HP Case Study Hewlett-Packard Case Study

Hewlett-Packard is a force to be reckoned with in the enterprise computing realm but they have certainly faced some challenges. These challenges have come from competitors, from clients and from within. Overall, Hewlett-Packard has weathered the storm well and faced its challenges head on but some of the things summarized and spoken of in the Harvard Business Review case study as offered by Das Narayandas and Robert Dudley shows some cracks and fissures in the Hewlett-Packard facade that must be dealt with. Even if it's mostly or entirely a public relations effort on some of the fronts involved, Hewlett-Packard needs to address its buy-in and client concern issues with the full force of the robust resources that it has available to them.

Analysis

As explained in the twelfth page of the case study, Hewlett-Packard's CSO division has been experiencing a bit of a trade-off. Even with its purported success with upstream and mid-stream business sales, they were encountering those successes at the expenses of gains in other arena. The primary loss cited was its ability to show itself to be a "value added" supplier rather than just a seller of computer hardware and there is a huge difference between the two. In other words, selling a computer to a company is one thing but showing them specific and tangible ways to improve and grow their business is quite another as the latter gives the firm being sold to a huge amount of incentive, especially as compared to simple reliability and uptime metrics, to stay with a vendor rather than change to a competing firm like Dell (Narayandas, and Dudley).

Indeed, it is not just Dell and the like that Hewlett-Packard's CSO team should worry about. IBM, which has left the computer sales racket entirely, has chosen to focus on software solutions and enterprise resource planning (ERP) giants like SAP and such are also trying to market to many of the...

Even Microsoft has changed the rules of the game by marketing Microsoft Windows productivity stalwart Microsoft Office on Mac-based machines (Foley). As another related example, newer Windows and Mac machines can (or do) run on Intel motherboards and/or processors which was not the case with Mac until fairly recently although they have explored going in a different direction as of late (Satariano).
If there is one core recommendation that should be offered to Hewlett-Packard's CSO division, it would be to establish and maintain a core value chain with the client. The illustration and explanation of the value chain that a customer can quantify, realize and verify should be first explained during the initial sales efforts and should be reinforced with every selling and renewal opportunity that comes along. If the client openly questions the value they are receiving and/or it becomes apparent through follow-ups and such that there is a deficiency, then any problems can be identified and resolved by the sales and/or operational team. For this to happen, the two groups must work in tandem and one should not undermine the other. In other words, the common tactic of puffery and over-selling the product is a bad thing for salespeople to do but the operations staff need to back up the legitimate claims of promised service that the salespeople offer. Puffery is not typically actionable in a legal setting but that doesn't bar a lawsuit from having to be defended in some form and it's just bad business (Schroeder).

A tangential, but very much related, example is the art of catering to the client in a way that makes it more personal and professional. The flow of conversation…