CONVERGED SYSTEMS

SALES PLAYBOOK

Drafted: 2/28/2014 Peter Stone

Edited: (v1.1) 4/30/2015 Peter Stone

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Customer Decision Makers:

4 Selling Themes Guide Most Customer Engagements

Operational (CIO/CTO, IT Director, Infrastructure Director, etc.)

Financial/Line of Business (CFO, P&L Owners, Line of Business, etc.)

Provocation
Insight
Technical Leadership
Consumption

Customer Types (Use Cases):

DevOps onDemand, Business Logic/Apps onDemand (AppStacks such as: Bitnami Apps, CRM in 30
seconds, etc.), ITOps onDemand, Utility Consumption, Core IT Services

** All Sales Engagements Must be Aligned to the Customer Buying Cycle

Delivered to the Customer via Rock-Solid Appliances

CUSTOMER MESSAGING
for Operational Leaders

Customers Title /
Focus Area

Customer Challenge

What Converged Systems Delivers??

How Do We Does It

Key Performance Indicators,

Proof Points

Title:
Head of IT (CIO, CTO,
VP Operations, etc.)

- Expensive to Design
and deploy IT
infrastructure
- Shrinking budgets, but
need to do more
- Security issues
(hacking/internal risks)
- Predictable
performance, capacity
& capabilities
- Keeping lights on vs.
innovating for business
excellence

- Reduced infrastructure management costs

- Reduced time to procure & provision
- Simplified IT architecture and
deployment by standardizing on open
standards and platforms
- Eliminates the need for customer to
become a system builder
- Focus resources on business needs and
not what products you need, or how to
maintain them
- Simplify release & upgrade processes
- Reduce time spent on incidents/problem
tickets
- Reduce downtime

We deliver purpose built

appliances based on
Open Compute
blueprints configured
with ITaaS, PaaS and
Apps on Demand.

- Deployment X times faster than

roll your own
- UAT reduced from 2 months to 1
week for example?
- Reduce Mgmt. costs by X%
- Upgrade cost reduction (Time and
materials savings) X% vs. previous
platforms/infrastructure, etc.
- Design reduce time & effort
50% over previous attempts for
example
- Customer-specific value
measurements? AutoZone, Technical
College, Kuwait Hosting, etc.

Focus Area:
TCO, Risk, SLAs, CapEx
& OpEx control, agility
& responsiveness to
business

Downtime solved by
seamless failover as well
as additional as needed
DR appliances
License model
fundamentally disruptive
to cloud compute
universe because we can
scale as needed with no
software true-up
Time to value, low cost
build process

CUSTOMER MESSAGING
for Financial Leaders

Customers Title /
Focus Area

Customer Challenge

What Converged Systems

Delivers??

How we do it

Key Performance Indicators,

Proof Points

Title:
CFO, COO, Line of
Business owners, VP
Finance

- IT expense and risk

- Time to market
- Competitive
advantage over
competition
- TCO and ROI metrics

- Lower TCO
- Reduce IT downtime and overall
business impact minimizing costs
- Reduce CapEx and OpEx over X
Period of time (based on
customers specific models)

SJ, Clark, Don, lets answer

here

- Customer X saved $$$ in one year

- Complex procurement
processes

- Streamline procurement process

- Customer reduced vendor contracts

down to one (vs. multiple with
build your own
- Reduced procurement cycle time
based on fewer required
signatures (saved days)

- Investment/lifecycle
protection

- Investment lifecycle protection

Trust
- Reduce financial and operational
risk of infrastructure

- Converged Systems platforms use

X% less power vs. competition, etc.

Focus Area:
ROI (Net Present Value,
Discounted Cash Flow,
Budgetary, etc.), Risk
(governance,
compliance,
operational, regulatory,
revenue, etc.)

;-)

PROVOCATION SELLING

Promote (social media, direct marketing, webinars, etc.) a set

of challenge statements with supporting materials:

Run OpenStack on Converged Systems for 60 days and if you dont

like it, dont pay.
Dont be extorted by technology vendors ever again.
Let Converged Systems prove TCO benefits of OpenStack for your
Private Cloud.
Turn RFP and RFQ situations upside down dont just answer the
request, give an answer the customer didnt know they needed.

This is going to need a solid set of supporting materials

INSIGHT SELLING

In contrast to traditional Solution Selling, Insight Selling is finding customers who

have agile organizations with emerging demands and/or un-anticipated demands
on their business that Converged Systems will solve for. Through this process,
Converged Systems will guide the customer on what and how to buy.

Type of Company to Target

Agile companies that have emerging demand, or

are in flux

Type of Data to Gather

What sorts of unrecognized needs does the

customer have, or face (governance, audit, SarBox)

When to Engage

Before customer has pinpointed a problem

How to Start Dialogue

Offer insights about what customer should do

to Mobilizers / Push marketing campaign

How to Direct Flow of Information

Coach customer on how to buy desired solution.

