Seibel Systems: Anatomy of a Sale

SEIBEL SYSTEMS: ANATOMY OF A SALE

Section 2, Group A

The company was founded in 1993 by Tom Seibal to address the growing need of organization of all sizes to acquire, retain and better serve the customers. Tom Seibal described it as a company built on traditional values and commitment to make its customers successful. Its revenue had reached $2 Billion with 8000 Employees and sold more than 200 Products with 139 direct sales offices in 40 countries around the world and was named among the fastest growing application software company by Fortune Magazine.

It was the world leader in the software for Customer Relationship Management with 50% market share and it was pioneering into the ERM (Employee) systems steadily. It was gaining a healthy reputation in the industry as several magazines had published its rapid growth and success.

Gregg Carman job was to serve financial services clients in the New England region. Largest being FleetBoston which is 9th largest financial bank in United States. FleetBoston had acquired the discount stockbroker Quick & Reilly and Carman was negotiating a deal of $ 2.1 million sales on behalf of Quick & Reilly. However, FleetBoston now wanted to veto the purchase and Gregg carman was stuck in difficult situation of whether to stand by Quick & Reilly or bow to FleetBoston’s Wishes.

“Siebel Core Values” as articulated by Tom Siebel are: to build a high-technology company focused on customer satisfaction, and build a company with enduring values. They listened to customers, revised their product based on feedback and got involved in product design process from start.

By 2001, Siebel assessed that there had been a significant change in the companies’ software decisions focus from cost reduction to customer retention, loyalty and satisfaction. Independent research studies founded that Siebel’s customers achieved a return on their CRM investment within 9.6 months. The customers achieved:

• an increase of over 20% in their customers’ satisfaction levels
• an increase of over 19% in their employees’ productivity levels
• an increase of 16% in customer retention.

Partnerships were crucial part of Siebel Systems’ go-to-market strategy.  Siebel Systems captured value from only software component rather than from all components of a CRM implementation –that is, implementation services, hardware, and software. By August 2001 Siebel System had 729 partners such as Accenture, Capgemeni, deloitte, classified and resourced by go-to-market importance. A large proportion of the success of software implementation was contingent on the performance of alliance partners, sales had to work closely with the partner organizations during and after the sales process to achieve 100% customer satisfaction.