The document provides guidance on getting to know customers in order to better align IT solutions with business needs and initiatives. It recommends researching the customer through their website, financial reports, social media, and other sources to understand their industry, goals, challenges, and key personnel. With this information, the document instructs building a customer profile and initiative map to identify opportunities for IT solutions to enable the customer's business strategies. Engagement with the customer should then be customized based on the research.

1. Getting to Know
Your Customer
Preparing to Align to the
Business Outside of IT
Jeff Korte - January 2018

2. Dell – Internal Use – Confidential2 of 29
What problem are we trying to solve?

3. Dell – Internal Use – Confidential3 of 29
I want my BI reports to go faster.
I want to implement personalized medicine.
Vs.

4. How can we:
• Be customer centric if we don’t know what they do?
• Bring value if we don’t know what matters to the business?
• Be relevant as we engage customers?
• Build campaigns that get traction?
• Streamline the engagement process?
Modern Realities
• IT is losing its influence over the business
• Businesses focus on growth and new initiatives
Refreshing assets no longer carries urgency
• We need to engage business leadership
Where
do we
start?

5. What is our role?
• Align our resources to the customer initatives
– Enable Relationships
– Build our Brand
– Grow Influence within Customer base
– Identify the need for our solutions
• Demonstrate our value to customers
– Establish Credibility
– Inspire Confidence
– Predict the Business Impact
– Deliver on Expectations
• Accelerate Opportunities
– Create Urgency
– Enable Change

6. Where do we start?
Understand the Business
Get to know People
Align with initiatives
Collaborate to drive value

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Research
Prepare yourself to adopt
the customer perspective

8. Build Customer Profile
Appreciate State of the Industry
Collect key information about account
Identify and Document Business Initiatives
Goals of research

9. Getting started – Read their website
How do they market themselves?
Company News and Announcements
• Acquisitions, Promotions
What are the financials?
• Website Investor Relations Page
Who are the key players in the Org?
Who are they hiring?
Follow Social Media posts

10. Mining info from a corporate website – Example
Details on Company Direction
Recent Changes at Company
B2B opportunities
Financial Info
About Dell
Open Positions

11. What to look for when researching
• What are their motivations?
– Growth? Cost Containment?
• What makes them unique?
• Are they Regional, National, International?
• Are they in a leadership or minority position in the vertical?
– ATT or Sprint?
• Industry Trends
– What is everyone chasing?
• Recent news
• Partnerships/Competitors/Collaborators
• M&A Activity
• Legal – Governance – Who do they answer to? – Regulatory Compliance

12. Reading the financial documents
• What do they do?
• Public / Private with Public Debt?
• What is the competitive landscape?
• Annual Revenue
• Profitability
• Budgeting process?
• Debt Structure
• Need help understanding? Ask the DFS Folks for guidance!
Typical Reports Available:
10K
Annual Reports
Quarterly Reports
Earnings Statements
Investor Guidance

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The 10K goldmine
Annual filing by public corporations (or ones that have public debt)
• Available on Investor Relations Page
• Look for:
– How many properties does it have? Remote sites?
– # of employees
– Revenue / Profit? – $1B – $100B? – Helps establish potential TAM
– Industry Trends – Where are they positioned within their industry?
 Is this an opportunity for disruption? Growth? Forced change?
– Management Statement
– Acquisitions?
 Consulting Opportunities?
App Integration / consolidation?
Datacenter move?
Infrastructure Consolidation?

14. Key Sentence
Example from Dell.com financial page
Link to Q3 Financial Summary
During the quarter, Dell Technologies launched a dedicated
Internet of Things (IoT) division aimed at coordinating
development of IoT products and services across all of our
businesses. This comprehensive approach includes IoT-specific
products, labs, partner program and consumption models to help
customers speed the implementation of their IoT solutions.
This is a new initiative.
Something Dell is proud of.
How can WE capitalize?

15. Ways to keep current
• Add Filter to google News
• Subscribe to the Local Business Journal
• Industry Websites / Newsletters
– Fierce(IT), HealthcareIT
• Google alerts – set up a daily email for each accounts
• Discover Org
• Annual reports
• Follow them on LinkedIn
• Google –> Search link to: (company name).
Help understand their GTM / business partners
• Twitter
• Search (company name) blogs
• SlideShare.net
• Industry Conferences

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Meeting
Preparation
Maximize the opportunity
with your customers

17. Is the topic tailored to their interests?
Understand the attendees
LinkedIn
− Job function / Previous Employers
− Experience
− Goals
Twitter
‒ Opinions/Interests
Google Search
Look for
− Research papers
− Personal interests
Meet with peers / subordinates
− If targeting a business leader,
take meetings with subordinates
and ask about the leader

18. Key personnel – Example Bio
James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul,” was a prolific singer, songwriter
and bandleader, as well as one of the most iconic figures in funk and soul music.
Born in Barnwell, South Carolina, on May 3, 1933, into extreme poverty,
James Brown worked his way to the top of the funk and R&B music earning
the moniker “The Godfather of Soul.”
Throughout the 1970s, Brown continued to perform ceaselessly and recorded
several more hits, most notably “Sex Machine” and “Get Up Offa That Thing.”
Although his career fell off during the late 1970s due to financial troubles and the
rise of disco, Brown made an inspired comeback with a multifaceted performance
in the classic 1980 film The Blues Brothers. His 1985 song “Living in America,”
featured prominently in Rocky IV, was his biggest hit in decades.
James Brown
Chief Soul Officer

