This document outlines a sales playbook for Converged Systems. It identifies key customer types and decision makers. It recommends focusing sales engagements on four themes: provocation, insight, technical leadership, and consumption. It provides messaging tailored for operational and financial leaders, and describes approaches like provocation selling, insight selling, and technical selling. The playbook also covers the customer buying cycle and how Converged Systems should deliver solutions to customers.

1. CONVERGED SYSTEMS
SALES PLAYBOOK
Drafted: 2/28/2014 – Peter Stone
Edited: (v1.1) 4/30/2015 – Peter Stone

2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
¨ Customer Decision Makers:
¤ Operational (CIO/CTO, IT Director, Infrastructure Director, etc.)
¤ Financial/Line of Business (CFO, P&L Owners, Line of Business, etc.)
¨ 4 Selling “Themes” Guide Most Customer Engagements
¤ Provocation
¤ Insight
¤ Technical Leadership
¤ Consumption
¨ Customer Types (Use Cases):
¤ DevOps onDemand, Business Logic/Apps onDemand (“AppStacks” such as: Bitnami Apps, CRM in 30
seconds, etc.), ITOps onDemand, Utility Consumption, Core IT Services
¨ ** All Sales Engagements Must be Aligned to the Customer Buying Cycle
¨ Delivered to the Customer via Rock-Solid Appliances

3. CUSTOMER MESSAGING
for Operational Leaders
Customers Title /
Focus Area
Customer Challenge What Converged Systems Delivers?? How Do We Does It Key Performance Indicators,
Proof Points
Title:
Head of IT (CIO, CTO,
VP Operations, etc.)
Focus Area:
TCO, Risk, SLAs, CapEx
& OpEx control, agility
& responsiveness to
business
- Expensive to Design
and deploy IT
infrastructure
- Shrinking budgets, but
need to do more
- Security issues
(hacking/internal risks)
- Predictable
performance, capacity
& capabilities
- Keeping lights on vs.
innovating for business
excellence
- Reduced infrastructure management costs
- Reduced time to procure & provision
- Simplified IT architecture and
deployment by standardizing on open
standards and platforms
- Eliminates the need for customer to
become a “system builder”
- Focus resources on business needs and
not what products you need, or how to
maintain them
- Simplify release & upgrade processes
- Reduce time spent on incidents/problem
tickets
- Reduce downtime
We deliver purpose built
appliances based on
Open Compute
blueprints configured
with ITaaS, PaaS and
Apps on Demand.
Downtime solved by
seamless failover as well
as additional as needed
DR appliances
License model
fundamentally disruptive
to cloud compute
universe because we can
scale as needed with no
software “true-up”
Time to value, low cost
build process
- Deployment – X times faster than
“roll your own”
- UAT reduced – from 2 months to 1
week for example?
- Reduce Mgmt. costs by X%
- Upgrade cost reduction (Time and
materials savings) X% vs. previous
platforms/infrastructure, etc.
- Design – reduce time & effort
50% over previous attempts for
example
- Customer-specific value
measurements? AutoZone, Technical
College, Kuwait Hosting, etc.

4. CUSTOMER MESSAGING
for Financial Leaders
Customers Title /
Focus Area
Customer Challenge What Converged Systems
Delivers??
How we do it Key Performance Indicators,
Proof Points
Title:
CFO, COO, Line of
Business owners, VP
Finance
Focus Area:
ROI (Net Present Value,
Discounted Cash Flow,
Budgetary, etc.), Risk
(governance,
compliance,
operational, regulatory,
revenue, etc.)
- IT expense and risk
- Time to market
- Competitive
advantage over
competition
- TCO and ROI metrics
- Lower TCO
- Reduce IT downtime and overall
business impact – minimizing costs
- Reduce CapEx and OpEx over X
Period of time (based on
customer’s specific models)
SJ, Clark, Don, let’s answer
here
;-)
- Customer X saved $$$ in one year
- Complex procurement
processes
- Streamline procurement process - Customer reduced vendor contracts
down to one (vs. multiple with
“build your own”
- Reduced procurement cycle time
based on fewer required
signatures (saved days)
- Investment/lifecycle
protection
- Investment lifecycle protection –
Trust
- Reduce financial and operational
risk of infrastructure
- Converged Systems platforms use
X% less power vs. competition, etc.

5. PROVOCATION SELLING
¨ Promote (social media, direct marketing, webinars, etc.) a set
of “challenge statements” with supporting materials:
¤ “Run OpenStack on Converged Systems for 60 days and if you don’t
like it, don’t pay.”
¤ “Don’t be extorted by technology vendors ever again.”
¤ “Let Converged Systems prove TCO benefits of OpenStack for your
Private Cloud.”
¤ Turn RFP and RFQ situations “upside down” – don’t just answer the
request, give an answer the customer didn’t know they needed.
This is going to need a solid set of supporting materials

