Contrary to popular perception, a high-technology company’s success is not actually based upon the technology the company offers. Whether a company succeeds or fails is determined by people; the leadership team that sets the company’s direction, the teams of people who build, market, and sell the products, and most importantly, customers. Steve Martin’s consulting helps high technology companies solve the four most important people-problems they face.
Steve Martin’s consulting goes well beyond the traditional examination of processes and procedures. He takes the customer's point of view to identify and ensure you are creating the best circumstance for success.
Executive Team Alignment: United We Stand, Divided We Fall
The single most important factor that determines a high technology company’s success or failure is its executive leadership team. Therefore, it is logical to assume that this team would be united together around the common cause of company-wide success. However, this isn’t usually the case. In reality, most executive teams are quite divided. Some executive team members serve their self-interests first or place the needs of their operational area of responsibility before the goals of the company.
When we examine the composition of the high technology executive team we realize that this situation should not be a surprise. The team is a collection of diverse individuals. There are scientists with advanced degrees in computers and mathematics, and businessmen with backgrounds in finance, marketing, and sales. There are people with varying degrees of career experience, levels of emotional maturity, and size of ego.
Given this diversity, it is highly doubtful that this odd collection of people would come together and befriend one another under natural circumstances. Even though they meet frequently, the executive team doesn’t “really” know each other personally since they have different orientations. The technologists speak differently than the marketeers and the finance guys think differently than sales. Because the team members range from intellectual introverts to expressive extroverts, they have a hard time working together as a team.
Over time, human nature dictates that team members band together into cliques that share similar backgrounds and political viewpoints. These cliques battle each other openly at meetings or covertly after initiatives have been seemingly agreed upon. As a result, initiatives are sabotaged, the reality about the company’s position is not discussed openly, and the truth is lost. This situation continues to worsen until a critical point is reached and members are ostracized. In fact, the central reason why senior leaders of high technology teams are fired is not over performance, but over their inability to function within the executive team.
Steve Martin’s executive team review is designed to bring the high technology executive team together as a true team. The review starts with an in-depth investigation and executive team member interviews. A blind survey is then created for each executive team member to complete. In the survey, the company’s current position, departmental strengths and weaknesses, technology and products, competition, target markets, and future plans are evaluated. The survey results are collated, themes are identified, conclusions are drawn, and presented back to the team in an interactive workshop session. More than an analytical view of the organization, this cathartic experience realigns personal thinking.
The high technology industry is like no other. Today’s challenging times, demands the collaborative performance of the executive team solely aligned upon the company and its customers. Please contact stevemartin@storyofinformix.com for further executive team review information.
The Synchronization of Engineering and Marketing with Sales
Struggling high technology companies all share something in common. Their sales, marketing, and engineering efforts are at odds. Sometimes, they are even at war. This ongoing conflict is a “pink elephant” at many high technology companies that no one will talk about the problem until it becomes so disruptive that it must be dealt with.
Engineering builds products without forethought to what customers really want or need. The marketing team lectures the sales department, saying that if only sales would take their advice, its problems would be solved. Meanwhile, the sales department always says it needs something else from marketing. It is clamoring for a silver bullet that will convince the most ardent skeptic to buy.
The root cause of this situation is that engineering, marketing, and sales have different views of the world. The engineering department believes that “their” technology will sell itself. They tend to focus on technology for technology’s sake that doesn’t match the real-world needs of customers. To the marketing department, selling is a series of steps that you guide a prospect through. These steps are based on the logic of purchasing the product, and the marketing team’s job is to provide the tools to move the prospect to the next step. Meanwhile, salespeople must work with the unpredictable part of the process: people. Their job is to formulate an account strategy based upon the people whom they are trying to sell to. They need intuition--what to do and say in a particular competitive situation. The figure below illustrates this dilemma between sales and marketing.
