Building Competitive Pitches #EvangelistGuide

In my previous post in the #EvangelistGuide series, I discussed writing competitive pitches, but covered quite a bit of ground as well.

As promised, we now move on to the way one builds a competitive pitch. This may take many forms, and formats, with the idea being the same throughout, namely helping the customer say what they need and why they need it.

If you start a conversation with an attack, you put people on the defensive, which is not always in your favor. However, there are times when it not only makes sense, but would be the most direct way to accomplish your task.

Know your audience
If you are speaking to tech people or executives, you need to understand their pain, their business, and their thought process. Many of these people will have logic and minutiae to help them ward off any attack. Your ability to speak their language and work with their fears/loves is key.

Never lose sight of the business aspects, present information in ways that you can say "we provide the option for you to pick which way to implement this solution in house or in the Cloud" instead of "we made this work only in the Cloud" if you are facing companies that cannot go to the Cloud today.

Explain your words 
Do your best not to talk down to the audience, but also not talk above them either. It is not an easy line to walk. Please keep in mind, words and terms which the US may use, or think are normal, may not work outside of the US.

Speak so any person in the room, or their company, can understand your intentions and your solution.

Do not use acronyms, unless the audience has already.

Invest your time
Be there at the moment, no distractions, no phone, no Twitter, just you and them. You may use the same ploys every time, but you need to have many ploys in your bag of improvisational responses. Practice other angles, read more, watch more, write more. You also need to relax and take the time to debrief yourself after you are finished each time.

Test new ideas
If you are on a path of evangelism you should have already read or watched or listened to as much as you can on the subjects of sales, overcoming objections, persuasive techniques, hypnotism, poker, body language, non-fiction business biographies, The Godfather, the Bible, The Art of War and The Prince.

If you are still interested in going into the discussions that make sales people cower, now the hard work begins. Just like you need to push people beyond the law of 3 (3 no's, 3 excuses, 3 yes's) you need to be ready with so many more methods for your attack in case you are thwarted early on. It will happen to you, especially in the earlier days, but even later on, you need more ploys.

You can try to reason with the person on the other side, just remember if you are one on one, they will LIE to your face. Never have these discussions one on one, you want their people in there to listen to you and hear their own management make a case for themselves. You can be on your own, in fact, I advocate it should always be one on many. I like them to feel they can gang up on me, I like those odds.

When reason fails, resort to other tactics that match up with your opponent. They may say they want openness, yet are a closed company. They may be happy with their incumbent, but is that because they fear the new, the unknown or just are afraid to MAKE MORE MONEY. Never be afraid to point out the obvious. Push them to think, push them to visualize the problem through a story of your own. If you cannot reference other companies, or provide a good enough story, you need to practice this further and do more research.

Sometimes the simplest method is the easiest. I like to listen to people tell me why they don't like our solution or a specific vendor while I take notes and wait and listen. You then have them telling you what is wrong, what is important to them, and what the largest issue they face is on this topic. If there is a team of people at the meeting, they may all have input, but the executive is the only one we really care about, so watch the executive as the underlings toss out red herrings.

Help them make a decision
The hardest part is having the customer say what you want to hear, without you saying it first. Just like in salary negotiations, the one that mentions a figure first loses, if you or I suggest an outcome, prior to the customer stating it, we will lose all of the time and effort we put into the pitch.

Walk along with them as they explain themselves. Check in with them while they are speaking by verifying what they have stated in their terms. Lead them if you need to, but work on helping them solve their problem, not on you providing the solution. They will love you all the more, and never look back at the competition.

Coming up in this series, why executives lie, why one on many is important and the differences between Enterprise customers and Family owned business/startups.

If your sales or marketing teams are in need of training on this topic please contact me now as Q1 is getting busy.

Writing Competitive Pitches #EvangelistGuide

Once upon a time, people would have discussions with one another and argue the finer points of The Beatles Vs. The Rolling Stones, beer vs. wine, blended vs. single malt scotch, or is Eric Clapton really God? Should we be in Vietnam or Korea, or do we colonize Mars? iPhone vs. Android, Jobs vs. Ford, 72' Dolphins vs. anyone.

