what do VP’s do, anyway?
Today’s corporate strategy lesson is an excerpt of a post I made on an internal discussion forum concerning senior management’s globe-trotting to meet with customers. The contention was that if the regular employee’s are under all sorts of cost-cutting measures, such as travel restrictions, then why do the senior VP’s and CxO’s get to fly around the world in their $30 million jets and visit with customers?
Customers *want* to be schmoozed. If I were about to buy $500 million of equipment from any company, I’d be ecstatic if the CEO flew out to personally thank me for my business and show me that he or she cares about my company too.
As much as the marketing folks try to differentiate, our servers and IBM servers aren’t *that* different in features. Sure, IBM has a better virtualization implementation than us (HP) right now, but we have better storage, etc. In other words, there is — more or less — feature parity between the large server companies.
At that level of commitment (a couple hundred $million and above), you’re *not* going to get that sale based on features alone. You’re no longer purchasing a box; you’re looking to form a relationship with your supplier. This is the equipment that will become the lifeblood of your company, so you want to damn well make sure that the product is good enough, but more importantly that the vendor will be there with fabulous customer support when the box breaks.
Since there is parity — more or less — in the solution stack, you are now shopping for a vendor that can prove to you that it has great customer support. If a VP or CEO is going to fly out to your site, you know that you’ve got the vendor’s attention. You know that if you have a problem, the vendor is going to dedicate itself to fixing the issue so that *your* business continues uninterrupted.
It bears repeating. In this context (couple hundred $million), executive stroking in the pre-sales stage is meant to assure you that you’ll have executive-level attention if there are any issues in the post-sale stage.
Someone else points out:
And the job of the CxO is to look the customer in the eye and tell them that HP will be there for them now and in the future, especially when they have problems (because there will *always* be problems).
So if you’re a company peon and you’re wondering why the upper management is always travelling around and schmoozing with the customers, there’s your explanation. It’s part of their job description, along with creating budgets, deciding which markets to enter, and allocating resources for various products. A senior VP is also a glorified sales rep.
It’s also why — if you’re an engineer and aspire to be senior management some day — you’d better get some people skills. Like it or not, your raw intellect alone is not enough for you to be a good senior executive. If you’re a brilliant analyst or strategist but you can’t talk to a customer, you may as well give up hope of becoming a true company leader right now.
Incidentally, this is why a good company has two parallel career ladders. More on this tomorrow.