6. “INSIGHT” SELLING
¨ In contrast to traditional Solution Selling, “Insight Selling” is finding customers who
have agile organizations with emerging demands and/or un-anticipated demands
on their business that Converged Systems will solve for. Through this process,
Converged Systems will guide the customer on what and how to buy.
Type of Company to Target Agile companies that have emerging demand, or
are in flux
Type of Data to Gather What sorts of unrecognized needs does the
customer have, or face (governance, audit, SarBox)
When to Engage Before customer has pinpointed a problem
How to Start Dialogue Offer “insights” about what customer “should do”
to Mobilizers / “Push” marketing campaign
How to Direct Flow of Information Coach customer on how to buy desired solution.
Private/Hybrid/Public cloud delivery models

7. TECHNICAL SELLING
¨ Leading with pre-sales engineering to “design win” customer solutions
(already happening overseas) – get in early and design Converged
Systems into an opportunity.
¨ Get Converged Systems Engineering to be leaders in such areas as
“AppStacks”, Upcoming OpenStack Projects & Releases, Integration with
AWS, Google Cloud, MSFT Azure, etc.
¨ Get involved in Open Source community via main foundations, associations
and local groups “All politics are local, so customers are researching options
locally (and on the web)”
¨ Technical selling is also tied to Provocation Selling in that we need to
“prove” our product technically works and is superior from a price/
performance/benefits standpoint.
¤ Have demo/POC units available
¤ Collaborate with and let resellers innovate their own services on top of our product
foundation

8. CONSUMPTION-BASED SELLING
¨ Per vCPU, Per VM, Per # of Users, Per “AppStack”, Per Hour/Day/Month…
All these different consumption models are opportunities for Converged
Systems to sell. PROVIDED of course, we can position our products with per
vCPU, etc. pricing models as well as consult and advise customers on how to
set up our products to deliver these consumption-based computing delivery
mechanisms.
¨ Consult with customers, provide advisory services on how to acquire ITaaS
and PaaS via consumption-based procurement/delivery models.
¤ Leverage the Following:
n Vertical market consulting
n Reseller partners offering co-lo/hosting/managed services
n Converged Systems designed/created AppStacks

9. CUSTOMER TYPES
¨ Web 2.0/Cloud Computing Companies (Public & Hybrid
Cloud):
¤ Example – Managed Services, Hosting/Co-location, Web Services,
Application Services companies
n Pay-per-use & self-service applications, multi-tenant hosting, on-demand
“burst” capacity, development & testing use cases and customers.
¨ On-Premise Private Cloud:
¤ Example – Traditional IT Organizations looking to move to cloud:
Financial Services, Legal, Education, Manufacturing, etc.
n Chargeback-based IT, Reduced TCO, General Budget Shrinkage, Top-down
organizational change, Challenges deploying & managing IT, respond to
competition quickly, etc. use cases and customer scenarios.

10. CUSTOMER BUYING CYCLE
Status Quo Stimulated to
look
Interested Options Evaluating Preferred
choice made
Final
Approval
Implement
- Watching
trends
- Observing
Competitive
Activities &
benchmarks
- Comfort
zone
- Problem(s)
occur
- Problem(s)
analyzed
- Problem
result(s)
assigned
consequences
- Can it be
solved?
- Is it “worth”
solving?
- What
Options are
available?
- Identify
stakeholders
- Research
possible
options and
solutions
- Establish
functional
requirements
- Draft internal
ROI
requirements
- Explore possible
options
- Narrow down list
of options
- Reconfirm
requirements
- Update the
business case/
ROI/NPV
opportunity costs
- Conduct
detailed
eval of
serious
options
- Obtain
stakehol
der buy-
in
- Finalize
the
business
case
- Finalize the
contractual,
legal and
commercial
T’s & C’s
- Get
references
- Confirm
decision
- Obtain
internal
purchase
request
- Submit
final
proposal
/ paper
work for
order
- Validate
decision to
buy
- Install /
configure
solution
- Feedback
&
advocacy
Trigger
Events –
Moves, no
more
capacity, etc.
Business Case
Development –
coach customer
through
Requirements
and needs
defined
Reduction of
options down to
key choices
Vendor
selection
Business
negotiation
(legal,
financial, etc.)
Place
order
Refinement
of customer
needs,
customer
loyalty
Stage
Buyer
Actions
Criteria
To move
forward

11. CUSTOMER DELIVERY
¨ Converged Systems needs to deliver to the customer a defined
set of appliances/solutions.
¨ Need to set our product line-up (# and types of appliances,
AppStacks, validated solution stacks as value add, etc.) with
clear pricing, (clear reseller pricing as needed; with
appropriate discounts), support options/pricing, delivery
services/install charges, as well as any follow-on services and/
or products (consumption based management solution to tell
customer when to buy additional nodes, etc.)
¨ There can not be ANY confusion within customers’ minds about
our offerings, our pricing, our support, etc.

12. RESOURCES (needed!)
¨ 1)Hosting, 2)Education and 3)Manufacturing company Case Studies –
India/Kuwait customers?
¨ Whitepaper on OpenStack/Converged Systems Consumption-based
computing
¨ Whitepaper/case study on TCO of Converged Systems+OpenStack for
multi-tenancy and managed services
¨ “AppStacks Provocation” whitepaper(s), web seminars & solution brief –
need to generate “thought leadership” to push content and get potential
buyers in early stages of Buying Cycle consuming our message
¨ Discounted cash flow ROI analysis for cloud deployment tool/TCO tool.
¨ New corporate marketing materials & leave behinds