‘Sales alignment and field alignment is a clear priority for me internally,’ says HPE Vice President of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem Jeremiah Jenson. ‘What it means for partners is more people showing up at their offices co-selling with them and going to market together with them.’
New Hewlett Packard Enterprise Vice President of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem Jeremiah Jenson is making sales and field alignment a “clear priority” as part of a plan to drive more joint co-selling between HPE sales teams and partners.
“Sales alignment and field alignment is a clear priority for me internally,” said Jenson in his first interview since jumping from Amazon Web Services 10 weeks ago to take the top North America channel job at HPE. “What it means for partners is more people showing up at their offices co-selling with them and going to market together with them. It’s about understanding the partner capability and being able to bring that to the customer in the right places.”
Jenson said the “growth” opportunity to get partners to cross-sell across the portfolio starts with sales and field alignment. “It starts with sellers sitting down with sellers discussing joint opportunities and us bringing something to the table beyond the portfolio and them bringing something to the table beyond the capability of a relationship with their value-add and their services,” said Jenson. “That creates magic for the customer. So we are very, very focused on how to do that.”
The move to drive tighter sales and field alignment with HPE’s North America partner base comes with HPE moving to incent more partners to sell the complete HPE portfolio, including storage. Effective Nov. 1, HPE is rolling out a new Triple Platinum Plus medallion aimed at getting more of its largest transactional partners to sell the complete HPE networking, compute and hybrid cloud portfolio.
The HPE channel team is sharply focused on driving that cross-sell opportunity across the portfolio, looking closely at the right metrics to “get the right results,” said Jenson. “Are we measuring the right things?” said Jenson. “Are those things producing the right results? Where they are we want to celebrate that and do more of that and where they are not let’s understand and tweak the plan to make sure we get the right results.”
Jenson complimented the strong sales and field alignment that Aruba has with partners. One example of the cross-selling that could benefit HPE is taking an Aruba networking customer at the edge into the rest of the HPE portfolio in the new unified HPE Partner Ready Vantage program.
Sarah Miles, founder and CEO of Milestone Tech, Castle Rock, Colo., which was just named HPE Hybrid Cloud Solutions Partner of the Year, said she is “confident” that Jenson’s focus on driving stronger sales and field alignment with the HPE direct sales team will pay off for partners.
“Jeremiah understands the age-old request from the partner community is that we need better alignment with field sellers, and they can’t just be their own organization,” she said. “I think Jeremiah really gets it. That is where he is going to have work to do to go internally to gain mind share, partnership and alignment with the end-user sales arm of HPE to foster a stronger connection between the loyal trusted HPE partners and HPE sellers.”
Jenson has a “lot of confidence and support” from the Milestone Tech team and entire channel community, said Miles. “Jeremiah understands what the partner community wants and needs and what HPE needs to do to align with us, and I have confidence that his experience will enable him to not just understand the problem but to actually make significant strides in executing the solution,” she said. “Those are two very different things. A lot of people can identify problems but have no idea internally how do you get the buy-in for your vision.”
Jenson, for his part, said HPE has already started driving the sales and field alignment with specialty sales reps in the storage business.
“We have a really good, focused plan around how we get some of our storage sellers in a very measured and methodical approach to the business to show up with co-selling opportunities to work with our partners,” he said. “We’re taking that across the portfolio.”
Another area that is a priority, said Jenson, is incenting partners to drive “net-new logos” growth. “There will be predictable change, but we certainly want to incent partners in the areas of priorities, and net-new logos are a part of that,” he said. “It is really important to us given all the investments we’ve made that we take those [new offerings and services] to customers. Because it is absolutely the case that we should be acquiring customers faster than we should be acquiring revenue. The value proposition is there.”
