A major corporate client consolidated 44 separate Salesforce environments across business units to cut costs and improve returns. The deal closed when the client launched a new line of business, and trust between the client and partners like IBM's Bluewolf team proved decisive.
They had been looking at their Salesforce investment across all lines of business, and traditionally each of the businesses had done their own, own work. And so they started to kind of pool that spend and realized that they were spending an awful lot of money and wanted to really start to see a return on investment. And so that was, I think, a motivating factor for them to really start to look at the platform.
The CIO would say, "We're— it's okay. We have Deloitte. We have Cognizant. They're doing an okay job, but they're not great." So we took that as a theme for how we went into the business of selling, and we said, "We're going to take you from good to great." I think at the time they had 44 different Salesforce orgs that they were looking to consolidate and solve for.
So the interesting thing about the opportunity was that was sort of the premise in which we we were brought in.
Literally the day it was announced we could talk to Bluewolf, I was on the phone to Eric and saying, "I need you guys over here.
Let's go do it." It was myself and a couple of other people went over to IBM, and I think we were kind of locked in a room together for a couple of weeks, really putting together a talk track of how would we sell this thing. Plus it put us all on a similar page to say, "How do we think more innovatively for this client?" Ironically, the piece of business that we won had less to do with an org rationalization and more to do with a very significant new line of business that they were creating.
So they said, "We're gonna give you this IBM BlueWolf.
This is the biggest growth area." Nobody really knew what it was gonna be like. It was a massive customer. There was always an inherent risk of what if it doesn't work out well.
It sounds cliché-ish in my opinion, but It was trusting each other, right? We had to trust each other, and it wasn't, "I'm looking to get this sale for this reason," or, "You're looking to get this sale for that reason." The acknowledgement, the recognition of what this meant to the greater organization, to have us step out, take the risk, and win, that was exciting. That's why we come to our jobs.
Okay, perfect.
