Arvind Krishna calls for partners' help in winning new customers
and why is AK still here ? he is just as clueless as his predecessor.
https://www.channelweb.co.uk/news/4057889/ibm-ceo-direct-clients-fallen-400
11 replies (most recent on top)
The channel / alliance has already been restructured. AK was just reminding the street about that. Don’t be surprised if tomorrows earnings announcement doesn’t have some consequences for the channel / alliance
Anyone with the word Channel or Alliance in their title should be put on PIP immediately. Get rid of these deadbeats now.
They move sales teams around so much because almost all sales are fudged. I’ve looked into several supposed deals ibm made, reaching directly out to the client and the deal never happened or it was wildly exaggerated. If you keep the sales people on the same “clients” they would figure out that the “clients” are often IBM execs faking a sale. Yes, I’m being serious.
"IBM RA’ed the experienced sellers who held the relationships with the end users. Yep it saved money over the short term, but now they have to pay the Piper. It seems management took their direct sellers and their established relationships for granted, and now,it’s coming back to haunt them. Who would have thunk removing experienced sellers would cause customers to abandon ship. "
Absolutely correct.
You nailed it. IBM re-assigned its Sales teams every year... There are no more relationships with any clients. This company is just about clueless as it can be.
Good to see that the useless Channel Partners are doing their usual bang up job. They should can that whole organization immediately. Such a waste of resources.
AK is commenting on where he has taken IBM. NOTE he has been even more aggressive in transforming IBM than what almost anyone believed. When IBM bought Redhat, the goal was a fortune 1200 strategy. (IBM announced in July of 2019 that it had mapped 1200 customers into the go forward strategy). AK just told you IBM has adopted a fortune 400 strategy, but would like to expand it to a Fortune 500 strategy as they are trying to get partners to bring IBM to the table. Play out the ramifications of this announcement. Infrastructure division mine as well consolidate into GBS and SW as nothing else matters except mainframe. (NOTE that includes cloud, Kyndryl are you taking it) Power is most likely a top 10 ISV play (Oracle, SAP, JackHenry, and a few more), with Power being a Niche AI play designed exclusively for performance. Scale out (think below Fortune 500) is now just a distributor play as IBM has acknowledged they have divorced you and outsourced their sales and marketing to the channel. This announcement has certainly clarified where IBM is heading (exclusively Fortune 500), but it raises the question of what is IBM spending their sales and marketing dollars on as that head count should be quite reduced.
It’s fallen because ibm does not have a clue about building relationships and setting up a sales function that allow them to attract and retain their customers or talent!
Having a B2B model only is never going to bring home the bacon.
The proof is in the pudding.
There are two things going on here
- IBM has moved almost exclusively to an enterprise customers engagement model, so sure customer count is going to drop. Apparently someone forgot to tell the IBM channels organization to backfill the direct IBM void with BP’s
- IBM RA’ed the experienced sellers who held the relationships with the end users. Yep it saved money over the short term, but now they have to pay the Piper. It seems management took their direct sellers and their established relationships for granted, and now,it’s coming back to haunt them. Who would have thunk removing experienced sellers would cause customers to abandon ship.
And he's ... proud of that???