The document provides advice on building a successful sales and delivery organization, covering topics such as bid management, pipeline management, sales cycle execution, resourcing, delivery management, operations, and contractual/legal considerations. Key recommendations include augmenting presales teams with business consultants, understanding local markets before expanding, incentivizing project managers, choosing partners/outsourcing over direct hiring when possible, and distinguishing warranties from support.

1. Isam Shahwan, MBA
Services Sales Lead
Microsoft Corporation

2. Business Development / Sales
Management
• Bid management and pricing + Risk
assessment. How fast can you deliver a
document that can address all issues
yet be competitively priced?
• Pipeline management and forecasting
quality and accuracy. How real is your
forecast? How is the sales cycle
managed? Are you keeping track? If so,
how are you doing it and can you
measure results? What is your closure
rate? What is the opportunity aging and
how can you improve it?

3. Business Development / Sales
Management
• Sales cycle execution. Must have a solid sales
director on the ground to accurately track
execution. This person’s relationships are key in
many areas among which are:
o Customer relationships for future and current
business
o Customer satisfaction
o Invoice payments and AR management
• Strategic alignments with enablers and partners.
Under various conditions the deal may have
been brought in by another entity, how well do
you know them? How can you get a piece of the
pie? Can you align with the technology vendor
to get a way in?

4. Recognize Your Strengths
• Augment your presales teams with
business consultants. They are key to
winning deals.
• Do not expand into territories unless
you really understand what makes
business work in that territory.
• Qatar today (2009) has a boom in the
Health sector but in order to compete
you must know the players and how
you rank against them in that market.

5. Delivery Management
• Project management: I am a big fan of
creating incentives for project
managers and here is why:-
• They hold the keys to project profitability. If
their eyes are open and they are a truly
integrated and trusted member of a project
team, they can make or break a project.
• Project managers must have relationship
skills. It does not matter if this person has 5
certifications in project management because
if they have 0 skills in relationship
management projects have stronger
likelihoods to fail. This is another strong key
criteria for success. With the right skills they
can save projects from failures.

6. Delivery Management
• Resourcing:
• Direct delivery staff: This can be an expensive option because it directly
impacts your costs based on the resource’s utilization. Therefore, whomever
you decide to hire here, this person better have excellent
background/experience and must be forecasted to stay off the bench for
more than 70% of his time. His bench time must also be used for BizDev
and he needs to be ready to lend a hand when the situation necessitates it.
• Partners / outsourcing: This is a safe option if you have built relationships
with organizations with excellent delivery track record and have good
reputation.
• Staff augmentation: This is based on project by project scenarios and
should be a safe option. Try and look for an option to work with an off-shore
entity that has excellent delivery track record in your region.

7. Delivery Management
• Maturity and delivery management. A solid
delivery manager should have the capability
to grow the delivery maturity in order to:-
o Improve delivery forecasts
o Sign-off with confidence on risk assessment
exercises conducted by the sales team.
o Reduce the number of failures on projects
o Improve customer satisfaction
• Post implementation checks.

8. Operations Core
• Accounting delivery milestones and
confirming progress. This is key to
measuring your recognized revenue in
any fiscal cycle.
• Billing and AR In the Gulf region this
can put businesses out of work quickly.
If this is not prly managed, you can
suffer and possibly go out of business
very fast.
• Forecasting backlog delivery with
assistance of Delivery team.
• Properly assessing customer
satisfaction and reporting results to
delivery teams.

9. Contractual / Legal
• Solid contractual instruments? Do not
copy others’ contracts.
• T&C’s must account for potential failures
and this must be adjusted for in your risk
assessment (Pre-Sales).
• Clearly examine your warranty clauses. In
Gulf, I am a big fan of not giving any
because customers look at warranty as a
support mechanism which inflates your
post implementation costs. Clearly
distinguish between the 2.

10. These are just headlines of what I have
learned in my past experiences of starting
one IT business in the US and working with
Microsoft in its services organization for over
7 years. Contact me if you would like to get
more specific details and how to fine tune it
for a stellar sales and delivery org.
LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/isamshahwan