Interlude - Index of

136 | Grown-Up Company
our customer support organization before his trip to see if
there had been any problems. No failures, just some simple
questions, so Rob expected an easy call.
The CIO began the conversation by saying, “Rob, I want
you to know that your sales guys really piss me off!” Not what
Rob expected, so he asked what we were doing wrong. The
CIO said, “Here’s the problem. They come in and they tell
me all about your products. They tell me how fast they are,
they tell me how reliable they are, how they work, speeds and
feeds—more technical detail about your products than I could
possibly want to know. And then they sit back and smile, like
they’re done.”
“What should they do?” Rob asked.
“I pay you guys enough money that I want you to figure out
my problems. I don’t want to figure out what your products do.
You come in and look around, and you tell me how your products
will fix my problems. That’s what I want.” In retrospect,
that was pretty much what the man from Georgia Pacific was
trying to explain. If you listen carefully enough, customers will
often tell you how to win their business.
NetApp now has many customers who spend millions of
dollars a year with us. The largest ones spend around $100
million a year. I don’t know if you have ever written a check
for $100 million—I personally have not—but if I ever do, I can
tell you one thing for sure: My expectations will be quite high.
This may be the most important lesson of enterprise selling.
••
Although I started the Love Program in order to improve our
products—I was the VP of engineering, after all—it also uncov-