Teradata has lost its way for the last 3 years now. You need to forget about Branding or what ME, CT and the rest of the marketing VPs tells you. Or what the supposed Revenue Managers tell you Its all smoke and mirrors.
Your mission is to get the account executives to understand what Teradata is and what they need to sell. If you ask associates what does Teradata sell, you will get 50 different answers. Is Teradata a services company or a Technology provider. Forget Branding that does not mean c-ap to the bottom line, that is a waste of resources. It seems that your marketing department is leading . What you need is to go back to what made teradata a success, a Sales Driven Organization.
The field needs to drive what comes out of marketing not the other way around. The test has been done where marketing lead and it was catastrophic, to the extent where the company lost accounts and money.
When you take bandwidth out of the field and give it to marketing to play with the flavor de jour, you are doing a disservice to all who value this organization. For the last 4 years you have done so, from ABM, to account allocations ( it took marketing 3 years to determine what to call a global account. Last count was 5 different names. For the last 3 years you kept changing the account owners based on some Marketing flavor. You took out AEs from accounts which they worked hard to establish credibility and assigned new ones which have no idea what the account or industry is based solely that they live in a certain geo area.
Go back and look at you model, at what made this company achieve double digit growth during the worst recession the global economy has ever seen fro 2008 on.
12 replies (most recent on top)
- e., I suggest dropping “Vantage”. You have one brand, Teradata. Call it Teradata Analytics. QED.
Yes but there is no one left to tell the customers about it. The list of un-utilised features and products is staggering
Vantage supports Python and R....
Is the company banking its future on Vantage? If so, that strategy will surely fail. The entire data science community is migrating to open source products like Python and R. This trend is unwavering and pervasive. Why would anyone want invest in a proprietary product like Vantage?
That's the problem. All talk and no revenue...
You don’t have to be a marketing guru to figure out the right strategy. Go to snowflake.com. They have very clear and familiar message - data warehouse built for the cloud. In contrast Teradata is filled with marketing bs like pervasive intelligence, sentient enterprise, data science experience, vantage. The core product has become a second class citizen buried under the mud, and no wonder that sales are equally confused as customers does.
LOL, Vantage is simply the underpinning of Pervasive Intelligence spinning around in the Sentient Enterprise. Clear as mud. I know OR gets it, but no one else does. And the flippant characterization to the investment community and by all the LT members that Vantage is the fastest growing product ever in Teradata! What a scam......
Don’t forget what else happened in 2008 - a new platform was introduced, one that is now the Install Base. It flourished and so did the stock price, while sales and services grew beautifully thanks to those hard-working teams. Been a long time since a positive HW platform was introduced, and if you asked 25 customers and 25 employees what the hell Vantage is, they’d all give you a different answer.
Hey it is me again the C band manager that was let go. What made Teradata successful was their Customer Services team, Their dedication and focus ensured that every c-appy early release of SW or untested HW rollout was successful. TD should focus on their core offerings. Cloud services scare me.
In house solutions are always better and much more secure. Not to mention the margins. Pull your head out of the sand, Offer what a customer needs, a resonable priced in house solution and they could again be on top. This is so simple. If they need someone that knows what to do, reach out to me. This is so sad.
I am one of those ex AEs who knew what the value proposition was, how the peripheral components contributed, and could articulate this. I contributed to the bottom line. And gone
I bet if you laid off everyone Manager and above in Marketing, there would be little difference in sales and there would certainly be some bottom line savings. They are that clueless and have brought Teradata to it's knees.
Vic should look in the mirror at himself and the feckless Board to assess their part in the failure.