Selling Power Magazine Article

It’s a numbers thing – selling, that is. It relies on numbers for just about everything. Oh sure, salespeople are supposed to be glib talkers who just love to connect on a human level, but the really impressive sales types are more analysis than talk and more number crunchers than hand shakers. At least, in this new world order of sales, they’d better be.
 

Salespeople – and, frankly, all businesspeople – now live in a world full of data, and there is plenty more to come. The next revolution is called “big data,” and it encompasses all the data from the Web and other novel sources that must be managed and exploited.
 

Teradata is a $1.9 billion per year company – not small, but hardly a giant in the IT world. But Teradata has been dealing with massive data volumes for a long time, specializing in enterprise data warehouses. Data warehousing collects data in one place, very efficiently. If designed correctly, these warehouses enable business users, including sales execs, to interpret data without going through IT departments. And another Teradata specialty, in-database analytics, means analysis can be done with blinding speed.
 

These advantages make Teradata essential to many top B2C firms, including online retailers and most major airlines. The data revolution is coming to B2B sales, as both marketers and salespeople can exploit all their company’s data on customers, rivals, and its own operations, to maximize profit.

A Number Explosion  
 

Mike Koehler, Teradata's president and CEO, sees two main themes that are shaping his firm's business: "First, data is exploding. There are new types of data from mobile sources and sensors and social media. Traditional data is increasing, too." And International Data Corporation supports Koehler's assertion. It forecasts that the world will generate 50 times more information in 2021 than it does now. That's more than 5,000 percent more bits and bytes to manage, understand, and use.
The big data explosion is already showing up in Teradata's own business. At the end of 2010, the firm had 10 customers with at least one petabyte of data to manage. By the end of 2011, that count had doubled to 20 customers.
 

Facts and figures aside, business must make a profit on all that data. So the second theme is the need to not just store and manage all these bytes, but to analyze and extract business value from them. “Analytics and business intelligence have always been important, but they are becoming more important,” Koehler stresses. “That need is accelerating.”
 

Since its spin-off from technology company NCR in 2007, Teradata has been investing in four key areas. The first is consulting. “We wanted to make our consulting organization broader and deeper,” Koehler explains. Teradata has increased its consultants by 63 percent and now has the largest consulting organization devoted to data warehousing in the world.

Customer Teams  
 

The second investment is in customer teams. Since the spin-off, these teams have grown by 39 percent.
 

In addition and most important, Teradata sought to increase its own research and development (R&D). The company has boosted R&D spend by more than 33 percent.
 

Another key area of investment for Teradata is expanding partnerships with firms that help design data systems and extract value from data. These partners, which can also help Teradata penetrate new markets, have increased by 50 percent.
 

Some especially important partners have been brought in through acquisitions: Aster Data, which specializes in analytics for big data, the unstructured data from social media and other sources that do not easily fit in traditional data warehouses; and the acquisition of Aprimo’s integrated marketing management, a tool that is scalable for any size company and supports marketing and sales. “We now have two huge opportunities to add value,” Koehler explains.
 

Koehler says Teradata will continue to invest in all these areas, but he is seeking, not to grow into a gigantic firm, but only to help clients with gigantic data challenges. He makes it clear that “[Teradata’s] number one objective is not to be the biggest IT provider, but to be the best IT provider.”
 

Robert Fair, executive vice president for global field operations at Teradata, leads more than 5,000 worldwide salespeople and consultants. “Independence from NCR allowed Teradata to make its own investment decisions as a more focused, aggressive, and successful business,” Fair stresses.

Exponential Growth


Independence has paid off on the top line. Revenue is up 30 percent since the spin-off. Teradata increased sales by 13 percent in 2010 and about 20 percent in 2011, compared with single-digit growth as a unit of NCR. “Investments have allowed us to move into spaces adjacent to our stronghold in data warehousing, that is, big data analytics and integrated marketing management,” Fair notes.
 