19. Customer Mind Map Example

20. What are customer’s top drivers and why?
Adopt the business’ perspective
Uptime
Operational
efficiency
GrowthCosts
Change
velocity

21. Adopt the individual’s perspective
Job security / advancement
Cost savings
Solution implementation
Eliminate pain points
• Capacity / performance constraints

22. I have all this info – Now what!
• Write it down – Collaborate with the Account team!
– Xmind
– One Note
– Powerpoint Preso
– Internal Wiki
• Build an opportunity map
– What opportunities align to each business initiative?
– Collaborate with the team and build action
items around engagement
• Engage your customers
– Validate your findings with Champions
– Build on meetings with Champions to facilitate
are neutral or negative towards us
This
is what
Growth
looks
like…

23. Align Business Initiative to Campaigns
What are they trying to accomplish?
How does this align to our current messaging?
Describe the campaigns to share with the extended team
Document progress and track follow ups
See examples next…

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Initiative Map
Acme, Inc Strategies
Therapy Innovation
Globalization
Economic Value
EUC Experience &
Security
Red Team
Engagement
Workload
Modernization
Expand Across Care
Continuum
Develop Healthcare
Solutions
Provide Insights and
Analytics
Meet Emerging Market
Demand
Drive Inorganic and
Organic Growth
Enhance Compliance
Capability
Improve Operational
Efficiency
Digital Application
Solution Transformation Project Initiative
Win 10
Vulnerability
Identification
Cloud Migration
AI for the
Digital
Modernization
Risk Mitigation
ITaaS
IoT
Acme, Inc

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Dell Technologies Active Initiatives - detail
IT Transformation
 Workload Migration
 Effort designed to drive workloads to PC 2.0, and other cloud models to leverage better economics and agility of modern
infrastructure.
 SAP Resiliency
 While systems have been architected with Operational and Disaster Recovery Concepts in mind, the focus of this
engagement is to employ robust standards and processes to ensure not only can IT meet business requirements for
Resiliency, recovery, but also demonstrate that it can over and over while the environment continues to evolve and
change.
 The initial work product is to define the target state, provide the roadmap to maturity, and ensure the first phase for
SAP Resiliency meets the objectives builds a baseline for other processes and applications as needed.
 Process Modernization & Operating Model
 People Process work required to accelerate consumption and effective utilization of desired target state
environments. Started with PC 2.0 through best practice process definition of the key operational processes.
 Additional work required to implement and remediate them along with instantiate the other key processes that a mature
services oriented IT shops utilize. This will invoke the need for some Organizational Retooling and alignment as well.

26. Example campaign map
EBC
Acquisition
Client Devices
Infrastructure
ROI Strategy
VMware
PKS
Customer 1
Customer 2
Bob –VMware – On
Dave’s team
Isilon
XtremlO
Data Domain
vCloud Certified Offering
to Hospitals – VCPP
Accelerate program – Building
GTM Strategy to design and
deploy their Cloud
Engaging with Pivotal on
App/Dev
Expand Price List to Dell Tech
Buying Group
Ready Systems
Object Storage
Russ
Sue
2 Datacenters
Billy – Intro to Customer
Steve
Gene
Feb/March Timeframe
Campaigns
Security
Service
Provider
Offering
App
Rationalization
Portal
Consolidation
EPIC
Residency
Analytics
Curtis – Meeting 11/29 –
went great!
Next steps on PC tab
Resident Contact
Jim Robberts
Asked for meeting with
Matt Roberts 12/18
Desktop – Client
Provisioning and management
Key Contacts
HCI is a better fit
Multitenant
vCloud Air Provider Hosting
Get Contact from Dean
Work with only 2 security
partners:
Mark Steele
Workspace one
Device as a service
ECG
Optiv
VP Apps
CTO
Russ text Mike 11/21
asking for a meeting
when he’s in town next
Russ has strong
relationship

27. Act
• Knowing the drivers and perspective for customers will enable
you to customize the engagement
• Customize presentations to the customer interest
– 150 yr old railroad may not see the world the same as Tesla or Uber
– Financial Services doesn’t care about HIPAA
• Understanding recent issues or growth potential
– Emphasize scale when a corporation is growing
– Emphasize flexible spend or modular growth when cost is a concern
• Watch for changes in leadership
– Power vacuums are excellent opportunities for change
– Incumbents need to resell the value of previous solutions
– Challengers can capitalize on opportunity to establish new direction

28. Last bits of advice
Prepare to be wrong
• Preconceived ideas can be misleading. Abandon them if they aren’t useful
This is just context
• This information is intended to help start the conversation, not dominate it
Adapt over time
• Evolve strategy as you learn more from the customer
Be Humble
• Use this information to be informed, not to inform

29. Execution ideas
• Google it
• Ask around
• Engage the verticals to identify resources
• Engage Partners, Service Providers and Influencers
• What decks are out there?
• Book a meeting with someone and ask them questions
– Internal, customer, leadership, verticals
• Plan a social event
– Lunch, Happy Hour, Dinner, Game Tickets,
Tailgate, Go carts, Demo-ball, Lasertag