CRN reported on the opening Cloud Computing session hosted by Gartner’s Vice President Tiffany Bova at the Xchange Solution Provider 2013 event currently running through March 12th. The session, which had Bova suggesting attendees “Fire all of your Salesforce”, in order to get into the cloud, may be considered by some to be controversial. The statement seems to draw a line between hardware based sales organizations and service/virtual solution companies.
Bova suggests finding sales people that understand the cloud, which is where I would find the biggest problem in the statement, (of course besides firing the entire sales staff). Though the cloud is maturing, the suggestion that there is a large pool of cloud-centric sales people just waiting to be hired by companies wanting to get into cloud, is little more than a dream.
Hiring sales people can be tough enough, add to it a prerequisite for cloud experience and companies may find themselves with very few options. If IT companies were to, as suggested, fire their entire sales staff in order to restructure or remodel their businesses towards the cloud, they would not only be setting themselves up for failure, but they would be potentially losing business with trusted customers and long-term clients.
Now, my guess is that Bova was just trying to open the IT business owner’s eyes through her statement. This may have been a shock tactic to point out the fact that the usual sales approach is not the approach to take with cloud services. I have seen Bova talk at previous events and she always has good insight into the state of the industry, as well as developing trends, and industry advice.
If this was not just a scare tactic and it was a literal statement, then I think Bova is off base with her statement. Today’s IT Salesforce, especially hardware based sales people, need education and proper training to be brought up to speed on cloud and services selling. Most vendors have moved their products to subscription based models making this the right time to educate and train the workforce.