Teradata has expanded into new markets and smaller firms than it used to serve. The company has doubled its customer base since 2007. Investors liked that growth, sending Teradata stock up 250 percent, even in the troubled markets of 2009 to 2011.  
 

The data deluge is already pounding ashore. According to The Gartner Group, enterprise data will grow 650 percent in just the next three years. “This data will increasingly come from nontraditional sources, such as Web logs and sensors that require new types of analysis and technology,” Fair (continued on page 2)

emphasizes.
 

Managing, analyzing, and extracting value from big data is a huge challenge. Fair continues, “It also creates one of the biggest opportunities for companies to create competitive advantage.”
 

Fair argues that social media is a powerful tool for bringing together people interested in solving common business problems: “Peer-influenced decision making has always played a big role in how Teradata markets to its customers, and social-media tools can facilitate those relationships.” He expects that will be true of most B2B companies in the future.
 

Teradata’s ability to support in-database analytics for B2B sales means speed and economy. “In-database analytics moves the processing to the data, rather than the data to the processing,” Fair explains. “This reduces costs dramatically and improves overall response times.”
 

Fair says Teradata differs from bigger competitors, such as IBM, Oracle, and SAP, because it has always focused on analyzing data rather than data transactions. “We’re seeing hundreds of companies move thousands of applications off of transactional database systems to Teradata,” he explains.

Integrated Effort


Sales VPs who want to exploit data need to work closely with IT departments. “The most successful companies have sales and IT departments working together to integrate data and maximize its value,” Fair says.
 

Moreover, explains Fair, best-practice data handling costs less in the long run. “A company may have 30 data marts, each with an annual operational cost of  two million dollars. We eliminate those costs by consolidating data into an integrated data warehouse.”
 

Teradata has increased sales territories from 385 to 535 since 2007. The company goes to market by industry vertical, with sales teams that have an account executive, an industry consultant, and a technical consultant.
 

New Teradata reps get two weeks of general training in San Diego, then further training in their specialty and access to Teradata University online, which is also available to customers. Team members are compensated partly by revenue, while sales managers are rewarded for revenue and margins. New accounts can take six to 18 months or even up to five years to bring on board. Deals are big – $500,000 to $50 million, according to senior account executive Ron Kunze.
 

Teradata uses a strategic-selling sales method. Kunze says the sales cycle is getting shorter as data challenges mount and Teradata becomes more familiar to prospects. “We are the best company you never heard about,” he jokes. “We are not at the Super Bowl, not at NASCAR, and not famous like IBM and Oracle.”
 

Teradata builds business, however, by amassing successes – and references. “People who know about databases know about us,” says Kunze.
 

Prospects are qualified partly by data volume, which can be anywhere from one terabyte to 50 petabytes. But qualification also recognizes which applications a company has, how many systems are interconnected, and how fast users want their data or analytics. 
 

Hunter Versus Gatherer


Kunze, who manages business with eBay, PayPal, and 20 subsidiaries, practices what he preaches. Social media can be used for prospecting and gathering information, according to whether a rep is a “hunter” or “gatherer.”
 

“I am a combination of hunter and gatherer,” he notes. So for his purposes, Kunze ranks Twitter and LinkedIn as the top social media, followed by Hoover’s, Discovery, LexisNexis, and others. He looks up customer execs on Twitter to see what they are talking about. Many execs do not tweet much about their business, but they do retweet about items that interest them or cause pain.
 

“I can also learn who they follow, like Gartner, Forrester, or my competitors,” Kunze says. “So I follow who they follow. I get a daily feed on my companies.”
 

He thinks most sales reps have not yet appreciated the value of Twitter: “The more value you put into it, the more people will follow you, and you become a trusted source on a topic.”
 

According to Kunze, LinkedIn is best for prospecting. He uses LinkedIn to learn about prospect decision makers, but not to sell. “It gives you one more data point, and it is very up-to-date,” he says. “Other tools may have lots of information, but they are not up-to-date, and people and organizations change so fast these days.”
 

