Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) introduced a series of training modules to help its IT sales teams accurately represent and sell customers on the vendor's environmental sustainability-focused capabilities, according to HPE Chief Sustainability Officer Monica Batchelder.

In light of today's power hungry networks and compute environments, business executives and enterprise IT buyers definitely recognize the value of sustainability-focused technology, Batchelder told SDxCentral. "It's not really a matter of convincing them anymore that [sustainability] adds value to their business," she said. In fact, customers are "demanding that we offer them sustainable products."

But beyond sustainable IT, enterprises "want a partner that can work with them on how to implement that technology and how to use it to drive their own sustainability goals," not a vendor that "sells them something and walks away," she explained.

At HPE, sales leaders represent "the frontline" for discussing sustainability and how the vendor can help address environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals.

After half a decade of operating a small team within the sustainability organization to "engage with sales folks and with customers directly on sustainability briefings," HPE decided that team "can be another step in the process, but we really needed all our sellers to be the frontline to have sustainability conversations," she explained.

That sustainability sales consulting team operated from 2017 to 2022 and contributed to a significant increase in sustainability-enabled sales revenue, which jumped "from just over $312 million [to more than] $1 billion," Batchelder said. And that "conservative figure" is only "based on direct engagements with customers on sustainability," she noted.

Fresh off those successes, HPE launched a sales enablement program with nine hours of technical training modules that "prepare our sellers to have conversations with customers and recommend the right solutions for them," she said.

HPE also launched an associated badge program for sales team members that complete the sustainability training modules. "Our sellers can actually feel competent letting customers know that they're people [who] can work with them on those problems," she explained.

The training modules emphasize key themes like HPE's history of sustainability action, common customer challenges, and how to recommend appropriate solutions.

From the beginning, customers want to know that HPE has strong and legitimate sustainability credentials. "We have evidence that they're looking for partners [with] those same values and sustainability leadership," Batchelder said. "It begins with understanding . . . HPE's strategy as a business," and the vendor's "heritage and legacy around sustainability," she explained.

Next, the training covers how to understand common enterprise challenges in meeting sustainability goals. Chief information officers (CIOs) "now more than ever" have goals or key performance indicators (KPIs) tied to the sustainability of IT operations.

"If we can have conversations at the CIO level – in addition to the IT buyer level – we can expand that perception of HPE as the strategic vendor that our customers are looking for," Batchelder said, touting the company's "breadth of solutions in the sustainability space."

The trainings also stress how HPE meets enterprise customers wherever they might be in terms of sustainability maturity. "If it's day one, and they don't even have procurement requirements related to sustainability, we have a sustainable IT purchasing guideline that they can use to directly influence their own procurement requirements," she said.

More advanced enterprises that have already implemented environmental monitoring, for example, can work with HPE on "how to connect that from edge to cloud across all of their IT," she added. "Really, it's understanding the customer's pain points [and] where they are on the journey and then identifying the right solution."