Hi Guys/gurls...I am not sure who Anita Tuladhar is...but certainly Sudha Shah is someone we all should be proud of. I am not sure where she is now or what she is involved in but when I read about her 5 years ago I was really impressed and proud of being a Nepali. This is the 5 page article published about Sudha Shah in Fortune magazine 5 years ago.
Blind Optimism, Thick Skin, And A Cell Phone Sudha Shah is selling software in a crummy economy. Good thing she has
By Melanie Warner
August 13, 2001
(FORTUNE Magazine) – Sudha Shah is at the peak of her game. As one of the top sales reps for a big software company, she's won the respect (and perhaps envy) of her co-workers, and she has earned a bucket of money in commissions. Last year Sudha blasted through her sales quota by more than 400%, bringing around $40 million in revenue to SAP, the German business-software maker--more money than all but one of her 300 sales colleagues in the U.S. She won't hint at what her commissions were for 2000, but one former SAP rep estimates that Sudha's total compensation may well have exceeded $800,000.
But that, as the saying goes, was then. And this is now.
When you're a sales rep, the past means nothing; sure, it's great that you've built up relationships, but what are those contacts worth today? Every year Sudha has to prove herself all over again. So this year she has a higher quota than last year. To hit--or, she hopes, to exceed--that ambitious new target, she must go back to customers who just bought millions of dollars' worth of SAP software, largely on the strength of her promise that the stuff would help their businesses purr happily into the future, and convince them that they absolutely, positively need SAP's new Internet-savvy products too. And that's not even her toughest problem. Her toughest problem looks like this: In April, after months of working the phones, she was this close to getting semiconductor equipment maker LAM Research to buy a new SAP product. Then she got a call from Don Roberts, LAM's senior IT director. Sorry, Roberts said, but we've cut our 2001 tech budget--maybe we'll make a deal next year.
Sudha is getting familiar with that refrain. As companies hunker down in the slowing economy, they've been slashing budgets for technology. In the past six months 44% of the CIOs of large companies surveyed quarterly by Merrill Lynch reported cutting their IT budgets by between 5% and 30%. Companies are facing tough choices; LAM, for one, has had to lay off 15% of its work force. The last thing corporate executives want to hear as they cut projects or workers is a chirpy sales pitch from an optimistic 34-year-old about the revolutionary promise of customer-relationship-management software. But that doesn't discourage Sudha; it goads her on. Working out of SAP's Silicon Valley office in Foster City, Calif., she spends as many as 70 hours a week peddling corporate software to high-tech clients. With a Nokia cell phone clipped to her ear, Sudha is constantly dialing--making from 30 to 70 calls a day to gather tips and work her contacts. In the past 12 months she ended two vacations early to work on deals, one when her boss e-mailed her about a new account, a digital printing company called Electronics for Imaging. "I could have just thrown it back at my boss and said, 'I'm on vacation--wait until I get back,' but I didn't want to do that," says Sudha. Instead, she flew home from Montreal, where she was visiting friends over the Christmas holiday. Four months later she had nailed the deal.
And so far, more than halfway through the year, that's the only sale Sudha has actually closed. Last year she completed ten transactions to land the title of SAP's No. 2 sales rep in the U.S. She's gunning for No. 1 this year, though she needs a whole lot more revenue to get there. But she's not worried. "Things don't really start to ramp up until the end of the year," says Sudha cheerfully. "There are a couple of accounts that could be big later."
Confronted with empty-handed customers, the sharp decline in the tech sector, and gloomy economic predictions--in short, in the face of overwhelming evidence that this is the toughest market for salespeople in years--Sudha's optimism seems downright loony. She's living in a fantasy world in which CEOs care about nothing so much as making their companies hum with the most up-to-date technology. She's in deep denial.
And that's a very good thing for SAP. Sudha, and sales reps like her, perform the essential task of a corporation, the thing that makes a business a business--they bring in the money. In a difficult economic climate, when every crumb counts, their job is that much more important. When SAP posted revenues of $1.6 billion and earnings of $180 million in their most recent quarter, co-CEO Hasso Plattner pounded his chest proudly over the happy results. After all, profits were up 78% from the year before, making SAP one of the very few tech companies to beat analysts' expectations. And it was the sales reps like Sudha--who ignored the dire predictions and the naysayers and ventured out to slay huge deals--who made Plattner's boasting possible. When Sudha closes with a customer, it's one small act of faith that this company has a future.
