our needs" explained Peter Elms. "Cambashi introduced the concept of the 'sweet spot' and suggested gathering the whole sales team together so that we could focus on existing customers and identify the potential sales opportunities that lay with them."

Three training and business development workshops were timetabled. The topic of the first, held early in 2003, was the consolidation of business systems in manufacturing companies. "From just one workshop we began to adopt more of a business approach and understand manufacturing better" said Peter Elms.

The topic for the second workshop, held in May, was life cycle management. "This went really well, partly because we have a lot of people focused on that space and we have a named solution" commented Peter Elms. "In particular, it became obvious that Mike Evans had an unbelievable knowledge of what was going on within our account set."

The third workshop therefore took a different format. The objective was to review a series of named accounts and identify any potential for new HP sales opportunities. For each account there would be an internal sales team review followed by a Cambashi-led review.

The focus was on HP's top 12 manufacturing accounts; 30-60 minutes was allocated for discussion of each one. HP account managers produced concise data on their contacts outside the IT organisation, the opportunities they already had in the sales funnel and any competitor or partner issues.

Cambashi prepared information on the current industry drivers, the business initiatives of each customer company, and the potential for engagement with key stakeholders. As information was shared the discussion moved to areas of opportunity.

"By the third session everyone was using business not IT language and we all had a clearer understanding of the drivers within manufacturing and what our customers want" reported Peter Elms. "In addition we were gaining invaluable background information. Mike Evans knows many people; more importantly he understands their attitudes and can advise how best to approach them."

The workshops had an immediate impact on the way that sales people approach customers. "They go in with strong presentation content and the confidence to say that HP can help, that we've done it before and that we've reduced costs for other customers. They can relate HP benefits to business people and to business problems."

As a direct result of the workshops HP identified several major areas of potential and changed the way in which it would approach certain accounts. Peter Elms again: "We've opened up opportunities in our existing accounts that we did not know anything about or had not considered before. We have new options for every single account, that's 12 areas of potential revenue which we did not have before.

We have initiated 4 or 5 projects which could lead to fairly significant revenue. This has greatly helped us with account planning; identifying resources and allocating a focus has been easier. We also have much stronger account intelligence about the political scene. We completely achieved our aims. In both the short and long term we are looking to build revenue in every account we have by making customer relationships higher and wider."

The 11 account managers who took part described the input from Cambashi as extremely valuable and asked to go through the same process with their remaining accounts. Feedback was so positive that HP commissioned Cambashi to lead a new series of workshops. "The sessions were so obviously worthwhile that it was easy to obtain further funding" concluded Peter Elms.

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