After talking with our Business Development Manager Dagne Grass about the first Baltic sales enablement I was really interested in who was our first Baltic customer that she mentioned, the great thing is that I didn’t have to look far and Dagne was more than happy to answer a few questions on how the collaboration with Rimi came to be.
How did we acquire our first Baltic customer?
When Rimi issued their tender for Service Desk operations, Atea Estonia was invited to participate, as it was quite an extensive scope with a lot of requirements Atea Estonia contacted Atea Lithuania and we received the tender from them.
Can you give us some insights into the sales process?
Firstly I would like to give a big thumbs up to Rimi as this was a very well structured tender, especially for a company that is not always required to go into public bids. After qualifying the tender internally from a sales perspective, we understood straight away that we could comply with the requirements with no problem, thanks to our experience in the Nordics.
How challenging or easy was to work with Rimi?
Working with Rimi was very easy, the most challenging part was to negotiate about the local deliveries at the same time as the global/Baltic ones, as Rimi is present in all three Baltic countries with the most significant being Latvia with about 50% of the business and Lithuania and Estonia being very similar in size.
We are delivering Service Desk and Monitoring services for Rimi – do you see more services in the future?
At this point Service Desk is their main priority and has been for a while, but shortly after we started talking with them (Rimi) they mentioned that they would be interested in a services partner as well. Also, we were approached by Microsoft Baltics, who informed us that Rimi was interested in someone to help them with their Azure strategy and Digital Workplace. Now Service Desk is live, and we are having different conversations with Rimi, and I would say that the future is looking very good in terms of potential collaboration. I like the way that Rimi is looking at managing their IT.
Only good things in the future! Now that Service Desk is live for Rimi, can you please comment on the after-sales part?
The sales process took about a month, so I would say it was very rushed for being a tender, and the same could be said about the transition process. One of the requirements from Rimi was that the potential service provider has to be able to transition them in approximately a month, which is a short time frame. We had our transition project manager Igors (Igors Sceglovs) assigned already in the sales cycle, even before we knew that we would win the tender. Igors did a fantastic job! He took part in convincing Rimi that Atea was the supplier of choice, he did all the necessary pre-work and took charge in the negotiations between the three involved countries as some parts of the scope went through Atea Estonia and Atea Lithuania due to language requirements.
What do you think that the first Baltic customer means for AGS?
I think it means a lot – for a long time we didn’t consider the Baltic market to be for us, as they weren’t ready for the services and the prices, but now Rimi is an excellent example that things are changing. It diffidently gives a lot of pride in how our market is developing and allowing us to be closer to the position that other Atea countries are in where they communicate with their end-customers daily. Today we have Rimi coming to our office at least once a month, and I hope that we can help them build their future with IT.
If it’s not a big secret, are there any more Baltic customers in the pipeline?
Well…we have some Service Desk cases that are still to immature to disclose, but I can tell you that we are in pre-sales work with one of the largest Baltic banks, and we are also working in 2 different streams with Rimi talking about their Azure and Modern Workplace journeys.
– Daniela Rubule, Marketing Manager at Atea Global Services
After talking with our Business Development Manager Dagne Grass about the first Baltic sales enablement I was really interested in who was our first Baltic customer that she mentioned, the great thing is that I didn’t have to look far and Dagne was more than happy to answer a few questions on how the collaboration with Rimi came to be.
How did we acquire our first Baltic customer?
When Rimi issued their tender for Service Desk operations, Atea Estonia was invited to participate, as it was quite an extensive scope with a lot of requirements Atea Estonia contacted Atea Lithuania and we received the tender from them.
Can you give us some insights into the sales process?
Firstly I would like to give a big thumbs up to Rimi as this was a very well structured tender, especially for a company that is not always required to go into public bids. After qualifying the tender internally from a sales perspective, we understood straight away that we could comply with the requirements with no problem, thanks to our experience in the Nordics.
How challenging or easy was to work with Rimi?
Working with Rimi was very easy, the most challenging part was to negotiate about the local deliveries at the same time as the global/Baltic ones, asRimi is present in all three Baltic countries with the most significant being Latvia with about 50% of the business and Lithuania and Estonia being very similar in size.
We are delivering Service Desk and Monitoring services for Rimi – do you see more services in the future?
At this point Service Desk is their main priority and has been for a while, but shortly after we started talking with them (Rimi) they mentioned that they would be interested in a services partner as well. Also, we were approached by Microsoft Baltics, who informed us that Rimi was interested in someone to help them with their Azure strategy and Digital Workplace. Now Service Desk is live, and we are having different conversations with Rimi, and I would say that the future is looking very good in terms of potential collaboration. I like the way that Rimi is looking at managing their IT.
Only good things in the future! Now that Service Desk is live for Rimi, can you please comment on the after-sales part?
The sales process took about a month, so I would say it was very rushed for being a tender, and the same could be said about the transition process. One of the requirements from Rimi was that the potential service provider has to be able to transition them in approximately a month, which is a short time frame. We had our transition project manager Igors (Igors Sceglovs) assigned already in the sales cycle, even before we knew that we would win the tender. Igors did a fantastic job! He took part in convincing Rimi that Atea was the supplier of choice, he did all the necessary pre-work and took charge in the negotiations between the three involved countries as some parts of the scope went through Atea Estonia and Atea Lithuania due to language requirements.
What do you think that the first Baltic customer means for AGS?
I think it means a lot – for a long time we didn’t consider the Baltic market to be for us, as they weren’t ready for the services and the prices, but now Rimi is an excellent example that things are changing. It diffidently gives a lot of pride in how our market is developing and allowing us to be closer to the position that other Atea countries are in where they communicate with their end-customers daily. Today we have Rimi coming to our office at least once a month, and I hope that we can help them build their future with IT.
If it’s not a big secret, are there any more Baltic customers in the pipeline?
Well…we have some Service Desk cases that are still to immature to disclose, but I can tell you that we are in pre-sales work with one of the largest Baltic banks, and we are also working in 2 different streams with Rimi talking about their Azure and Modern Workplace journeys.
– Daniela Rubule, Marketing Manager at Atea Global Services