Pure’s full portfolio-selling sales force

Pure Storage reckons that its sales org should sell the entire product portfolio in its fiscal 2024 and thereby increase their reach.

Update: Email author corrected to Dan FitzSimons, Chief Revenue Officer, 26 Jan 2023.

Pure is currently in the final quarter of its FY2023, and preparing for FY2024. We have seen an internal email from Pure Storage sent by Dan “Fitz” FitzSimons, Chief Revenue Officer, presenting the new go-to-market organization within sales and its supporting technologies.

Dan FitzSimons.

It starts out by declaring: :This past year Pure once again took more of the overall storage market than any of our competitors.”

Hmm. We have a bit of a problem with this as Pure’s expected full FY2023 revenues are ~$2.75 billion, whereas Dell storage has been pulling in $4.2 billion a quarter for its past three quarters.

Then Fitz talks about a $5 billion bookings goal for the year and declares: “Our strategy is simple: to expand our footprint and wallet-share with existing customers building on core strengths and winning new use cases, and to do the same to land new customers in every segment.”

“The single biggest factor in your and Pure’s success is tied to our ability to integrate the breadth of the portfolio – FlashArray, FlashBlade, Evergreen//One, Portworx – into your selling motions.”

He says “FlashBlade is a clear example of a successful Pure growth engine … delivering more than $1.5 billion in total FB bookings, extending Pure into new fast file and object use cases.”

FlashBlade has reached mature levels of scale. Nevertheless, its sales team is being amalgamated with the core FlashArray team because the integrated portfolio is the big selling strength Pure sees itself as possessing. So Pure is “Unifying our FlashArray sales team (known as the ‘core’ team) and our UDS/FlashBlade specialist team into a single, unified Portfolio Sales Team. This combined team will immediately increase the reach of our portfolio-focused account executives around the world.”

Pure is also unifying its Data Architect and Field Solution Architect teams: “creating a consistent engagement model for customers that covers the portfolio across all technical use cases – Database, Modern Data Protection, Virtualization/Cloud, Modern Data Analytics.” The Principal Technologists (PT) team will be expanded “with a dedicated PT in each major sales region.”

Fitz argues: “The tighter alignment will create velocity, reduce customer friction, and help us lead with the use cases that our solutions have been built to address.”

And it’s not just sales leading with this effort. “This is a company effort. It will require everyone who ‘wears the orange’ to shift our mindsets in how we train, engage with, and represent the portfolio in our marketplace.”

Finally, a note of caution: “In the unlikely event that you are contacted by a financial/industry analyst or a journalist, do not offer a statement, and contact the communications team.”

A separate source in Pure said this is just the annual culling of underperforming sales reps, and there haven’t been any layoffs in other parts of the org. Pure has been contacted for a comment, and told us: “Just to reiterate what we shared, the unification of our global go-to-market organization is a very positive outcome for not only our customers, but our internal team. It enables our customers to leverage the full portfolio and our unified sales team to put forward the best possible solutions (across every workload) to our customers.  “

Additionally, very few employees were impacted by the change.”