Blind Optimism
Blind Optimism, Thick Skin, And A Cell Phone
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 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