Siebel promises new look sales strategy

Last December, traditionally direct selling Siebel made a very public bid to attract channel partners to sell its OnDemand hosted application to smaller users. The vendor promised a structured programme that would tie Siebel's own sales team in synergistic harmony with partners, with Microsoft's growing CRM user base the target.

But things haven't gone well for Siebel this year, and this week it hinted at a major strategic shift towards a more aggressive sales strategy. Certainly it has to do something. Investors have been getting increasingly tense in recent quarters as Siebel's share price has collapsed like a sumo wrestler's deckchair. The competition that Siebel was trashing in the late 90s is fighting back hard - SAP and Oracle to name two, not to mention new-look CRM contenders like Salesforce.com.

Now there's open talk of a possible takeover, which explains why CEO George Shaheen has been on his feet all week talking of a bright new Siebel future, and exciting new products on the way.

Siebel clearly thinks that its sales strategy has been faulty. It has consequently promised to get better organized and more focused on big market opportunities. Shaheen has talked of ‘returning to our roots'. Its roots being direct sales into big ticket corporate accounts, not piddly SME stuff that requires the ‘100 per cent commitment to the channel' the vendor was talking about last December. µ

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