Getting in
Before Sudha can close a deal, she has to get in the door--no small thing, especially now. The worst part about being a salesperson is feeling like a big fat nobody. You make calls, you send e-mails, but no one answers. Sudha is in this Nobody Zone with one of her prospects right now. She received a tip that this outfit--we'll call it Company X--might be chucking its old mainframe computer, and the disjointed software systems it has pieced together over time, in favor of a single system to run its human resources, accounting, and manufacturing departments. This kind of enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is SAP's core product, and, if Company X became a customer, it would mean big bucks. But first Sudha has to get in and talk to someone. She has called and e-mailed several people in charge of buying technology for Company X, but nobody seems to want to talk to her. If she could just get a meeting, she thinks, she would surely get the ball rolling.
Sometimes Sudha is trapped for weeks in the Nobody Zone. She was stuck there last year with AMD, the semiconductor maker, which eventually became one of her biggest customers. For over a month chief information officer Fred Mapp wouldn't return her phone calls. He was a huge fan of Oracle, a key SAP competitor, and wasn't inclined to switch allegiances. Still, Sudha persisted. In fact, she called Mapp with such regularity that one of his direct reports, whom she was also bombarding with phone calls, insisted that she "stop calling Fred."
Sudha acquiesced, but she didn't give up. She just shifted course, contacting an SAP sales rep in Germany who had sold software to a German business unit of AMD. She persuaded the rep to ask his AMD contact to meet with her during an upcoming trip to the U.S. That helped her get a subsequent meeting with one of Fred's IT managers, which led to a meeting with Fred, which led, eventually, to her winning the account. When Fred was finally introduced to Sudha, he liked the way she listened, the way she seemed to understand what he needed from the new software. And he liked her enthusiasm. "A ball of energy" is what he calls her. "Sudha didn't oversell, and she didn't start talking at me," says Fred. "She made notes when we talked, and when she said she'd call and follow up on things, she did." He ended up turning Oracle away and spending what one analyst estimates was more than $20 million with SAP. "I would do anything for Sudha," he says now.
Like many of Sudha's customers, Fred found her intriguing. A small brunette with a wide, engaging smile, Sudha is a rarity--a charming young woman in the largely male world of hard-core nerds. She's also comfortable being the exception, the exotic standout. Her father was a doctor in Nepal, and Sudha, the oldest of five children, grew up in a rural village without electricity. As a teenager, she attended a Catholic boarding school run by German nuns in Katmandu. It was there that Sudha learned English and got the sort of wide-ranging education most Nepalese kids could barely imagine. But her parents didn't actually expect her to put her education to practical use. They assumed she would consent to an arranged marriage, like every other nice, 17-year-old Nepalese girl, and stay home to raise a family. That wasn't Sudha's plan. Outspoken and strong-willed, she announced to her horrified parents that she had applied to colleges in the U.S. "I wanted to go to a bigger pond, to explore more and see more, and chart out my own life. I didn't want to do what was expected of me," says Sudha, whose full last name is Shah-tsou. She got a full scholarship to attend Mills College, a small, all-women's school in Oakland, Calif., and majored in business economics and communications.
People had always told Sudha that she would be great in sales, and after graduating in 1991 she landed a sales job at Nady Systems, a company that makes wireless headphones. It wasn't long before she realized sales was the job she was born to do. "I love talking to and getting to know people," she says. Four years and several companies later, she was at Oracle, selling database software just as everyone was starting to get a big case of tech fever. Customers, Sudha remembers, were flush with cash and eager to spend it. No one wanted to be left out of the tech revolution. "There were times when customers were calling us," says Sudha. All that was still true in 1998, when she left the ultra-aggressive Oracle sales team for SAP.
Those days of the easy sell are gone, but that hasn't changed the way Sudha attacks her job. She seems to love the challenge of accounts that are tough to crack--hard-shelled nuts that will eventually give way, once she finds the weak spot and applies the right pressure. During four visits over the course of a month, I never once heard her fret that she might not win a deal. Other SAP salespeople I met griped about how tough it was to sell software in a "demolished economy," but not Sudha. Reluctant CIOs and disappearing tech budgets are simply an opportunity to "be more creative" in structuring deals. If you buy now, she pleads with customers, you'll have a fully loaded software system whizzing and ready to go when the economy picks up. You'll be way ahead of the pack. And why not take advantage of this slow period to endure the eight or ten months (and inevitable disruptions) it takes to install new software? Sudha's glass is never half-full; it's always overflowing. She once had a boss who challenged her reps to a contest: She wanted to see who could get the most hang-up calls in one month. Sudha won. Her prize was a rubber chicken, which now hangs on the wall of her cubicle, next to a whiteboard on which someone has scrawled in big letters: SUDHA WILL CLOSE LOTS OF BIG DEALS IN THE AMERICAS THIS YEAR.
