It Rarely Works This Well - The Wells Fargo Story
WMMM #021 - This week I share a story for understanding how enterprises buy.
Jeff Keplar Newsletter June 17, 2023 8 min read
It Rarely Works This Well - The Wells Fargo Story
The technology supplier was MapR Technologies.
The customer was Wells Fargo.
The characters:
Paul - Wells Fargo Capital Markets Project Leader
Phil - Wells Fargo Chief Data Officer
Robert - Wells Fargo Supply Chain - Procurement
Lawrence - MapR Account Manager
Vince - MapR Pre-sales Engineer
The Landscape
MapR was a player in the Big Data space, a market that began with the release of Apache Hadoop 1.0 by the Apache Software Foundation in 2011. A distant third to Cloudera and Hortonworks, MapR was a fit for those wanting a more sophisticated and scalable file system than HDFS, the open-source version used by the market leaders.
Most enterprises sought solutions from Big Data platforms to enable them to combine structured and unstructured data to provide better insights through an extensive array of open-source analytics tools. Typical use cases included enterprise governance and compliance reporting, recommendation engines, fraud detection, marketing response prediction, image classification, speech recognition, chatbots, and predictive maintenance.
Our story takes place six years ago this month, with Lawrence preparing to harvest his first significant commitment from Wells Fargo after a 2-year investment. He had found a need in their Capital Markets group, located a stone’s throw from Grand Central Station. Teamed with his stellar SE, Vince, they had won an order for a small starter project and had invested the prior 18 months in helping their client with installation, training, and completion of this first project.
The owner of the project was Paul. Lawrence had prioritized Paul’s success, and it was paying off. Paul had a new boss, Phil, the Chief Data Officer, who was viewed as disrupting the status quo.
The MapR project was getting much attention and enabling Lawrence to help Paul and Phil identify more use cases across the enterprise. It was moved into Phil’s group as fans were keen on exploring the cost-savings and new capabilities on a larger scale.
Lawrence and I had been working together for about nine months, and his confidence in me had grown.
Flashback to one year earlier.
I was asked to wear a “second hat” and take over Eastern US Sales for MapR. Doing whatever is needed sometimes requires wearing “multiple hats” and is a common occurrence in startups of MapR’s size at the time.
MapR organized its global sales organization into five theaters. The East should have been the highest producer. It was the lowest, and I was asked to turn that around. The outgoing manager Jay was a seasoned sales manager who “had run out of pep talks” for this sales team. It happens.
I found:
Lawrence - a good hunter
Lennox - a large accounts type
Mark - focused on Ad-tech
Sarah - struggling at hunting
Matt - just moved over from Inside Sales
Debika - new from Oracle
Scott - new from Workday
Carlo - new from Workday
Sean - solid Financial Services Business Development
Vince, Patrice, and Paul - solid SE team
Tom - excellent SE leader
Frederick - Montreal sales
Two open H/C: Philly and Toronto.
I learned I also had two salespeople halfway out the door and one serious customer satisfaction problem.
Morale was low.
There was a nearly unanimous sentiment that the Northeast, particularly NYC, was isolated from the rest of MapR.
The Founders rarely spent time on the east coast, and the MapR talent pool was very Silicon Valley-centric.
Lawrence did not buy into this “groupthink” of NYC being on their own. He believed that the salespeople knew what they were getting into and what they “signed up for:”
Find those accounts that need our stuff
Win them
Cultivate them by making them successful
Harvest the annuities.
Another nearly unanimous comment was, “Lawrence was a very helpful teammate.”
Lawrence had wanted the management job in the East but was not considered for it when I was asked to step in.
Are you getting the picture?
Bring it on. Give it your best shot at scaring me away from this role.
Jay had called $4.5m for Q3 before he resigned. SalesOps saw $3.5m and logged that in the Forecast before I could make the rounds.
I found $1.2m after my first pass. Buckle up.
We rallied to beat the $3.5m by $32k because I was able to help Matt build a $60k pilot into a $2m new logo win. (Apologies for the lack of details. Stay tuned for that story in a future edition.)
Everyone in this East Theater now wanted the details of how Matt had just closed $2m in 75 days.
