Why would the man who engineered the first big corporate sales of Lotus Notes – helping to make the program a household word – leave Lotus for a virtually unknown management consulting firm called Axiom? “I want to build a national and global sales organization,” says Barry Davis, “from the early stage of growth to a major enterprise.”

To pursue his goal, Davis has hired account managers for the home office in San Francisco and will soon pursue reps for regional sites around the country. He’s been looking for top talent, sales professionals who “know the market, have contacts, know how to build relationships and close sales,” he says.

Judging from past experience, Davis and his sales team may be bound for success.

In a 19-year sales career that started with positions at Burroughs Corp., Bunker Ramo Information Systems, Management Decision Systems, Wang Laboratories and Technical Financial Services, Davis landed at Lotus in 1990 when the company was in the midst of launching Notes, which at the time was an unknown commodity. “People asked, ‘What the heck’s groupware?’ It was hard to show the product,” Davis says. “The challenge was to create awareness of what it could do.” Solid benefit selling.

Davis not only created awareness, but also convinced General Motors and Arthur Andersen to purchase 15,000 and 60,000 copies, respectively, landmark orders considering that most PC software sold in single copies at the time. In 1991 those two deals brought in $7 million, while a third with Compaq added up to a cool $14 million in total sales for Davis.

A deal with gm involved Electronic Data Systems, the company founded by Ross Perot and acquired by gm in the late 1980s. Davis attempted to sell to gm through EDS and finally succeeded by selling to the European division, which at the time was more liquid than the American division. When the final agreement was hammered out, the software could be used throughout the company. “It would allow them to communicate and collaborate across all departments worldwide,” Davis says, a tremendous achievement since at the time gm was using 18 e-mail systems that couldn’t communicate with each other.

Davis didn’t just sell Notes to gm, he convinced them to take on a full-fledged relationship. “We developed a strategic partnership,” he says. “We convinced them we’d be with them for the long term.” The contract that was signed in July 1991 was the first big corporate deal. “There weren’t orders like that before,” Davis says. “Besides being big, it helped legitimize Notes.”

After reaching agreement with gm, Davis moved on to Arthur Andersen, which was an even tougher sale because the company was “a Microsoft shop and had a lot of objections,” Davis says. But Davis would not be turned away. “I got the entire Lotus sales team involved, including Iris Associates, the company that designed Notes.”

He also developed an important new strategy for selling complex software – a sales team comprised of a senior salesperson and a technical expert. “It was a novel concept that was ideal for the account,” Davis says. “It allowed us to be on top of what the customer needed.” After a series of meetings with key executives, Davis won the contract, which was bigger than gm’s and included maintenance as well as software.

After winning these big sales, Davis was named to head a new account group, code-named Swarm, that focused on the top 25 accounts and later pursued new business. Working with the group’s three sales/tech teams, Davis helped bring Notes into the mainstream by selling it to a range of companies and integrating it with their desktop applications. The experience was one of the highlights of Davis’s career. “It was one of the best groups ever assembled,” he says. “I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and sell for my company.” As the leader of Swarm, Davis made Notes an international phenomenon, winning seven global accounts while pursuing large and small companies in the U.S.

The growth of Notes transformed Lotus into one of the most successful software firms, and last year techno giant IBM purchased it. This may be one of the reasons Davis left the company, although he attributes his departure to a desire for a new challenge.

“I was ready for a significant growth opportunity,” he says, which he is experiencing at Axiom, the young management consulting firm that is seeking to revolutionize the industry. The company has developed Rapid Business Renewal (RBR), a program that promises to reenergize companies quickly, with an emphasis on growth instead of cost cutting and downsizing. “Axiom’s product is big, because growth is where the action is,” Davis says. “Companies not focused on it are doomed.”

Founded in 1988, Axiom was a small, unknown company when Cambridge Technology Partners bought it last year. The Cambridge, Massachusetts firm, a publicly held company, is already well known, so Axiom can draw on its success.

Axiom’s office is free form, with wide windows, a warehouse look, no private offices and no corporate hierarchy. Davis thrives on this kind of environment. “My style is out of the box,” he says, but he must install a certain order because “there’s no sales structure in place.” His plan: to create a sales organization that will build the RBR brand and extend the company’s reach from the West Coast by winning national and global clients. His quota is to land five to ten new accounts each month by pursuing customer service and sales managers at high tech, health care and other high growth companies. He plans to reach them with promotional mailings before embarking on sales calls.

For one of Axiom’s current accounts, Viag Intercom, a German telecommunications company, Axiom is employing the RBR strategy to implement performance improvements in many of the company’s targeted business processes, including product development, customer acquisition and customer service.

Davis is seeking to do at Axiom what he did at Lotus: transform a virtually unknown product into a mainstay well in the mainstream. “There are tremendous similarities,” he says. “In the early ’90s, nobody thought Notes was going to make it. Now, we’re going to change the way companies do business using management consulting. The lesson from Lotus is it can be done.” And the sales challenger is just the guy to do it.