The Different Viewpoints Sales and Marketing Have About Sales
As a result, friction between the areas develops. Salespeople feel they must translate theoretical arguments into a practical message while the marketing team believes the salespeople themselves are the problem. The solution to this problem is to define the intuition that sales needs. The first step is to understand the people involved in the sale: the different types of customer personalities, selfish interests that motivate the purchase, and languages the customers speak. Next, identify the circumstances of the sale: the competition, the players (e.g. the key decision maker’s authority and title) and the deal position (competitive, collaborative, or blind). Finally, a feedback loop for collecting win-loss information should be put into place.
True win-loss analysis is very important and unfortunately, it’s a lost art. Most companies never take the time to understand why they won a deal. They only examine losses. And they usually conduct the examination in one of two ways. In the “blame game,” the account team and various key departmental executives get together to hammer home their own personal agenda using the loss as a lightning rod. The sales team argues it needs a product enhancement or new marketing program while someone else may argue that sales is inept.
In the “cumulative dogpile,” the salesperson is put under a microscope and every account move is analyzed and criticized by management. It’s painful to witness and even worse to be the subject of one of these inquisitions. After the fog of war has lifted, it’s easy for the generals back at the corporate office to second-guess the battlefield actions and take potshots at their soldiers. Unfortunately, the cumulative dogpile and blame game impede the flow of critical information and dissuade the truth from being communicated.
Meaningful win-loss analysis is the first step in synchronizing the engineering, marketing, and sales arenas within a high technology company. The information must be objectively collected, common themes collated, and results shared between engineering, marketing, and sales in a non-confrontational manor. Only then, will these diverse organizations be aligned for common good. Please contact stevemartin@storyofinformix.com for further information on comprehensive win-loss studies.
Sales Diagnostics: Why Aren’t We Selling More?
Why aren't we selling more? Everyone's got an opinion. Some may say the economy, the marketplace or lack of functionality. Others will say it's the competition or the sales team’s lack of ability. Perhaps, it's actually the customers. For a moment, let's put ourselves in the position of your customer. As the customer, you are going to meet with multiple vendors, listen to their presentations, read their marketing collateral, and take a look at their web site. Each vendor, most likely, has equally talented, friendly, and professional salespeople who come to your office. However, you will only select one product. Given that, how will you behave with each vendor?
Steve Martin’s consulting takes the customer's point of view in analyzing why you aren't selling more based upon the principles explained within his critically acclaimed book Heavy Hitter Selling. Starting with language diagnostics, what is the optimum way to structure your message to persuade the customer to buy? Moving to rapport, does your current sales staff know how to create the personal, technical, and political receptive states to win the deal? Do you have the right people and is your sales organization "wired" correctly to sell to your customers? Do you have sales intuition? Are you collecting and sharing important information about customer behavior during the sales cycle?
Most companies are well versed on the logical arguments for selecting their product. However, the decision to make a major purchase is primarily based upon individual needs, traits of personality, and how the decision-makers receive information. Since most companies don't understand their customers in these regards, personality profiles are created for the key decision-makers involved in the selection process in order to understand how to message to their emotional subconscious minds. Recommendations to improve the suggestive powers of the web-site, marketing collateral, and field presentations are made. In addition, the competitors‘ communication styles are defined and areas of opportunity identified. Please contact stevemartin@storyofinformix.com for further information regarding comprehensive sales diagnostic consulting.
How Start-ups can Compete with the Goliaths in their marketspace
Cisco is one of the most recognized high technology companies around the world. With annual sales just under $20 billion, Cisco is the gorilla of the networking communications marketspace. Beating the gorilla is a formidable challenge for any start-up. However, privately funded Veraz Networks did just that at Transcom, one of the world’s largest wholesales voice over IP carriers. In a deal valued at $10 million, it was recently announced that Transcom would be using Veraz Network’s gear to replace all of their installed Cisco gateways.
How did they beat the Cisco-- the gorilla?
The answer may actually surprise you.
