How To Get the Deal

This may sound like a commercial for The Men's Wearhouse, but that's the style in which CEO Jim Buchanan presents himself in radio ads for his company, Buchanan Associates.

Based in Irving, Texas, the solution provider won the Dallas Cowboys as a customer in a recent $2.7 million, three-year deal to move the football team's entire network infrastructure from its training camp in Wichita Falls, Texas, to Texas Stadium in Dallas after one of their executives heard Buchanan's confident, personable voice over the airwaves.

"I give them my home phone number and a money-back guarantee," Buchanan says. "If there's a service they don't like, all the customers have to do is write it off their invoices and they don't have to pay us."

Buchanan readily admits there's much more to getting the deal than an advertisement and a guarantee. But it's often the smaller providers,like Buchanan Associates, with 2000 revenue of roughly $30 million,that are more likely to jump through flaming hoops to get the deal and maintain a solid relationship with a customer.

But that's not to say that only small solution providers are focusing on the importance of customer relations. Large solution providers, such as Compaq Global Services VB7 and Unisys Services VB11, are also beefing up their customer-relationship skills,particularly in this softened economy,to keep their big customers content and coming back for more.

"It's about business value, innovation and relationships," says Tom Simmons, vice president of Compaq Global Services' FutureSourcing unit.

"The customer is trying to ascertain why they should do this [project] with someone else vs. myself. Part of that process is letting me tell you how I can bring a more innovative idea about how to apply the technology or the application of the technology to a certain business process," Simmons says. "What we find today in large accounts is that we not only have to be experts in the technology, but we've got to be able to relate it to the individual's business."

Compaq Global Services contributed 21 percent of Compaq's overall revenue in 2000 and was responsible for the bulk of the fourth quarter's operating profit. The unit earned $241 million, up 20 percent from the prior year's profit, on revenue of $1.8 billion for the quarter.

Marci Meaux, Compaq Services' vice president of worldwide channels and SMB services, says the company has been trying very hard in recent years to provide greater support for channel partners across all areas of business.

"The Compaq Services Network is a virtual community between Compaq and our partners that's enabled by Web-based capability programs," Meaux says. "That's not just the sales and marketing piece. There are three things we're focused on: access to sales tools, sales training in multiple formats like in CD-ROM or Web-based training, and support during the sales process. It's enabling our partners to utilize some of the same things that we found successful."

In addition, Compaq Global Services is finding it necessary to adjust its selling strategy, while Compaq as a whole is trying to become better known in the marketplace as an enterprise-solutions company.

"As a result, we're moving to a principal-led-type model, which focuses on having senior engagement individuals who are focused on the services industry and can work very

closely with clients," Simmons says. "You need that level of engagement so you're able to come to customers to speak with a total, well-integrated value proposition instead of the individual components that we have. The customers want to see their problems all tied up."

One such customer is HitHive, a small-but-growing B2B company based in Seattle. Founded in 1999, HitHive gives its customers the ability to sell music and music subscriptions to end users.

Although HitHive is a small company, vice president of technology Travis Pine says he was treated well by Compaq, as a hardware vendor, and Compaq Global Services as a total solutions provider, during the five months he shopped around for storage solutions. And what a storage behemoth he needed,HitHive's storage solution would have to hold between 50 TB and 100 TB of information at HitHive's current and future locations around the globe.

Pine says he evaluated storage products from the likes of Compaq, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi and several smaller vendors. "The criteria that we used were technical metrics that we had to hit," Pine says. "Overall, Compaq outperformed EMC and HP, but not by much."

What sold Pine on the Compaq Global Services' solution was price and the willingness of the organization to treat HitHive as a valued customer,in other words, the relationship. "It was also their willingness to come in and gain our business and to understand our business model," he adds.

"Nobody else,EMC, HP, even the smaller guys,understood where we were going," Pine says. "Compaq did a very good job in spending time with us to understand the business part. We probably spent our first three meetings just discussing our business model and what we wanted to do, and they basically understood the vision."

Throughout the meetings, Pine says Compaq Global Services treated him and his team just as well as, and perhaps even better than, a smaller provider would.

"In my experience, they [Compaq Global Services] have given us the resources, whereas smaller [providers]...make a lot of promises, but it takes a lot more than that to deliver," Pine says.

Hardware expenses alone for HitHive's solution were approximately $5 million, Pine says, with the entire project costing roughly $10 million. HitHive is using Compaq's Tru64/Alpha product line in conjunction with Compaq's StorageWorks SAN technologies. Those platforms house 30 TB of digitized music and media, which is accessed by end users over wireless and traditional Internet connections.

Pine's most important requirement now from Compaq is getting the support his team needs, when it needs it.

"We have put together a fairly proprietary system, which requires the [expertise of the] folks that we've been working with for the past nine months," Pine says. "One of the things I impressed upon them [Compaq Global Services] is that we're going to need those people 110 percent. I just can't call some third party to come in and maintain this, because they're not going to know this system."

Having knowledgeable people on a solution provider's management team seems like a no-brainer, but it's not always the case, especially when start-ups attract recent college graduates with little or no real-world experience.

Optum, a solution provider based in White Plains, N.Y., doesn't suffer from that problem. "The average experience level on my six-person management team is upwards of 17 years, so we've all been in the technology business for a relatively long time, and we think we've got a very good resource pool that really understands what clients need and want," says CEO David Simbari.

Optum began in the data- warehousing arena and is now transitioning to the supply-chain business. "Traditionally, in the warehousing business, it was sort of like my golf game,I hit and hope," Simbari says. "But the way we view this now, we engage with clients at a very high level and understand what their business requirements truly are. For us, it's very important to go into and examine the issues they're having in their supply chains, particularly in their execution environments."

Midsize and large companies are Optum's target market, according to Simbari. The company's client list now includes roughly 100 companies, among them GE Aircraft Engines, The Home Shopping Network, Lucent and Service Merchandise.

"We made a conscious decision to move into the area we call virtual inventory management and deployment, which is a far more strategic-type scenario than a warehouse-management system," Simbari says.

Narrowing its focus appears to be paying off for Optum, which will end its fiscal year in July with expected revenue increasing by approximately $15 million over the previous year.

Says Simbari: "You've got to understand people's businesses, particularly if you want to [make an] endeavor into this revenue-enhancing type methodology. We find ourselves narrowing our focus as opposed to expanding it, and that has led us to great success as far as those target markets."

Part 2: The Personal Touch