McDermott: SAP America’s top salesman

ORLANDO – Listen to Bill McDermott for a few minutes and you know you have a full-blooded salesman in front of you. McDermott, the chief executive officer and president of SAP America, was hired about nine months ago from Siebel Systems Inc. to turn around the U.S. subsidiary of the German business software giant, which wasn’t achieving sales targets.

But for McDermott, running a company means not only managing people and problems but selling products — and then some.

The numbers speak for themselves: SAP America’s first-quarter revenue rose 34 percent year-on-year at constant currency rates, according to McDermott. “We have a plan, a dream executive team, a motivated staff and a great brand,” he said during an interview in a room with a view to one of the vast sales floors of the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, where SAP is holding its Sapphire customer conference. While talking, he occasionally glanced out the window, keeping an eye on the floor activity. You get the feeling he’d prefer to be down there selling rather than giving an interview.

“Everyone in this company, from the executives down to the product line managers and their staff, are spending as much time with customers as they can,” McDermott said. “We are a totally customer-focused organization.”

The SAP executive likes to make as many sales calls as he can, he admits. A case in point: McDermott made a recent call to the CEO of Fender Musical Instruments Corp. “That call, following up on earlier negotiations, was enough for our CEO to sign the deal,” a company official said.

Even if the current economic climate is tough and companies are keeping a tight lid on IT spending, opportunities abound, according to McDermott. He sees one big opportunity in the current wave of consolidation in the U.S. enterprise software market, involving Oracle, PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards, and the uncertainty it has created among many users.

“With our advertising campaign, we’ve created an awareness for SAP as an alternative,” McDermott said. “Our follow-up telephone sales efforts have led to a 50 percent hit rate of customers who are very interested in talking to us.”

SAP America is offering PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards customers, mostly in the mid-market and enterprise level, a free consultative assessment of their current technological environment and formulating an opinion, McDermott said.

Beyond the opportunities arising from “the love triangle,” SAP America is striving to develop channel partnerships to penetrate the small and medium-size business (SMB) market with its Business One offering, McDermott said.

On Tuesday, the company announced a new partnership with IBM. The U.S. company joins American Express Tax and Business Services as a major channel partner for the Business One product line, in addition to 17 existing smaller resellers and another 17 signed up during the Sapphire show, McDermott said.

“Resellers understand that the SAP brand plays big,” he said. “Many of them just need to get over this idea that SAP is too expensive. We’re working on this.”

While SAP targets its Business One offering at SMBs with annual revenues of less than $200 million, the company’s All-in-One offering, based on scaled-down versions of the group’s Business Suite products, is aimed at mid-size companies with annual revenues of between $200 million and $1 billion, according to McDermott.

“We’re working with a handful of resellers to distribute All-in-One and our own direct sales teams,” he said. “Resellers for this product line must have industry experience to provide real value. They are few in number.”