Private/Hybrid/Public cloud delivery models

TECHNICAL SELLING

Leading with pre-sales engineering to design win customer solutions

(already happening overseas) get in early and design Converged
Systems into an opportunity.
Get Converged Systems Engineering to be leaders in such areas as
AppStacks, Upcoming OpenStack Projects & Releases, Integration with
AWS, Google Cloud, MSFT Azure, etc.
Get involved in Open Source community via main foundations, associations
and local groups All politics are local, so customers are researching options
locally (and on the web)
Technical selling is also tied to Provocation Selling in that we need to
prove our product technically works and is superior from a price/
performance/benefits standpoint.

Have demo/POC units available

Collaborate with and let resellers innovate their own services on top of our product
foundation

CONSUMPTION-BASED SELLING

Per vCPU, Per VM, Per # of Users, Per AppStack, Per Hour/Day/Month
All these different consumption models are opportunities for Converged
Systems to sell. PROVIDED of course, we can position our products with per
vCPU, etc. pricing models as well as consult and advise customers on how to
set up our products to deliver these consumption-based computing delivery
mechanisms.
Consult with customers, provide advisory services on how to acquire ITaaS
and PaaS via consumption-based procurement/delivery models.

Leverage the Following:

n

Vertical market consulting

Reseller partners offering co-lo/hosting/managed services

Converged Systems designed/created AppStacks

CUSTOMER TYPES

Web 2.0/Cloud Computing Companies (Public & Hybrid

Cloud):

Example Managed Services, Hosting/Co-location, Web Services,

Application Services companies
n

Pay-per-use & self-service applications, multi-tenant hosting, on-demand

burst capacity, development & testing use cases and customers.

On-Premise Private Cloud:

Example Traditional IT Organizations looking to move to cloud:

Financial Services, Legal, Education, Manufacturing, etc.
n

Chargeback-based IT, Reduced TCO, General Budget Shrinkage, Top-down

organizational change, Challenges deploying & managing IT, respond to
competition quickly, etc. use cases and customer scenarios.

CUSTOMER BUYING CYCLE

Status Quo

Stimulated to
look

Interested

Options

Evaluating

Preferred
choice made

Final
Approval

Implement

- Watching
trends
- Observing
Competitive
Activities &
benchmarks
- Comfort
zone

- Problem(s)
occur
- Problem(s)
analyzed
- Problem
result(s)
assigned
consequences
- Can it be
solved?
- Is it worth
solving?
- What
Options are
available?

- Identify
stakeholders
- Research
possible
options and
solutions
- Establish
functional
requirements
- Draft internal
ROI
requirements

- Explore possible
options
- Narrow down list
of options
- Reconfirm
requirements
- Update the
business case/
ROI/NPV
opportunity costs

- Conduct
detailed
eval of
serious
options
- Obtain
stakehol
der buyin
- Finalize
the
business
case

- Finalize the
contractual,
legal and
commercial
Ts & Cs
- Get
references
- Confirm
decision
- Obtain
internal
purchase
request

- Submit
final
proposal
/ paper
work for
order

- Validate
decision to
buy
- Install /
configure
solution
- Feedback
&
advocacy

Business Case
Development
coach customer
through

Requirements
and needs
defined

Reduction of
options down to
key choices

Vendor
selection

Business
negotiation
(legal,
financial, etc.)

Place
order

Refinement
of customer
needs,
customer
loyalty

Stage
Buyer
Actions

Criteria Trigger
To move Events
Moves, no
forward

more
capacity, etc.

CUSTOMER DELIVERY

Converged Systems needs to deliver to the customer a defined

set of appliances/solutions.
Need to set our product line-up (# and types of appliances,
AppStacks, validated solution stacks as value add, etc.) with
clear pricing, (clear reseller pricing as needed; with
appropriate discounts), support options/pricing, delivery
services/install charges, as well as any follow-on services and/
or products (consumption based management solution to tell
customer when to buy additional nodes, etc.)
There can not be ANY confusion within customers minds about
our offerings, our pricing, our support, etc.

RESOURCES (needed!)

1)Hosting, 2)Education and 3)Manufacturing company Case Studies

India/Kuwait customers?
Whitepaper on OpenStack/Converged Systems Consumption-based
computing
Whitepaper/case study on TCO of Converged Systems+OpenStack for
multi-tenancy and managed services
AppStacks Provocation whitepaper(s), web seminars & solution brief
need to generate thought leadership to push content and get potential
buyers in early stages of Buying Cycle consuming our message

Discounted cash flow ROI analysis for cloud deployment tool/TCO tool.

New corporate marketing materials & leave behinds