Mary Jane Grinstead, founder and owner of MJC, Inc., has been working with and satisfying customers in the high technology industry for twenty-five years. Before founding her own company, she held executive and senior level positions in sales, marketing, and operations for IBM; Anacomp, a leader in outsourcing, data storage, and print solutions, and ARDIS, the nation’s first wireless data network.
Throughout her career, Mary Jane has made customer service and satisfaction an integral part of every sales and marketing strategy, ever linking customer service and satisfaction to revenue. Her specialty is long-term B2B relationships that encompass both short-term and multi-year sales.
As general manager of IBM’s second largest region (sales of $750 million) with 14 branches in six states, Mary Jane had responsibility for 2000 employee supporting the sales, distribution, and customer service of all IBM product lines throughout New England. Operations included national accounts, new business development, and resellers in all major industries. At a time when mainframe computer sales were at an all time high and Apple Computer controlled the PC marketplace, she created and carried out a sales, support, and service strategy that doubled PC market penetration and in less than two years led to 135 percent increase in business among the hundreds of colleges and universities in New England.
As a corporate marketing executive at IBM, Mary Jane developed and led a marketing research project to determine what it was like to do business with IBM from our customers’ points of view. The project involved customer interviews with executives, users and technical personnel at their locations; in-depth surveys with IBM employees involved with service delivery to these customers; and identification and benchmarking of best-in-class suppliers who became targets to study. The recommendations from this work produced a major account service model that crossed all sectors of IBM. Adoption of these recommendations significantly changed IBM’s methods and global marketing practices.
As one of five charter executives responsible for the start-up and building of ARDIS, the largest commercial wireless data networks of its day, Mary Jane, led the organization to become the leader in corporate markets, growing the business to $60 million in revenue over a six-year period. She developed a cross-company innovative training and measurement system for customer satisfaction that included a Manifesto-approach under which ARDIS and its customers mutually agreed on how each would perform in the business relationships and how problems and dissatisfaction—no matter how great or small—would be expressed and resolved. ARDIS became the marketplace leader with Fortune 100 accounts such as Avis, Sears, Lucent Technologies, and Bank of America. The company built development relationships with more than 100 application, connectivity, and device partners. Mary Jane packaged and delivered her model to other network operators around the world, including Hong Kong, Singapore, UK, Germany, and Canada.
At Anacomp, Mary Jane revamped the national sales organization and created an entirely new quota and measurement systems that included empowered customer service metrics for every person who had contact with the customer. This nationwide system of sales accountability grew revenue by 25 percent.
Mary Jane is a published fiction author and freelance business writer specializing in business writing for companies, associations, and economic development organizations in the entrepreneurial high technology field. Her features and articles have appeared in magazines, newspapers, and on the web. Her works of fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications including The MacGuffin, The Comstock Review, Pangolin Papers, Orange Willow Review, Reader’s Break, Inkwell, Re:Al, Crab Creek Review, and Rivers Edge. She has edited several non-fiction books.