But the fun and good times eventually give way to serious business discussions at work when you are in sales, and now you not only need to have a good argument, you also need to know information, not the type your Google search, but real data and details. As much as you can recite every word in your favorite song or poem or The Princess Bride movie, that is how prepared you need to be when you get into these discussions.

Except when you won't. Then you may freeze up and do what I try to train every salesperson in the world NOT to do, which is lie to the customer. You make up stuff that even Vizzini would call BS on, but you get away with it because you think the customer knows less than you.

Your customer is not so stupid. You might be, though.

If you can't say, "I don't know the answer to that question, but I know someone who does, and I will get an answer for you by ..." you are not a great salesperson.

What does this have to do with writing competitive pitches? Evidently, quite a lot based on some I have been reading lately. They are the equivalent of lying. Not Competitive pitches.

I will admit, if you are in a strong and dominant position in your market, you probably do little competitive work because you do not need to. Yet. You will because:

"The thing I worry about is some guy in his garage
inventing something I haven’t thought of."
- Bill Gates, Microsoft

For everyone else that is in second, third, fourth, or tenth place in their market, you need to do competitive position papers and research. Salespeople will think of it as handling objections, but it is more than that and less at the same time.

What do you need to be in the competitive space? You need to...

• Be a strong improviser. You never know what will be thrown at you.
• Have international or at least regional knowledge to understand the nuances of culture and other influences on people.
• Know about your products/solutions and the competitions inside and out. Like Sun Tzo (Vito Corleone for you nonreaders) said, "keep your friends close but your enemies closer."
• Read, listen, and watch as many things as you can on topic and off-topic, so you have more angles to work with when involved in different industries. (Your examples should be just as relevant and helpful as your knowledge)
• Be fearless.
• Not be arrogant.
• Have friends in weird, odd, far out, and local places that you can reach out to at random times and days.
• Have a sense of humor.
• Think like an executive or an assistant or a CFO or the person on the 4AM support shift.
• Know you will not win every discussion, and that is okay. Really. It is.
• Think out of the box, especially when revisiting clients you already saw. No one likes repeats.
• Wear a black suit. ( Just kidding)

If you have all of this, you can start to work on your first pitch or presentation for a product or solution...or against one. 

Once you get the slides and presentation done, then you can move up to writing white papers or bigger efforts.

Finally, you can get to the big leagues and go speak to people in person and do battle. It is a battle, of wits, just like in The Princess Bride. The stakes, not a princess, but potentially millions of dollars on the line.

Wits, not geek-speak. If you are involved in development competitive situations, you may have no other way to do this, but geek speak, but since I am not a developer, I will let others who know this field better provide some details or links.

Wits mean you do not go pointing out "we have a one-click interface" or an "open status bar" unless that is all you created. 

You want to aim higher.

Set your goals in alignment with the executive you are meeting with and what they need. CRM, project management, payroll, whatever it is, there are numerous ways to point out the benefits of your solutions without reverting to geek speak. 

You must speak the executive's language, finance to finance, marketing to marketing, sales to sales. Meet them on their terms, not yours. Don't sit in their seat, but if you walk into a conference room, do try to take the seat at the top of the table. Mind games are fun, even if meaningless to you at the time.

Take time to think about your answers, especially when presented with unknown data. Ask more probing questions, find the nugget they hide and let them know it is okay to let you see and hear about it from them, in their own words.

Never put down your competition, Microsoft likes to use the term "legacy" on every other company's products, yet mysteriously they never say that about their own, which are now quite old as well. You can say our competitors do this or that, but we take a different approach. I know, I sound like the startups pitching to VCs, but they learned fast the need to differentiate themselves from the competition. Which is what you should be doing as well.

If you are the only person writing these types of documents, you MUST, I cannot stress this enough, you MUST get input from people inside and outside your organization in order to provide well thought out documents. The last thing you want is for someone to rip your doc apart and start something like FUD Buster Friday posts to show how bad your work was on the topic.

A follow-up post in this #EvangelistGuide series will look at various ways to build a competitive pitch. Until then, if you need someone to help you with your competition, my consulting fees are reasonable, and my time is flexible.

Fud Buster Friday #68: That "Product" is Dead

Stick any name you want, any product, any solution, to that title above, it makes no difference to me and should not to you either if you are in sales of any sort or responsible for a product of any sort.

