Case Study

In 2002, SAP was growing market share globally — but losing ground in the Americas due in part to demo quality. SAP’s own CEO described the demos as “piecemeal” and noted that the competition was winning on presentation, not product. Siebel and Oracle scripted their demos and showed less functionality, but appeared more polished and coherent. One internal stakeholder described the result as “death by demo”: too much functionality, not enough story.

Company & Position

SAP Americas, Program Manager / Director, Sales Operations (2001–2005)

Details

U.S. Solution Engineers were spending hours preparing for every demo — further complicated by prospects who required demoing against a customer-supplied script. Demo system responsibility was fragmented across internal organizations with no clear ownership, conflicting priorities, and no process for building integrated scenarios.

Actions

• Led program management of a strategic initiative to overhaul demo operations for the U.S. market.
• Conducted structured research with Sales Engineers and field leaders to document the full landscape of issues: prep time, organizational misalignment, technical infrastructure barriers, and scenario coverage gaps.
• Presented findings to Board-level stakeholders; recommendations spanned organizational alignment, content strategy, demo system architecture, offline capability, and a pre-sales certification program.

Outcome & Impact

• U.S. field findings adopted into the global program framework, directly shaping solutions across all seven workstreams.
• Recommendations drove alignment of demo system infrastructure, prioritization of CRM scenario development to compete against Siebel, and establishment of a pre-sales certification model.