The pitch
If you last thought about the world of sales when you read Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman or saw David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, you might not recognize the new vocabulary of the profession, which involves fancy talk of win-win partnerships, valued-added strategies, and ROI. In the second half of the 1990s the friendly good-time Charlie salesman was recast as a "partner." This new salesperson not only sold something you needed but also stuck around to make sure the thing you bought worked, to help with short-term problems, and to anticipate future strategic needs. In the new sales vernacular, there are no products, only "solutions."
This recasting of the sales relationship was born of a crisis of confidence. In the early 1990s two things happened: Customers became convinced that if they didn't buy all sorts of new software, they'd fall hopelessly behind their competitors; and software became more and more complicated, so much so that customers who tried installing complex applications often wound up frustrated, if not downright angry. To make the most of the first trend, software companies had to carefully manage the second. So they developed the "solutions" approach, seeking to inspire trust and assure customers that they wouldn't be stranded after the sale.
When it works, the solutions approach is a beautiful thing for sellers, because it helps turn one-time buyers into repeat customers. That is crucial for SAP. Since wooing new customers is now particularly hard, SAP must convince its enormous installed base of ERP customers--some 375 Fortune 500 companies--to buy new customer-relationship-management, supply-chain, and e-procurement software, all of which help connect companies to their customers and suppliers via the Internet.
For salespeople like Sudha, making the solutions approach work for both new and old customers translates into nonstop relationship building. Luckily for SAP, that seems to come almost naturally to Sudha. To get AMD's business, she spent weeks talking to people from different departments, trying to understand what they wanted from the new system. She talked to Fred Mapp three or four times a week, and put together detailed reports showing exactly how much money AMD could save by installing SAP--reports Fred could use to make his case to the CEO and AMD's board. When she met with EFI, she convinced CIO Steve Zoppi and IT director Calvin Do that she didn't just want to sell them software; she wanted to help EFI become the sort of fast-moving, efficiently run e-business that would be the envy of its competitors. EFI could do that, she told them, by running SAP's new collection of mySAP.com software--which would link EFI's internal departments with data about customers and suppliers--on top of the ERP system they had initially planned on. Sudha let Steve and Calvin know she would bend over backwards for them. And she did. During a Hawaii junket honoring her and other SAP sales stars, Sudha skipped the golf to talk by phone with EFI techies, answering their questions about SAP's software. The result: EFI bought the whole enchilada, both the complex ERP application and the newer Internet software.
In theory, the idea of the salesman as partner is a neat one. But, of course, when money is short, the veneer can come unglued. While a customer still might have his hands full installing the intricate software he recently bought, the sales rep wants to book revenue--and get a commission--by selling new stuff. So she may well find herself pitching new products to a "partner" who is interested in anything but new software--a situation that exposes even the best partners for what they really are: buyer and seller.
In June, for example, Sudha comes back to Fred, her staunch ally at AMD, to sell him a new product called SAP Portals, which blends an existing SAP product with software acquired from a startup company. SAP is betting so heavily on SAP Portals that it has spun off a company with just that name to sell it. In early June, Sudha gets on Fred's calendar and flies down to AMD's executive offices in Austin, Texas, with Jason Wolf, a colleague from SAP Portals, and Murali Kasiviswanath, the SAP engineer who will do the product demo. If they land the deal, Sudha and Jason will both get full commission.
The meeting takes place inside a windowless conference room at AMD. A few minutes into Jason's PowerPoint presentation, Fred announces he's "glazing over." He doesn't understand why he's being pitched on this new product--it sounds an awful lot like the Workplace software he bought from SAP last year. "I'm sitting in my car and I've got a motor that's ready to go and you're saying that the motor's no good and I need a new one?" he asks incredulously. Jason tries to explain how the new product is different from the one he already has, but Fred's not convinced. "I've heard you say we'll love this, but I'm the customer. You've got to understand my business problem," he says. Sudha, who's positioned herself next to Fred and across the table from Jason, Murali, and Walter Smith, another member of AMD's technical staff, intervenes, trying to persuade Fred to give Jason another five minutes to finish his presentation. Fred relents, but he's clearly impatient and longingly eyes the door.