Why doesn't it matter? Because how you reply to this question is the key.

Many answers exist on how to counter this, but here are some basics to remember.

1) Discuss with the naysayer the future road map or plans/designs or just about anything available. It is hard to continue to claim this after seeing or hearing about the plans. Yet some persist.

2) Find the internal people responsible for the product and have them call the client or someone of similar knowledge and ability.

3) If possible, do a hands on test or demo because seeing is believing, but having them do it for themselves is worth 1,000 times more. Just be there in case they need help with anything.

4) Other customer examples are helpful, especially if you know the customers or can arrange communications between the two parties.

5) Have them attend an event or conference and introduce them to key people. Everyone wants to feel special and it will usually rub off on their perspectives.

6) Try to keep emotion out of it, hard as it may be, but stick to the facts and pursue an unbiased discussion. Discussing alternative products or solutions is not a bad thing. However, know what you are talking about.

7) Don't lie. I repeat never lie about anything if you are trying to persuade someone to change their point of view.

8) Use The Force. Choose your words carefully and use inflections or speaking tactics to draw attention and get them interested. Don't just ramble on reciting information like you are reading the phone book.

9) The Godfather Deal. Make them an offer they can't refuse. Just kidding.

10) Talk about how the product can help them or their customers, use their own examples or businesses, customize the discussion to them. Again, making them feel special goes a long way to getting your point heard.


Don't forget to ask why they say this.  Push for reasons. Did someone tell them this? Did they read it someplace? Hear it on a podcast? Saw a Tweet? Discussion on G+?

The answer to this question also might give you a lead where to look for more information or push your PR.

Remember the person's last reason is the most important one to them.

The others are just smoke and mirrors although also sometimes valid. 

If they still will not change their mind, you have at least tried to do more than the usual steps but can feel you tried.

Less IBM Moments?!

There was a posting that came out titled We need more Apple/Google/Amazon moments, less IBM moments from Vinnie Mirchandani.

The post is interesting in his view of HP and IBM among others. He starts well:

HP’s many announcements in the past weeks led observers to say this was its “IBM” inflexion point – deemphasize consumer tech, get more into enterprise tech.

And you think it will be a nice post for IBM. But it soon turns into "The funny thing is I see in different ways IBM longing for some of its consumer roots."

Consumer roots? IBM? They have never really been about consumers, aside from the Lotus division, now referred to as ICS or IBM Collaboration Solutions. Thinkpads and PCs aside which were really aimed at corporates and some consumer side people.

Then he says:

The argument is IBM has shown enterprise revenue to be higher margin, more predictable etc. I would argue the better metric to use if what percentage of revenues comes from products introduced in the last 5 years and Apple, Amazon, Google blow IBM away by the wide margin on that metric.

Here is where it gets interesting, he doesn't care that IBM stock is at a high not seen for almost a decade, instead he looks at the short term benefits. IBM Connections does meet the 5 year guide and IBM says it is the fastest selling solution ever. Is it an iPod, iPad or iPhone revenue stream? Not likely, but then IBM looks at the long road picture, not the short term what's shiny today view which the author shared.

But the crux of the matter is the author really wants to sell his new book and so in typical fashion, instead of being professional and discussing his book, he takes shots at IBM.

And my next book profiles enterprises in at least 50 industries that are developing “smart” products and services – smart pens, shirts, medical devices, digital citizen services.

So naturally IBM would not be included because it's not about the consumer? Strange perspective. Amazon is not using EC2 aimed at consumers. Google charges for their corporate apps, but the rest are generally FREE. Only Apple charges for everything and they deserve it too given their generally high quality efforts. Since he says industries, hard to think of ANY industry that is not getting some benefit out of software or devices in one way or another.

And finally the one which drove me to a prolonged comment on his post:

IBM launched its Social Business initiative at Lotusphere – Lotus is two decades old technology! IBM first talked about On-Demand computing in 2001 – a decade later we are still waiting for its version of Azure.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he is impressed Lotus Notes is at the forefront of this initiative. Damn straight it's 20 years old, because it's that good!

