The Interview T
INTERVIEW
here are not many gaming professionals in operations with an IT background, but with some useful pointers from the press release issued by International Game Technology (IGT), we made the journey to
the global industry leader’s Amsterdam offices to meet Sabby Gill, IGT Regional Vice President of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
With a career in information technology, Gill who
was head hunted from Hewlett-Packard where he was VP & GM of Partner and Mid-Size Enterprise Business in HP Software within the EMEA region, has a brief to expand IGT’s sales coverage and implement a global functional business partner strategy designed to leverage the full resources of IGT for growth in international markets.
As a mainstream casino operator with the essential knowledge in IT, I was about to enter a dialogue across disciplines, but fortunately with sales and marketing as common denominator. Sabby, as he is known, has that engaging first impression that makes you feel at ease, and he started with a verbal resume of his career, which needless to say, goes beyond HP.
Ricki Chavez Munoz: I expect that a career as WW Sales Operations Director at PeopleSoft, Inc., a company specialized in HR Management Systems, Financial Management Solutions, and other systems including customer relationship management software, is extremely helpful in your new IGT role?
Sabby Gill: “Yes it is, in addition
to the other roles at CA, Oracle and most recently at HP. I must have
38 DECEMBER 2011 RCM: On the sales side in this industry and I
expect other people might have told you this also; casino operators are fairly conservative and fond of keeping to casinospeak with casino minded providers. How are your plans to meet all types of gaming operators?
SG: “You don’t end up being number one and 2.5
times bigger than your next competitor without knowing the intricacies of your customers. We’ve done OK in the past, but expect us to level change the way that we react and interface with the market. We’ve upgraded our account teams and the support infrastructure with additional tools and resources, we’ve taken the best from the industry and ensuring these are adopted effectively. The one area that I was extremely conscious of when upgrading the teams was ensuring that we had industry knowledge and expertise, you can’t teach credibility. That comes with experience. That’s what we’ve done by hiring from within the industry.”
RCM: Craig Churchill, IGT’s senior vice
president of International Sales, has said that you have ‘the ideal background for leading the growth of IGT in the EMEA markets,’ and I can see that your enthusiasm is contagious, but how does it translate in terms of customer relations and service as a key ingredient in these rather cynical deal making days?
SG: “That’s a great question. From the interaction
I’ve had so far with customers, they are all experiencing similar issues, when you think about what we offer it is not to dissimilar to the industries I have worked in previously, there are solutions that need to show customers value and a high return on
Ricki Chavez Munoz meets IGT’s new Regional Vice President of EMEA, Sabby Gill, and finds out his background, plans for the future, and what he brings to the gaming giant
been in almost every customer facing position you can imagine and all of that experience is coming in handy in my first eight weeks here at IGT. We’ve neglected some of our key customers over the last few years and customer satisfaction has taken a bit of a hit, we’ve not deployed our resources effectively and have always gone for the big deals and not necessarily serviced some of the smaller regions the way that IGT should have. That’s all going to change”
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