After The Sale Is Over

Teradata’s sales and support culture was predicated on the maxim that the last customer is more important than the next. The focus of the sales team, with few exceptions, was beyond landing the sale but also ensuring buyer satisfaction after the purchase. In an approach that was rare for the time, Teradata pushed a lot of marketing purpose out into the field with the sales teams in an effort to keep buyers happy through constructive dialogue.

Like all good sales organisations, Teradata recognised that the relationship between buyer and seller shouldn’t end when the sale is made. Often, the relationship intensified just after the sale as the customer began to understand whether the expected benefits of buying a system could be realised. 

Teradata’s leadership ensured that the company broke out of the mind set that saw a separation of concerns between R&D, manufacturing and the services activities that helped the company to establish itself and it’s product. According to Jack Shemer, “We wanted to deliver a product that made customers extremely satisfied, because that’s how we would grow”. And the extension to the data base computer ‘product’ was the access the customer had to the Teradata people that designed and built the system, their system. When a company bought a Teradata Data Base Computer (DBC), they didn’t just get a product shipped and installed, they got the obsessional attention of the whole company to help make sure that they got what they expected.

For Teradata, this intense nurturing of the relationship with the customer had other benefits beyond a higher propensity to a future repeat purchase. For a young company with a new product, the feedback loop to research and development was extremely valuable. Teradata discovered some uncomfortable truths and unintended consequences in those early days after each sale was made and the systems installed. Even though the Teradata DBC was a new specialised decision support technology, the purchasing decision was often made with the promise of a specific business benefit in mind. But in those early months with their new purchase, customers created new challenges and identified new opportunities that were previously not thought of by the developers at Teradata

As a ‘natural’ learning organisation, Teradata capitalised on what it learnt and that helped not only the product’s development but also the way in which future systems should be sold and differentiated, especially against IBM in the early years and Oracle later on. In many ways, Teradata’s early customers helped it to understand how to sell and support its product beyond it’s own collective view of how to do so, proving the maxim that the last customer is more important than the next, to be universally true.