Returning to Lawrence and his opportunity for Q2 of next year.
Lawrence and I sat down to discuss our strategy for closing his Q2 deal.
Positioning MapR as a Hub, the System of Record, not a replacement of Teradata or Oracle, had eliminated internal friction for Paul and Phil. It also expanded the mid-term and long-term potential for Lawrence.
We ran through an exercise that increased the size of Lawrence’s opportunity by 5-10X. I have found this a helpful practice when trying to hit stretch numbers. In this case, we agreed to add an option to Lawrence’s proposal for Paul. This option was an 8-figure commitment with corresponding incentives.
Paul was prepared to see a number one-tenth the size but liked the incentives with this more significant commitment. However, he advised us that if we wanted a deal by June 30th (Q2), it could be, at most, an amount less than half of what we had proposed.
(I have left out a significant amount of content for the component of the story in favor of making this a quicker read. Lawrence overcame several obstacles - with Wells and within MapR - to get us to this point.)
Since I had experience with Wells Fargo’s process when purchasing enterprise software, I let Lawrence know how I thought they would approach this order with MapR. When we received a call from their Supply Chain group, Wells followed the script I had given Lawrence.
Robert was assigned to our transaction. He had reviewed the proposal and spoken with the business (Phil and Paul.)
(Sparing you the details of the back and forth between Robert and us. Lawrence had managed to get some brief interaction with Paul. Wells locks down communication when they enter negotiation and procurement mode. Let’s skip to Robert’s request for executables from us.)
He told us they wanted the incentives offered at the 8-figure commitment but could only commit to mid-7 figures. He wanted a 12-month price hold at a discount provided for the 8-figure commitment.
Find A Way to Say “Yes”
Robert’s job was to improve the terms for his clients, Phil and Paul.
Merely saying “No” would not provide him with any wins.
Simply saying “Yes” would defeat the purpose of offering an incentive to commit to more.
Finding a “Yes, but…” is a solution that has worked for me. In particular, offer a way to obtain identical terms and conditions on future order(s).
We structured a solution with better terms than the original $2m opportunity we started with - the one Paul was expecting a proposal for. While they were better terms, they weren’t as favorable as the 8-figure commitment we had proposed as an option.
We investigated and found the risk of going above mid-7 figures valid. We landed at a mid-7-figure sized deal and inserted a provision that entitled Wells to receive identical terms going forward, but on and only on a second order equal to or greater than this June order. Also, we gave them until December 31st to place this second order.
We addressed the price hold request by offering a price point slightly higher than the one in the June transaction.
Once Robert wrapped his head around this, he took it to his client(s). We already knew this would work for Paul and waited to let this play out.
We closed our Wells deal, and the East Theater exceeded its attainment for the entire prior year at the mid-way point in the year.
Fast-forward to early December
We receive an urgent call from Paul. They had obtained year-end funds to spend on something extraordinary.
Paul has identified the provision in the order they signed in June as just that. They wanted to take advantage of the provision allowing them to replicate the June order, and they are uneasy that they can finish it in time.
This is something that rarely happens in sales.
The client wants to give you money so desperately, and they are worried they will run out of time.
Ever happen to you?
The best part of this story is the ending.
Wells Fargo invested 8-figures in MapR in a single fiscal year and drove 9-figures in value by creating a single system of record for Regulatory and Compliance.
Lawrence’s tough-mindedness and belief in his approach to sales were rewarded.
Had we chosen to take merely what Wells had scoped to purchase in 2017 and continued with this same behavior in 2018, we would not have reached the same level of investment until late 2019. With hindsight, the just-in-time implementation approach for Wells would not have allowed them to drive the same level of value. Their investment in MapR made using MapR for Regulatory and Compliance a mandate from Wells management with a more aggressive timetable.
MapR was sold in August 2019 to HPE.
Summary & Lessons Learned
1) Sometimes, the 2nd hat is the best way to deliver value to a startup.
2) Shoot for the stars. If you miss, you may reach the moon.
3) Understand how enterprises buy.
4) Stick with your convictions. Resist “groupthink.”
Thank you for reading,
Jeff
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