Sounds like MASSIVE changes to Sales at IBM

In 2021, our company is taking even bolder steps against the three sales priorities to position IBM as the partner of choice for our clients in their journey to open hybrid cloud and AI - across all business units, industries, Geographies and Markets. We are:

Unifying the
IBM go-to-market

Reimagining sales roles

Enabling client experiences through modern tools and ways of working

Elevating our ecosystem
of partners

With a single consistent segmentation for all IBM clients across software, cloud, systems and services – and one that encourages an even tighter connection with Red Hat.

With an emphasis on bringing more market-leading, deep technical expertise to our clients.

With additional Garages for co-creation; interactive demos and trials; a customer success team to help our clients with deployment, adoption, consumption and renewal of our products; and a marketing-led demand generation engine.

With one ecosystem mission – to help our partners to achieve their business goals, all the while positioning them for growth with our open hybrid cloud platform.

Executing as a company via two segments, we will engage with clients in a highly-experiential way and bring more technical expertise closer to our clients and partners:

The first segment includes around 500 industry clients that will be served by a dedicated cross-unit client team that is focused on delivering industry and technology-centric experiences.

All other IBM clients will be served by IBM Technology and/or Services, or supported by Ecosystem Partners.

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IBM will lose 30-60k employees after this blood bath is over. At all levels. Arvin’s brings in the Goldman Sachs exec to justify the massive layoff.

The message hasn’t changed, the products offered won’t either. All software will ultimately fall under hybrid cloud to confuse shareholders even more.

Think of Newco as the elephant graveyard of IBM. IBM wants all of “old” IBM to land there. Newco can then become a supplier to new Hybrid IBM. New Hybrid IBM is nothing more than Cloud, Redhat, and Ai Everything else goes. Why Because IBM can milk the IP from it that way. Newco has value as the old legacy systems and services still generate a lot and I mean a lot of profit. Get the headcount correct, and Newco can survive. This is a restructuring folks NOT a titanic rearrangement of the deck chairs. Ask yourself this easy question. Does Hybrid IBM want to be in the HW, or legacy OS business? How about the outsourcing business? NOPE they don’t It’s all Redhat, Hybrid cloud, and AI That’s it. Come the end of Jan this will be crystal clear

Really difficult understand what they want to say behind the words but 1 thing seems strange on me: Will be NewCo parts of "Ecosystem partners" ??? make sense?

Sales guys being more tech - ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Sales/sellers is getting hit hard. Restructure coming, along with RAs, NewCo spinoff and flattening the middle managers.. by month-end.

This is the Gerstner play all over again. Gerstner took 13 levels of management and squeezed it into 7 AK is now doing the same

What a lot of verbal diarrhea! Basically the top 500 accounts get most of the TLC, while the rest are pushed a little harder towards working with partners. Doesn't seem like much of a shift in strategy to me. Haven't the larger named accounts always had dedicated teams, with the remainder being supported by local sales teams, that try their best to keep them as IBM direct customers regardless of IBM saying they want to leverage the channel more? Maybe IBM plans on eliminating more of the local sales teams to force more channel activity. If so, those local folk may likely be recruited by the same partners they've been pushing back against. - or maybe not :)

Reading between the lines, sounds like if you aren’t supporting a top ~200 account that gets dedicated sellers, then you will be rebalanced. I don’t see how this impacts anyone other than Global Markets.

another re-org... what would anyone else expect?

IBM has been in re-org for the past 10 years at least.

It has never produced any results except for the fact the Execs get to keep extending their stays and cash in.

neither

From what i gathered from the announcement, Sellers are going to take on a more technical role, or the technical sellers will take on more of a sales role. Either way, sounds like sales is going to be drastically slim down.

What a way to start the year, right

Thread regarding IBM layoffs

Sounds like MASSIVE changes to Sales at IBM

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