September Catch-Up
Sometimes...
It's been almost 8 weeks since my last post, and a lot has happened since then. Not only did I manage a couple of week holiday with my wife and two boys, but we also filled the job vacancy in our team.
Michael Wignall joins us from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Tubedale Communications, where he was Chief Technology Officer, responsible for expanding their technical capabilities to cover hosting, infrastructure solutions, telecommunications, CRM and enterprise project management consultancy. Michael started a couple of weeks ago, and already has been heavily involved in a number of public sector CRM opportunities. Since then, I have been able to concentrate on my new sales territory.
Over the last couple of years, Craig Steere and I have been providing CRM pre-sales support across all industry sectors for both Enterprise and Mid-market customer opportunities. However, this FY we decided to focus specifically on Enterprise Financial Service and Public Sector clients, and to that end, we re-organised our CRM pre-sales team as follows:
- Simon Hutson - enterprise financial services clients.
- Michael Wignall - enterprise public sector clients.
- Craig Steere - enterprise retail, manufacturing & professional service clients plus all mid-market clients.
When I agreed to take on the financial services sector (and the associated sales quota) back in July, it looked as though the worst of the "credit crunch" had passed, and for many clients it was business as usual. How wrong was I? At the moment it is too early to know how many of my current CRM financial services opportunities will be reduced in scope, delayed or cancelled altogether, but I think things just got a whole lot harder.
On the plus side, clients will be looking hard at the total cost of ownership of any solution they purchase, and this plays well to the general Microsoft "high-volume, low cost" proposition. We proved this back in June when we sold 8,000 seats of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to a financial services customer who already had a significant investment in Salesforce.com. The real clincher, was that our costs over a three-to-six year period were significantly less than those of our competitor, even when you included infrastructure required for an on-premise deployment.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.