Two IBM sellers explain how they won a CenturyLink Salesforce deal by shifting the conversation from IT costs to business outcomes. A BlueWolf Align workshop led by Joanna Kiper convinced CMO Bill Hurley to choose IBM over Accenture, positioning IBM as a strategic partner rather than a vendor.
Now honestly, we started off behind, right? I mean, when we started off, what we heard was Trisac Century was in last week and they made a great pitch and they're gonna implement Salesforce for CenturyLink. And Greg and I are like, well, we can't let that happen. Yeah.
One thing we faced there that we face at almost every big telco is an IT organization that wanted to build everything. So they'd already budgeted for a project to build basically a CRM platform.
The perception was, geez, this licensing model's too expensive. Wouldn't it be cheaper if we just build it in-house on open source? And couldn't we just kind of build on some things we already have?
As soon as Joe was able to get his time with the CMO, with Bill Hurley, we started explaining to him the BlueWolf align process that we would suggest to go through. The BlueWolf woman that runs a lot of these align workshops, came in and very uncharacteristically of IBM, she had purple hair and tattoos and was very edgy.
And she knocked it out of the park.
She did.
Joanna Kiper is her name. And she was really such a good image for the next IBM, not the old IBM. It really kind of changed his perspective on, well, okay, IBM is a different place. So the Blue Wolf, entry into this equation completely changed the dialogue we had. It was not just about IT, it was about where's the business going. And that totally repositioned IBM because people thinking, okay, that's not a part of IBM we've seen before.
They came back and said, we decided not to take Accenture up on their offer to do this for free because what they're offering was focused on planning all the bits and bytes of a Salesforce implementation. You guys were looking at it from a business outcomes perspective and using that to drive the plan.
It was changing the dialogue, changing the topic of the conversation that ultimately made the difference. We were much more focused on helping the marketing organization, sales organization define what the customer outcomes should be versus how do we integrate Salesforce into the backend systems.
An important point for other IBM sellers to understand is, you know, on the grand scale of IBM projects, Salesforce projects look relatively small.
Mm-hmm.
But once you're established as the Salesforce partner and they're doing more strategic work on the business side, driving top-line revenue, that opens up years of work for you.
The IBM brand, while a very strong brand and, you know, top of mind to a lot of people in IT, was not necessarily known by the business community in the same context. We had a brand that was business-focused with BlueWolf, So they didn't really even think of us as IBM. They thought of us as Blue Wolf, which was a good thing.
