Toute ma vie. 20 ans. 24h/24.

Lucy Zinn

Sogeti USA, Vice-Présidente Ventes

I was one of the first sales reps in the US hired by Cap Gemini Sogeti in 1988. During college, I started selling in the local market – copiers, faxes, and computers. When I started with Cap Gemini Sogeti, I already had a lot of contacts with businesses that enabled me to get into the IT side of the organization.

I had to learn from scratch: our service offerings; the businesses my customers were in - ranging from consumer products to manufacturing, aircraft engines, printers and insurance; understanding their entire company processes, how they ran their business, how they went to market and manufactured; and then taking our service offerings, created over the years, back to our customers to address the business ‘pains’ they were facing at that time. Many books were read and many internal courses taken to learn how to sell.

It is a tough business to get into. You have to know what questions to ask the customer, you have to understand what we’re selling, what we’re offering. To be able to sell consulting services in today’s market, you have to be able to sell what the customers are asking for - whether it’s outsourcing their IT project, rolling out master data management to keeping their data clean or by helping them be more efficient in designing, building and manufacturing products.

You have to find out about their areas of pain and where they can make improvements, and then come back with a plan that can be put in place.

The more you know about your customer and their business, and how the business runs, the better you can ask the right questions. Can they ‘see’ the data, or are they able to collaborate with outside suppliers, do they want to reduce time to market, or create innovative products, etc? Asking the right questions enables you to find out what issues they have and bring in solutions to solve those problems.

For instance, understanding Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) enables me to ask questions of engineering Vice-Presidents or CIOs about their business processes, about ‘time to market’; ”how long does it take you to get a new product out the door?; “how do you purchase raw materials?” or “how do you manage packaging change?” PLM works for everyone who makes a product, from diapers, pharmaceuticals to aircraft engines, and involves all aspects of R&D, design, engineering, through manufacturing. It allows you to consolidate and keep data clean, manage workflow, reduce quality errors in production, manage packaging change, reduce procurement costs, etc. It tracks the entire product life cycle from start to finish.

With PLM, a company can achieve spectacular results. One of my clients saved hundreds of millions of dollars on reducing time to market for new product introduction and reduction of procurement costs.

It’s really talking with your customer, learning about their business. It’s also about going out to the business and understanding the business side even more than just the IT side. You have to be close to what’s going on. I have the benefit of longevity with my customers. I’ve been with Sogeti now for 19 years and have been providing solutions to my clients for all of those years. I know a lot of customers, what business and IT initiatives they have coming up, where they need help and how Sogeti can solve their problems.

At Sogeti we have grown a lot of practices from scratch. The service offerings which we had when we started have been enhanced over the years. We have built a partnership with Microsoft; we meet with their sales force on a regular basis, we have Microsoft training in our office, we have certified Microsoft consultants. So when we go out to a customer that needs an application built, we can provide a solution with the Microsoft Suite and come back with estimates, proposals, ideas and demos. Strong ties with the software vendors, be it Microsoft, Dassault, UGS, SAP, Oracle or IBM, with their software packages and business solutions, and our knowledge and expertise, these partnerships allow us to bring a lot to the table when we meet a customer.

Recently, we did a new business pitch for a big outsourcing deal. We were up against every offshore outsourcing firm and all the big consulting firms. Sogeti won the business because the client recognized the advantage of having local people, who knew their business, systems, packaged solutions and technologies on the market. They had faith in us to deliver high quality requirements and design onshore and development and testing offshore. Sogeti can be successful because we have great local people, methodologies, tools and processes that enable us to carry out large outsourcing deals. We are currently saving our client a lot of money and bringing better IT processes to the table. So selling global delivery is another service offering Sogeti is going after.

A strong differentiator from the offshore competition is that we live and work close to our customers; it’s our proximity, and the quality of our onshore as well as offshore staff.

Having good people onshore, with great communication and design skills, enable us to deliver an excellent product out of India or other low cost centers. We can tell our offshore operations exactly what our customers want and they come back with the precise code and documentation.

The business has changed over the years, from time-and-materials to selling services and solutions. Bringing in top consultants, idea-generating sessions, assessments and advice on process improvement, at a very good price - that’s all part of our service offerings. It’s a different world now, a different sale. Sogeti is good at that and as a company we are going to grow tremendously.

Additionally, I think we hire the best people available. We care about them, educate them and invest in them.

Almost every evening, we have training in our offices; we have a mentor program, caring managers, good benefits package, and a career path for our consultants so they can grow in new technologies. Sogeti has great directors that manage our service offerings and develop solutions for the market. We are a very professional international company, but also a have a local ‘family-like’ atmosphere. Our clients and consultants mean everything to us. Net, Sogeti cares about their employees and is a very good company to work for.

I work a lot of hours, normally 12 hours a day; too much maybe, but it’s worth it. My selling doesn’t stop at the sales cycle; now it also involves the delivery, which has to be faultless and highly effective. My customers trust me to deliver high value solutions and systems. That’s why they value Sogeti and that’s why I put in a lot of hours.

My customers mean a lot to me, they are my friends and I want them to be successful in their careers.

In selecting Sogeti as a provider, they know we will perform and meet deadlines with high quality. It’s that intimacy we have at Sogeti that makes us different.