As you can read in my previous post on Linkedin, Atea came under intense pressure when vendors like HP decided to sell direct to large enterprise customers.
We realised that the game was on and that we needed to mobilise all our muscles and brains to find a way to become more clear about the value we could provide our customers.
I love teamwork and I have so many examples of how much smarter and stronger you become when you allow the brains of your team to solve a problem.
I was blessed with a strong, dedicated team with a deep understanding of our industry. Together we created a concept called “Camp Victory”.
We realised that we were making our customers’ lives easier every day by offering them the best solution from the best vendors at the right price. We also could offer more than 1,000 well-trained consultants in more than 30 offices who could make sure that the hardware and software gave the end user the functionality they were looking for.
We needed to become much better at making our value visible!
Let me give you an example of what we did to prepare ourselves for the battle:
We invited a selected team of senior salespeople from our offices to a meeting at Bosön (Bosön is where the Swedish athletes meet for intensive training).
We had declared Atea to be the Swedish national team within IT infrastructure. And we had entered a strategic partnership with the Swedish National Team athletes – So, it was natural for us to go to a training camp in Bosön.
We were very serious about this training camp – we really wanted to test our new rhetoric with our sales force, and we wanted to establish a stronger message about our value add to our customers.
We provided assumptions for the role play that started within 15 minutes of arrival.
One of Atea’s most senior sales people then had the pleasure of entering a conference room to meet me, acting as a major customer. I enjoyed playing the role of a very demanding customer and asked quite tough questions … “why should I buy from your shitty company when I can buy a PC much cheaper directly from HP …”.
With our Camp-Victory project we activated a sence of urgency – We trained seriously to be ready for this change.
I am proud to tell you how we, as a team, fought this battle. And how we continued to keep winning, year after year.
I would also want to thank our vendors, such as HP, Lenovo and Dell Technologies, who worked with us to find a way to continue to do serious business TOGETHER. At the end of the day, we all become more professional and effective.
hashtag#Leadership hashtag#Changemanagement hashtag#strategy
The picture shows me in a strange suit, from one of our regular “crazy days” that we organised to drive energy and sales culture.
Atea – how we overcome the threat of vendors addressing end customers direct …
