CA Refocuses Field-Sales Organization

The Islandia, N.Y.-based software vendor is refocusing its direct-sales organization and incentives to add territory-based responsibility, including revenue generated by channel partners, President and CEO-elect John Swainson told CRN Wednesday. The new plan, spearheaded by Gary Quinn, executive vice president of partner advocacy, mimics CA's successful European partner program.

"Our sales force used to be focused on named accounts and enterprise accounts. We are shifting that focus to managing a territory," Swainson said. "We are telling our sales team they are not simply responsible for the thousand named accounts, but they have their territory responsibility, too."

CA has already hired 100 new U.S. field partner managers, who will work to lessen potential conflict between direct and indirect sales. Currently, the field partner managers are "primarily focused on cultivating enterprise solution providers and alliance relationships with the big [systems integrators], like an Accenture or a BearingPoint, and bringing their organizations in with ours to work on accounts jointly," Quinn said.

Swainson didn't give a timetable for the rollout of the new territory-based sales model, but he said it could boost the share of indirect sales to between 10 percent and 30 percent of CA's total sales by fiscal 2007. A big challenge will be changing the culture of CA's direct-sales force to cater to reseller partners, he noted.

"It's not an easy transition to make, and we are in the early stages. But we are going to do it," Swainson said. "As long as you have parallel structure for channel partners and direct sales, [they are] inherently in conflict. But by putting it into a field organization and telling the area and regional managers you are responsible for all revenue in your territory -- partner and non [partner] -- now you'll get the right behavior."

CA seeks partners with significant skill levels in IT professional services and cross-platform systems integration, but it isn't looking to crowd its channel, Swainson said.