northeast intercollegiate sales competition€¦ · carousel company overview . carousel industries...

©2019 Carousel Industries carouselindustries.com

CLIENT CASE STUDY

Northeast Intercollegiate Sales Competition

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Company: Carousel Industries

Type: Private

Industry: Information Technology

Headquarters: Exeter, RI

Number of employees: 1,300

Website: carouselindustries.com

CAROUSEL COMPANY OVERVIEW

Carousel Industries consults, integrates and manages technology solutions that solve business problems and contributes to corporate growth. Carousel’s managed services, mobility, visual communications, A/V integration, virtualization, unified communications, and data infrastructure solutions leverage their consultative approach, deep technical expertise, and extensive industry partnerships. They are a certified reseller of more than 35 technology partners including: Cisco, Microsoft and Avaya. Since their founding in 1992 they’ve grown an average of 30% per year.

Today they have over 6,000 customers, including 35 of the Fortune 100. Carousel has been recognized by both VAR and CRN Magazines as one of the top technology integrators in the US and they’ve been listed in the Inc. 500/5000 seven times. Carousel was also listed on the 2019 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 list in the Elite 150 category for the sixth consecutive time. Carousel is headquartered in Exeter, RI with over 1,300 employees working in 27 locations across the US, including over 250 service technicians

Whether it is the communication technologies that connect employees to the world, the data network

driving information or the infrastructure supporting it all, Carousel’s promise to their customers is that they will design, integrate, manage and support solutions that help maintain a competitive edge.

YOUR PROSPECT’S OVERVIEW: AUGUSTINE GRANDE & WEST

Augustine, Grande & West (AGW) is a law firm specializing in corporate law with different groups within the firm focused on trusts, real estate and general business law. They currently have several locations throughout the United States with clients in 25 of the contiguous United States. AGW was founded in 1996 by three colleagues who met in law school and after ten years in other law firms, decided to come back together to create AGW.

They have been handling corporate law for over thirty years and have successfully tried cases that have gone as far as the US Supreme Court. With the publicity that some of those cases have brought, they have grown the firm from the headquarters in New York, NY to five other major cities within the United States.

The firm strives to achieve results that exceed expectations through their commitment to their clients. A new part of the mission statement is to become technologically sophisticated.



SCENARIO • Law firm named Augustine, Grande & West (AGW)

o Specialize in high profile corporate cases

o Approximately 500 employees across five locations

o Recently brought in by Next Jet Aircraft as secondary council for recent lawsuits due to Next Jet 636 Max 5 crashes.

• Offices in NY, Chicago, LA, Dallas, Miami, and Boston

• Recently acquired some of these locations from other firms. They have disparate, aging systems.

• High profile case, with no local administrative support. Relying on partners that are not readily available due to end of life platforms, etc.

• Multiple systems now, which results in multiple contracts

o Nortel Norstar

o Fujitsu

o S4B

• Overall business issues:

o Multiple issues with calls while working with Next Jet’s other legal team as well as Next Jet’s legal and executive team.

• Business goals: IT standardization and sophistication of all locations and consolidated billing

Augustine, Grande & West currently uses several collaboration platforms as a result of existing technology from acquisitions. On November 2th, 2018 they experienced a phone system outage at their headquarters in New York, NY which resulted in a significant loss of billable hours. The outage caused concern and forced the conversation between the partners for the mission statement to include “sophisticated technology” because they never wanted to be faced with that situation again.

On August 19, 2018 on a flight from Houston to Honolulu, a Next Jet 636 Max 5 crashed into the sea ten minutes after takeoff. There were 140 lives lost during the crash. There was a second Jet 636 Max 5 crash on June 15, 2019 that killed 189 people only five minutes after takeoff. This led to the grounding of the airplane worldwide.

Soon after the first Next Jet crash, AGW was sought as secondary council to Next Jet’s current legal team. This means that they must have communication 24/7 internationally, with no downtime. The publicity surrounding the case has put AGW into the spotlight more so than ever before. Their professionalism is of utmost importance to them and this case could lead to expanding their firm to International locations.

To solve the communication issue, Augustine, Grande & West have had several meetings to try and determine what options (if any) can help reduce the risk of these types of outages. During their most recent business meeting, Caroline Sauer (AGW Junior Partner) threw a business card on the table which happened to be an Account Executive from Carousel Industries. They happened to be chatting with each other at a networking event setup for the alumni of the college they both attended for their undergrad.

During the conversation, Caroline shared how painful the outage was to her and her clients and how it impacted the organization across all their locations due to their headquarters being down. The Carousel Account Executive went on to say how as a company, Carousel has helped other law firms like Augustine, Grande & West consolidate disparate systems into an enterprise level solution for full collaboration across multiple locations. He recommended that they schedule a client visit to go over different options.

Without saying another word, Marshall James (IT Director) encouraged they bring the AE in for a meeting. Caroline followed up with the Carousel Industries AE and confirmed a meeting the following Tuesday.



POTENTIAL OBJECTIONS TO BE AWARE OF: • What is this going to cost them? • They have a recent growth spurt; can Carousel handle our reach across the United States? • Their teams work 24/7 for their clients, can Carousel provide on-call support? • Has Carousel been working with other similar law firms and can they share solid results? • They were recently declined a support renewal from one of their partners due to the age of their system and lack of availability of

parts. • How will this impact their IT department with implementation?

CHARACTERS:

• Sales Rep #1 for Carousel Industries • Marshall James– IT Director • Austin McCormick– VP of Information Technology • Michelle Grande - Partner



ROUND 1, MEETING WITH Marshall James (IT DIRECTOR): The goal of this meeting is:

• To understand AGW’s current business problems and the impact they are having on the company. • To understand their ideal state and how Carousel can help them. • To explain what current Carousel Industries clients are experiencing for results and validate that similar results would be a win for

Augustine, Grande & West. • Close to run a Carousel Unite demo with their VP of IT, Austin McCormick to evaluate the solution.



QUARTERFINALS, MEETING WITH Marshall James (IT DIRECTOR): The goal of this meeting is the same as Round 1. Do not assume that what was uncovered in Round 1 holds up in Quarterfinals.

• To understand AGW’s current business problems and the impact they are having on the company. • To understand their ideal state and how Carousel can help them. • To explain what current Carousel Industries clients are experiencing for results and validate that similar results would be a win for

AGW. • Close to run a Carousel Unite demo with their VP of IT, Austin McCormick to evaluate the solution.



SEMIFINALS, MEETING WITH Austin McCormick (VP OF IT) (Assume Austin has had the Carousel Unite demo leading up to this meeting)

After demonstrating the collaboration tools available and simplification of management, the goal is now to:

• Validate the enhancements during the demo with Austin and answer any questions about the solution. • Confirm that Carousel Unite could solve AGW’s current communication issues through sharing past success stories of other Carousel

Industries clients. • Understand the impact this solution will have on their business from a revenue perspective. • Close for Austin to sponsor a meeting with firm Partner, Michelle Grande.



FINALS, MEETING WITH MICHELLE GRANDE (PARTNER) The goal of this meeting is:

• Validate the problems that Marshall and Austin are experiencing have a huge impact on the business and that Michelle is ultimately responsible for these issues.

• Explain what you’ve discussed with Marshall and Austin about Carousel Industries and its ability to solve these problems and the impact it would have on AGW.

• Close to move forward with a long-term commitment: either 3-year term of $6,400 per month for Carousel Unite ($230,400 total contract value) or 5-year term of $6,200 per month for Carousel Unite ($372,000 total contract value). Installation services and handsets would be a one-time fee of approximately $167,000.

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