William T. Hewitt, the new Chief Marketing Officer of Novell, an infrastructure software provider, describes his strategy for the global market for expanding Novell into Asia.
Novell plans to position itself in the global market with a plain strategy- understanding the different cultural and economic aspects of the global market.

Novell, headquartered in Massachusetts, has a twenty two year experience in workgroup, desktop, data center and provides services to 52,000 enterprises in 43 countries.

“Novell has made excellent products with great customer satisfaction, this is what we intend to follow for a very long time to come,” Hewitt says.

Marketing might be all about the one thing that differentiates one company from the other, but the CMO said that there isn’t any one such thing about Novell. “It is our focus on customer that makes us unique,” he says.

Currently, Novell is in the middle of a transition to be a proprietor of software that is based on a Linux operating system. “It is yet to solve the real problems of the IT department, which could help us fix customers’ problem. That will be the one thing that differentiates us over time than people, who can develop the product within a week,” he says.

The other challenges for Hewitt, he says, are to communicate to people what Novell is all about. “That is more than generating awareness through advertising. It is generating awareness and demand among the economic buyers, functional buyers, the users of a product,” says Hewitt.

The 44-year-old Hewitt says, “A CMO might think of what Novell has to offer as a way to lower overall costs or bring a strategic vendor into shop and have a better negotiating position with another strategic vendor. They are in-charge of identity management. They think of how solutions can effectively track assets- both people assets and hard assets and make sure they meet all the corporate governance challenges.”

As the CMO, Hewitt’s goal is to help increase revenue by focusing on three areas- awareness, generating demand and giving the sales people the right tools in order to sell the products.
In generating demand, understanding the specific pain points is the key area to help the customer. “So when the client gets an email, views a webinar or gets a direct response from us, our sales person can fix it up,” he says. So, it is thinking about those pain points-do you know where your assets are?” asks Hewitt.

The right-mix of tools help get the maximum productivity out of the sales organizations, which, he says can be measured by “how many of our prospects have been converted to opportunities?”

Novell’s strategy to convert prospects into customers is like a qualification process. “We use a series of electronic mechanisms when people register for product information or white papers. We ask questions, do you have a current project? Is it budgeted? Do you plan to buy something in the next twelve months? If they answer all the questions, and if it qualifies, it is called a hot lead.”

But even if they don’t get a hot lead, they still keep in touch with the prospective clients. If the sales people don’t have complete information, they call out to the users individually. “We use a tele-prospecting company out of Asia and they call out to the customers,” he says.

But even if it is beyond 12 months, Hewitt notes that it is important to see the prospect’s interest in the company. “We put those in a special program campaign based on the fact that they know who we are. It is more of a specific marketing than a direct marketing,” he says.

Hewitt adds that metrics help measure various costs, such as the costs to convert to pipeline opportunities and the cost to convert opportunities to deals.