After reading, “Blind Optimism, Thick Skin and a Cell Phone” I think that the three keys to Sudha’s success were her ability to show empathy, her incredibly listening skills and her persistence and refusal to give up or say I can’t..
When it comes to empathy Sudha definitely has that covered. She can sense when customers are apprehensive and finds that one weakness each client has and uses her product to help that weakness. She listens and finds out what everyone in a company wants from SAP’s software instead of just talking to the CEO. She cares deeply enough to build relationships with all her clients and build her network by feeling what people want. No one wants to spend a fortune in a downed economy, she saw this, and then a company asked for a trial of the software. After that she approached her boss and his boss and had a discussion and got approved for 50 trials with a small fee. She wasn’t afraid to ask for help when she needed it, and she knew when she needed it.
Sudha also listened to her customers. She listened to their concerns about cost; she listened to what they wanted out of SAP’s product. She went a step farther with AMD by putting together an entire presentation for Fred to present to the CEO and AMD’s board that showed how much money they would save. When it came to CIO Steve Zoppi and IT director Calvin Do she went above and beyond by wanting them to be a efficiently ran e-business that would give them an edge on their competitors.
The most important skill I believe Sudha possessed was her persistence. She never gave up. She was stuck in the “Nobody zone” for weeks with Company X. Fred at AMD wouldn’t call her back for weeks. She had to get one of her connections and set up a meeting with him, to get a meeting with Fred. It took daily phone calls, hours of work, flying back from vacations early and missing concerts to close some of the deals Sudha closed. Sudha had set backs, like
