Clarifying the message

08/07/2006 10:31 PM by Chris Toohey

I spent the majority of the day after my last post discussing with people in the community just what I was getting at - while I won't go into the exact detail of many of those discussions (more or less because I didn't ask those individuals if they'd be willing to go public with their thoughts on the matter... and since they were no replies to said post...) I figured that I would clarify my statement and share with you my thoughts on the matter.

IBM apparently has a SWAT team that engages customers to provide them with additional services at no additional cost as part of their sales life-cycle. While I completely understand this, my statement was that such a squad be sent to current IBM/Lotus customers that are not being engaged for upselling, new product adoption, et al in an attempt to boost corporate-wide product adoption and Lotus customer retention. See, this team would go to SMB-and-above customers and show them how to utilize their current technology investments with IBM... at no cost to the customer. Sounds funny, I know - but let's look at it this way shall we?

We take 10 members of this community who have proven to be innovative, yellow-bleeding Domino gods and give them each $100,000/year. Their job: travel onsite from IBM customer to IBM customer, showcasing how their current in-house technologies can be utilized to resolve many corporate-wide issues. Let's say each member stays onsite one month with a customer. That's 120 customers per year utilizing their current investments and not looking elsewhere for solutions to their problems.

At an approximate cost of $1 million, IBM can solidify Lotus in 120 customer organizations.

Take it out of the marketing budget - hell, I don't care if I never see another Lotus ad in eWeek (not saying ANYthing about a dinosaur... <sorry, couldn't help it>).

It's a risk, sure. It's something that hasn't been done before (I believe). But I tell you this: if I'm the CIO of an organization that's been on Lotus Notes since R3, and IBM is telling me that they'll send me a consultant for a one month engagement to help bring my teams up to speed on the latest releases and functionalities of my current technology investments with IBM at no cost to my organization - it's certainly something that I'm going to consider green-lighting!