How do you position yourself to meet those needs?
You have to be careful so it’s not looked at as the sales guy looking for a sale. It’s multiple meetings with different people. That highest level meeting might be with myself or a chief technology officer or possibly head of marketing; basically, you’re just in there information-gathering.
Then if you think there’s specific opportunity for the company, you’ll follow up — maybe myself, but probably with the head of worldwide sales — where we start to bring in people that are more on the solution side of the business.
Customers don’t mind you selling to them if you have a solution. But there does need to be a separation between the process of information-gathering for purposes that are not specifically related to a sales process, and then the sales process itself.
How do you decide which needs you’re capable of meeting?
I would bring it back to [the executive staff] and say, ‘Here’s what we have found,’ and just open discussion up to the whole group, which will typically then lead to some assignments of tasks. We’re going to say, ‘OK, we need to now go prove out these two things. So you, vice president of marketing, go talk to XYZ analysts and ask their opinion on this. And you, head of my deployment services, go talk to three other customers and tell them what our point of view is on this and get their feedback on that.’
Then, based on that, we may make the determination, ‘OK, we now need to make a change in our product strategy,’ or, ‘In the upcoming releases of our products, we need to start moving in this kind of a direction,’ or, ‘We should go look at an acquisition in this particular area because it would take us way too long to develop ourselves into that space.’
What makes an opportunity attractive?
One way that I put it — I’ve thought about it this way for a long time — is, ‘Are you selling aspirin or are you selling vitamins? Is this something that really fixes a pain, or is it something that just makes somebody feel a little bit better?’ That’s an acid test for me.
I want to be selling aspirin, not vitamins, because when people don’t have money, you can do without your vitamins. But if you’ve got a really bad headache, you’re going to pay a lot of money for those aspirin. So that’s a way that I look at these kinds of things: ‘Are we truly solving a problem where our customers feel real pain, where they have a real need that they are going to pay money for? What is the business case justification for that customer?’
If you can’t find that business case, no matter how great you think it is, they’re not going to buy it.
Understand … the pain points and then what that means in terms of dollars. So you have this problem where you don’t have visibility into your inventory on the customer side. What does that mean to you?
‘Well, that means that we have to ship an extra $10 million in products and put them in these different locations just to make sure that we don’t run out. But if we had visibility, that would allow us to put the inventory there only when we needed it. Then instead of having $10 million in inventory, we could have $1 million in inventory.’
So if I could solve that problem for you and I could save you $10 million a year, it’s almost like you don’t even have to ask the question, ‘If I could save you $10 million dollars a year, would you pay me $1 million?’ It’s obvious.
How do you prioritize opportunities?
Sometimes we will create a matrix. … First prioritizing pain points of the customer — low, medium, high, in terms of … how important of a problem is this to solve.
Then understand what is it that we’re good at and are we already talking to the people that we would sell that to. Then it’s understanding: What is your capability in terms of product distribution? At least for us, we want to be selling more stuff to the same buyer. We don’t want to have to have a different sales force or a whole different sales process or whole different set of relationships to sell something else. So it’s understanding: Who is the buyer, and is it the same person that we’re already talking to?
And then what would it take for us to get this thing to market? What’s the level of effort?
You’re going to have to go put all those things together, and you get input from everybody. You’ll be getting input from marketing, from sales, from R&D and from our chief technology officer, and just go through this vetting process.
You need to tell people outright that you want their honest, complete, unfiltered feedback. And then when you get it, you can’t smack them for doing it. You’ve got to make them feel like there’s a safe environment to do that. Once people give open and honest feedback, you’ve got to make them feel good about that input. It doesn’t mean you’re going to use it.
Hopefully, you ultimately get to a point in conversation where you have general consensus. But if you don’t, everyone can understand at some point a decision’s going to be made. … Then we have to move forward and execute.
How to reach: E2open Inc., (650) 645-6500 or www.e2open.com
