“In the sales profession, the real work begins after the sale is made.” – Brian Tracy
In my 22 years in sales, I’ve noticed an ongoing irony. The better the experience is, the more loyal customers are—yet while the sales experience is full of passion and enthusiasm, the experience post-sale is often painful. If this is the case, and the goal of a sales team is to build customer loyalty, shouldn’t the relationship start with the “experience” and end with the product?
It should—but let’s be honest, it hasn’t. The traditional “product” sales process usually starts with your purchase, and ends with the goods hitting your dock, or at best, getting installed. At that point, many relationships enter a form of hibernation until you need more “stuff,” or a few years have passed and the initial product is due for a forklift upgrade. At Pure Storage®, we know there’s a better way! Our new Pure Value Review, a personalized environmental snapshot prepared by your Pure Storage systems engineering team and our valued partners, is here to flip the traditional sales process and deliver the stellar experience you deserve. It’s just the first of many steps we’re taking to modernize the customer experience over the next few years
Shaking Up the Sales Status Quo
The status quo in the storage industry has presented some major challenges for customers, which we’re addressing with Pure Value Review:
- Vendors rarely spend the time to measure ROI/TCO post-sale. Although there’s a lot of talk of ROI and TCO prior to the sale, the most important part of the whole exercise is actually measuring the “realized” ROI/TCO from one to three years post-installation. The Pure Value Review gives you a clear and concise view of the financial, operational, and technical benefits that Pure Storage has delivered post-installation.
- Feature adoption and optimization is left to the customer (unless there’s an upsell opportunity). The gap between what was promised and what is delivered usually comes down to your ability to deploy key features and optimize the environment throughout its lifecycle. Often, that adoption and optimization doesn’t happen because, let’s face it, you get busy or it turns out to be far more complex than originally thought. The Pure Value Review details which features have been deployed (and the benefits delivered), and also highlights the features that would most benefit you based on your specific environment.
- Vendors take up customers’ valuable time to re-confirm information they should already know. When conditions or key players have changed positions, sales teams require a lot of time with to assess and understand customers’ own install base simply to move forward on the next opportunity.The review allows the Pure and Pure Partner teams to stay very close to your real-time deployment, allowing interactions to be very prescriptive and focused on maximizing value to their specific environment.
- Customers don’t gain adequate insights into the health of their environment until it’s too late. You don’t usually have enough self-service capability to manage, optimize, and plan adequately, forcing you to navigate complex workflows every time you need to assess environments or model for the future.The review allows you to observe the state of your entire Pure Storage environment and then, working with the systems engineering team and the power of Pure1® Meta Workload Simulator, compare and contrast the potential options moving forward.
Delivering Exceptional Support at Point-of-Sale—and Beyond
When I joined Pure Storage in early 2019, I knew the company had a loyal customer following—and now, 18 months later, I know why. It really comes down to the fact that we not only promise a Modern Data Experience™, we deliver against this promise—as proven by our Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Gartner Peer Reviews. We deliver this not just at the point of sale, but beyond. How do we do this? We leverage our innovative Pure1 platform and its real-time telemetry to proactively monitor our install base, allowing us to deliver proactive support, prioritize engineering, and report on real-time value realization. (Read my previous blog about our journey and vision with Pure1.)
The work we’ve done in the past with modernizing the customer experience leads directly to our newest phase: the Pure Value Review. Here’s what you get:
- Full financial, operational, and business benefits delivered from installation
- Full graphical topology of the environment
- Environmental review including uptime, non-disruptive upgrades, data reduction rates, and proactive support cases
- Detailed support summary, including all cases and closeout notes
- System currency check, including a complete review of Purity operating environment versions
- Full system utilization summary, including max load (busyness) and utilization (capacity)
- Upcoming renewals highlighting arrays eligible for “forever flash” upgrades (Evergreen™ Storage Program)
- Feature adoption summary, including prescriptive suggestions of which features should be enabled (remember, with Pure, all software is included, so there are no hidden charges)
Over the past 10 years, Pure has revolutionized the storage industry by bringing unprecedented innovation and simplicity to a sector stuck on unnecessary complexity. At last year’s Pure//Accelerate® conference, we committed to continuing this journey and driving the same simplicity with Pure as-a-Service™, the ability to consume all of Pure’s portfolio “as-a-service.” A key pillar of delivering against this vision is our commitment to modernize the customer experience. I’m confident that the Pure review will once again take our customer relationships to the next level. Who knows, maybe we’ll see these reviews get integrated directly into Pure1 in the near future!
If you have questions about the Pure Value Review or Pure as-a-Service, or would like to get your own personalized report, please reach out to your local channel or Pure sales teams. You can also email us directly at info@purestorage.com.