With only two major accounts and their subsidiaries, Kunze does his own social media research. “Just give me a phone, a laptop, and an Internet connection.”
 

Gloria Irwin, Teradata’s strategy and sales manager for hospitality, sells to cruise lines, hotels, and the lodging sector. Some customers are small, but Teradata has big casinos as clients. Irwin handles seven key accounts and is closing on two others.
 

Irwin created Gaming Hospitality Industry Professional Group, or GHIP, on LinkedIn. She started it on her own Website and then moved GHIP to LinkedIn in January 2008. It has taken off fast and has 6,130 members, even though it does not accept all applicants.
 

“Some people are just collecting contacts, and we don’t allow that,” Irwin warns. GHIP has all of Irwin’s prospects, many IT vendors, and human resource departments that recruit IT professionals.
 

“I started it because I have been in hospitality for twenty years,” Irwin explains. “People reach out to me to ask if I know someone for this job or know software that will do that. I felt I should formalize the process.”
 

GHIP automates Irwin’s (continued on page 3)

networking, and she feels that LinkedIn is more professional than other social media. When prospecting, GHIP is the first place she goes. Irwin stresses, “I don’t have to make a cold call to anyone – ever.”
 

Although she owns the group, Irwin has four members outside of Teradata who monitor GHIP and ensure its proper use. “It is not a direct sales channel,” she says, “and we are very careful about people who abuse that.”
 

Irwin uses GHIP to extend invitations to Webinars. It is a way for members to present their technologies, and both Teradata and such partner firms as Deloitte, Capgemini, and Cognos use it that way. Irwin posts her full resume on LinkedIn, so she is not viewed as just a Teradata manager: “I want [group members] to look at me as a trusted adviser.
 

“We also learn from the group, find out what the buzz is about,” Irwin notes. “We often change our messaging and go-to-market strategy from monitoring it.”
 

Twitter feeds also have been very useful in helping Teradata clients learn from each other. “It’s the socialization of data, giving customers a way to connect,” Irwin explains. Twitter feeds are integrated with GHIP on LinkedIn.
 

So far, Irwin and her team have handled social media personally. But as size and volume grow, she is hoping that she can exploit Aprimo’s relationship manager to automate management and monitoring.
 

Tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter enable Irwin to understand what Teradata’s competitors are doing and competitors to understand Teradata’s plans, as well. “But that happens anyway,” she points out. “This just makes it more efficient.”
 

Irwin sees increasing demands to use professional social media for collaboration on projects in place of old tools such as MS Project. “There is a desire to collaborate in parallel, versus by emails that clog up your in-box,” she says. •

 

The State of Big Data Today


Information created and replicated:  >1.8 zettabytes
Files:  500 quadrillion
Investment by enterprises in the digital universe:  $4 trillion

Source: “Extracting Value from Chaos, June 2011,” IDC, sponsored by EMC Corporation.


 

Big Data's Global Growth within the Next Decade


Information managed by enterprise data centers:  x50
Number of servers:   x10
Number of files:    x75
Number of IT professionals:   x1.5

Source: “Extracting Value from Chaos, June 2011,” IDC, sponsored by EMC Corporation.

 

What Is Big Data?

Big data is a new generation of technologies and architectures designed to economically extract value from very large volumes of a wide variety of data. Big data achieves this by enabling high-velocity capture, discovery, and analysis.
 

Big data can include transactional data, warehoused data, metadata, and other data residing in extremely large files. Media, entertainment, health care, and video surveillance are examples of big data growth. Social media such as Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter are new big data sources. Consumers provide near continuous streams of data about themselves and, thanks to network effects, total data expands at rapid logarithmic rates.
 

Source: “Extracting Value from Chaos, June 2011,” IDC, sponsored by EMC Corporation.