HPE channel partners grapple with shift to consultative sales

Although Hunter stressed the importance of HPE channel partners adopting consultative sales approaches, he said the traditional way partners have sold products and services won’t necessarily become defunct anytime soon.

“Not everything is going to be sold like [GreenLake]. It will be a much bigger part of our mix … and it will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. That is not to say there is no more reseller or typical solutions being put together. There are, and there will continue to be,” Hunter said.

HPE channel partners, however, must reckon with how customer expectations continue to change, he added. “The world is evolving to one where our partners need to be able to talk about business outcomes. … [Customers] want to talk about how you are going to connect them with something that enables them to produce new services, reduce costs faster, move more quickly. … Therefore, it is incumbent on our partners to connect technology with business outcomes. … [Customers] are expecting people they can trust, that they can give them meaningful advice on their future.”

As a national solution provider, Zarek said Compugen seeks to align its sales strategy with the maturity of its individual customer accounts. Compugen has customers on either side of the spectrum. Some customers are at the front end of transformation and look to Compugen for leadership and support on its transformational journey, while others embrace a traditional model, he said. To meet a mix of customer needs requires Compugen to have a mix of salespeople who are adept at conventional sales as well as the more consultative, business-oriented approach that HPE is zeroing in on.

“What we have to do is … identify how we scale and transform our salesforce so we are … just a little bit ahead of customers [so] that we can pull them along, but not so far ahead so that we get disconnected. If we are too far behind them, they will think we are irrelevant,” Zarek said.

In the last six to 12 months, HPE has taken “the right strategic long-term thinking about how they need to operate against this maturity model,” he added.

“I don’t see that from other [vendors],” Zarek said. “Other [vendors] are saying you go all in into the new and forget about the old. I think that is a very dangerous proposition for a large business, which is what we have, and a large set of customers. The journey … that HPE is sharing with us allows us to get onboard in a very planned, predictive way and be able to optimize where we are along that journey.”