Most people assume that business is based solely on logic. After all, the high-tech industry is comprised of learned people with advanced degrees in the sciences of computers, math, engineering, and business. Therefore, we logically assume we are dealing with rational decision-makers. As a result, we focus on the logical and procedural aspects of the sales cycle. We prospect for customers, qualify the opportunity, explain the merits of our solution, and hopefully, negotiate a purchase.
The majority of the discussions we have with potential customers are based on the rationale behind the selection of our products. We offer facts, features, specifications, performance metrics, ROI’s, and business benefits. And, our sales process is oriented around the communication of this information. Unfortunately, our competition offers equally compelling reasons and statistics. In fact, the confusion this creates many times leads to customer paralysis and decision postponement (another feared competitor).
Undoubtedly, Veraz Networks does have a great product, but so does Cisco. And as you already know, offering a better mousetrap doesn’t automatically generate sales anyway. The key reason why Veraz Networks won, was because Cisco lost. Cisco lost the relationship with their customer, while Veraz Networks successfully built theirs. As Chad Frazier, President of Transcom, said, "Cisco promised us this and that, but I couldn’t in good conscience go down that road."
The "real" sales process is the process of building a relationship with the customer. However, the entire high-tech industry is predominantly focused on technical arguments when there is very little product differentiation in the customer’s eyes. As an industry, we have become enamored with the technical mantras provided by our marketing departments. While they are important, there is an entirely intangible human side to the sales process that is actually responsible for the decision made. It is the art of mastering the human nature of high-tech selling that is the real difference between the winner and losers. In essence, it is the sales team that builds the greatest customer rapport and the strongest personal relationships that will command the day.
Three attributes are at the foundation of building the winning customer relationships. First, you need to speak each customer’s unique language. Successful communication is the key to all relationships. Your web site, marketing collateral, and sales and technical teams must speak the customer’s language. Second, as a start-up you must create an unbreakable bond between individuals. You accomplish this by understanding their personal needs, wants, and motivations. Finally, you must convince the "entire" person to buy. You need to persuade both the logical conscious mind and emotional subconscious mind. Remember, it is human nature to avoid risk.
Vendor relationships are expensive and they involve investments of valuable time by customers. Customers have to spend time to determine whether a product’s characteristics are as they have been represented. They have to spend time evaluating other suitors to determine whether they are picking the best possible partner to solve their company’s business problem. They will have to spend time learning to use the new products they select, implementing them, and most likely, debugging or fixing product problems.
These relationships also cost money. The customers will have to acquire the technology and pay ongoing maintenance fees to keep the technology current. They may have to pay for professional services or hire additional staff to help implement the solution. And they may need to buy additional technology in order to make the solution work.
Building relationships requires rapport. Building rapport requires the complex process of human communication. Unfortunately, most high technology companies today are making three common mistakes. The first mistake is that the company (engineering, marketing, and sales) is solely focused on rational arguments of selecting their products. Whether a start-up company is trying to win its initial customers or displace a goliath in an incumbent account, the psychological sale is far more important than the logical sale.
Thee second mistake is that the majority of sales training time is spent only on memorizing logical facts about their company, product, and competitors. Little or no training is given on communication skills. It is absolutely critical that start-ups understand the process of communication and how it determines the level of rapport that is established between people. Every aspect of the start-up must
The third mistake is made during the hiring process. Most companies make previous experience in the same industry their main criterion for hiring. Since experienced people command the logical facts, they are assumed to be qualified candidates. A more important hiring criterion is a person’s communication skills, mental agility, and the ability to build relationships. In other words, how quick-witted or fast on their feet are they, are they able to solve complex problems real-time, and whether or not you enjoy their company.
During the early `90s, the term "win-win relationship" was being used everywhere to explain how to successfully negotiate your position while still enabling the other party to achieve its goal. However, the concept of win-win relationships does not go far enough in understanding human relationships. Relationships are created when people share the same activities or when they are motivated to achieve the same goals. The secret to the start-ups success is based upon building winning customer relationships. Please contact stevemartin@storyofinformix.com if you need help winning over your first customers or defeating the goliath in your marketspace.
