This past month James and Eli continued to meet to discuss events that had happened in our recent Citrix meetings.  The purpose of these meetings is to fill in any meetings that Eli was able to attend that James had missed as well as to identify opportunities to increase sales.  They are both actively waiting to collaborate on the Q1 objectives and planning to align their team accordingly.  

This past month James and Andrew had met up to demo a XenDesktop 5 deployment.  Andrew had previously done this installation for several VARs and was interested in going through this new product with James.  With this new exposure James is now more capable of selling this product by being able to talk firsthand about the installation procedure.

During the month of December technician Chris had expressed his concern over his knowledge on XenDesktop.  James Helman arranged what is known as a crack-and-gap in order to go over the areas in Chris’ knowledge that he found to be lacking.  Chris found this training to be very helpful in his discussions and is now able to sell XenDesktop to a much easier degree.

In December Jamesx and Andrew had met to discuss XenDesktop 5.  Due to their different roles in our customer-facing sales process, sharing their knowledge both technical and sales-oriented benefits one another.  This collaboration will better help James and Andrew to understand the product and the market, resulting in a higher capability to sell the product for Ingram Micro and Citrix.

During the December break James produced a list of add-ons to add to our Citrix product skus.  These add-ons aim to suggest an item for a quoted Citrix product that can be easily brought into the conversation and added onto the quote.  This should increase the amount of recommended Citrix product resulting in increased sales for Citrix and Ingram Micro.

Technician and Customer Feedback

Ingram Micro technician Carl had commented on the differences in how a VMware conversation is as compared to a Citrix conversation on his virtualization line.  He made mention of a tool in which VMware has that enables them to quote out a VMware solution far easier than the Citrix alternative.  It would benefit the Citrix team on their calls to have a similar sizing tool to the VMware offering.

Maurice, a representative from Insight Canada had difficulties on getting post sales support for XenApp.  He had claimed that when calling into 1800-4-Citrix that he had to initially wait fifty minutes before even talking to a technician.  Then, when he came in contact with the technician he was informed that they were unable to help him and that he should be calling Ingram Micro.  Considering that this information is not true, and that the wait is for fifty minutes, Maurice was quite upset.  I would recommend looking into this for such a long duration with incorrect information may deter potential customers away from the Citrix offering in the near future.

Ingram Micro technician Robert had an upset customer due to having an installation issue.  He was expecting to have a sku in which he could sell to his end user for installation.  Considering that we do not currently sell anything that could help this customer, the VAR was also unable to make a sale off from this issue but was still looked upon for support.  If we were to have a sku in which we could sell the VAR in which Citrix would help the customer in the initial XenDesktop/Xenapp deployment then we would have another revenue stream for VARs, Citrix and Ingram Micro.