Afterward, as we're scooping up items from the salad bar in AMD's cafeteria, Sudha admits that the meeting didn't go as well as planned. "It wasn't one of my best," she acknowledges, tossing some broccoli onto her plate. Perhaps she could have prepared more with Jason and Murali or briefed Fred better. But somehow, despite the obvious setback--Fred had clearly proclaimed he didn't need the new software--Sudha is undaunted. She insists that it is merely the first step in an ongoing effort. "Now I have lots of action items to follow up on," she smiles.
Clinching the deal
A week after the disappointing Austin meeting, Sudha gets some good news. Electroglas, a semiconductor-equipment company she's been pitching for five months, decides to buy from SAP over Oracle and J.D. Edwards. Sudha was expecting that decision, but she wasn't sure whether Electroglas' board was going to sign off on spending the money this year, given the slump in semiconductor sales. Sudha wanted the deal now, and so she had made the offer as appealing as possible. While she won't discuss the specifics, Steve Hmelar, Electroglas' director of information, figures that he got a 30% discount on the price Electroglas would have had to pay 18 months ago.
Sudha's even made some headway with Company X. By digging around, she found out that a colleague at SAP Portals knew an IT executive at Company X from a previous job. That got her the meeting she was angling for, and she's now in the running with Oracle and PeopleSoft. But Company X isn't in the market for a big ERP system, as Sudha had thought. Pleading poverty, Company X says it wants to buy only human-resources software, just one piece of an ERP system. It's a small-potatoes deal, but Sudha sees it as her way in, a crack that she'll pry open later. She thinks she can ultimately convince Company X to buy the whole integrated suite of SAP products. Already she's thinking about how she's going to work the deal. When she met up with co-CEO Plattner in mid-June, she enlisted his support, warning him, "I've got a big deal coming up that I'm going to need your help on."
My final few meetings with Sudha take place while she's working deals at SAP's Sapphire conference, an annual orgy of SAP employees, customers, and well-wishers held this year in Orlando's Orange County Convention Center, a monstrous edifice spanning half a mile. It's SAP's custom to pull out all the stops for Sapphire, and despite the withering economy, this year is no exception. All 9,000 people who attend get a Palm VII in their welcome packet and are later entertained by comedian Dennis Miller and the well-preserved rock band Aerosmith, which gives a raucous concert that Wolfgang Kemna, the head of SAP's U.S. business, kicks off with the shout, "Aerosmiff iz in ze houz."
Sudha missed the Aerosmith concert. She had to fly back to the Valley a day early to deliver a 40-page document to Company X. But before she left, she was once again working the LAM deal. Despite the earlier decision by LAM's executives to hold off on an SAP purchase because of budget cuts, Sudha has kept in touch. In the past few weeks she and LAM's senior IT director Roberts have been discussing Roberts' latest proposal: Let LAM try the product before buying it. That might be great for LAM, but it wouldn't let Sudha book any revenue. For weeks she and Roberts have been going back and forth about how to structure a deal. Sudha hopes to nail down an agreement at Sapphire, and on the first day of the conference she schedules a meeting with her boss, Roger Quinlin; Don and his boss, Bob Rudy; a consultant who has been working with LAM; and a technical specialist from SAP. The group spends an afternoon in a makeshift conference room, sipping bad conference coffee and talking about the definition of "free."
A few weeks later I check in one more time with Sudha, who reports that the meeting went well. She was able to get Bob to commit to buying licenses for at least 500 LAM employees before the end of the year, and she agreed to do an initial pilot for 50 people at a nominal charge. It was a great moment for Sudha. LAM felt as if it was getting a deal because SAP doesn't normally do "try before you buy" licensing, and Sudha will get a commission, although it won't be nearly as big as she'd hoped. The paperwork's not yet signed, but Sudha, of course, is confident that the details will get worked out. For a moment she's elated, flush with the thrill of a victory, no matter how small. Then she takes a deep breath, whips out her cell phone, and gets ready to tackle the next sale.
FEEDBACK:
mwarner@fortunemail.com
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