Taking the opposite view he is not interested in "older technology" just new and shiny.  As I pointed out in the comments, it's not like the software has sat for 20 years with no changes. If it was truly a bad product it would have been pulled long ago. No, the reality is tech writers hate Lotus Notes because they need something new to write about, not something that gets updates. Although they seem happy to post about any thing Microsoft does to update their DOS based Windows options. Is it readership? A numbers game? If so, why does so much press go to Apple? A niche, still, within the market but growing. Celebrity status will always trump reality unfortunately. I don't blame them they have a job to do and when I can I help them see the other side of their "conclusions".

I challenge the author or any other tech writer to do some investigative work on how many of the Fortune 100 companies uses Domino for some applications and messaging that is critical to their business. The results may surprise them.  You can argue whatever you want, but if companies really did not get a benefit out of using Domino I am quite sure IBM would drop it permanently and so would they.

We need more IBM moments like Watson, like Jams, like LUGs, like Smarter Planet and maybe some will be coming out at that Lotusphere thing in January 2012 that will play to the consumer side more. Stay tuned.

Sharepoint Symposium 2010 Reviewers: Need Enough Money and Take an Ibuprofen

KMWorld, a periodical I used to read quite often, but have been turned off by it of late because it has become a rag sheet for Sharepoint and Microsoft, showed up in the mailbox the other day.
IBM advertises in there and sometimes there are even articles about IBM software and solutions on the website and in print. But it really is a MS lovefest (see the series titled: SharePoint: The Reality Series 8 Implementing SharePoint 2010—An ECM manager’s view. To be fair, they do point out downsides, but overall what do you think when they created a Sharepoint Symposium anyway?

So on the cover of the January 2011 issue I was surprised to see a review of the Sharepoint Symposium 2010 that produced some interesting points.

You can read the entire article here, below is 2/3 of it. Bold text added by me.

We created the SharePoint Symposium to praise SharePoint, not to bury it. After all, the total number of seats worldwide likely tops 130 million! It’s easy to view it as a veritable panacea, especially for an organization committed to a .Net environment. It is not, however, without its shortcomings.

Nevertheless, you can use the platform for virtually anything—records management, corporate portal, Web content management, collaboration, business process management, digital asset management ... “as long as you have enough money and ibuprofen,” adds Tony Byrne, Symposium co-chair and president of the Real Story Group.

For all its remarkable characteristics, SharePoint is not a collection of best-of-class capabilities. Search is a perfect case in point. Even though it has improved in 2007 and 2010, it might certainly make better sense to license a mid-range search product, many of which are easier to install and administer and might likely be cheaper than the high-performance FAST search. Arguably, the same can be said about each component of the platform....

One thing that holds true for all SharePoint deployments is the imperative of creating a good governance strategy. The ease with which sites can be created, populated and then abandoned has resulted in a near-viral situation. For many organizations, it’s getting out of control, as witnessed by the overflowing audience at the Symposium’s governance session in Washington, D.C., in November.

From a document management perspective, or a collaboration solution perspective, the last paragraph rings true. The "it's in a database" problem of years ago seems to be updated for modern times and not just in Sharepoint.

Nice to know that not everyone, even Microsoft Business Partners, admit there are issues there.

Can you name 5 reasons why you like Outlook?

This is my question to you, if you say you prefer Microsoft Outlook over Lotus Notes.

So far, no one ever got past 3 reasons.

Seriously, you can't give reasons, yet you just want to get rid of Notes because of why?

I stress that I am looking for reasons that are true, not a "we heard Notes is dead" or some other Microsoft fed lines. Maybe now I can reply, really, I hear Ray Ozzie is retiring and with him goes all of Microsoft's developers, so be careful out there. He's like the pied piper, people will follow him anywhere. I know I would.

Technical reasons, even functionality reasons are acceptable. BUT, realize if you are on R6, or even R7, the problem is yours, not IBM's. IBM did it's part, they made R8 so much of what you asked for, yet you didn't upgrade for some reason. But I digress.

The ONLY thing that comes up is the ability to schedule an email to be sent in the future. And yes, it has uses, but even that can be done in Notes(with a little coding of a simple agent), set it up once and then use it forever.

Saving an email locally is possible now, natively. But to all those that demanded it, what was wrong with you printing to a PDF printer file all these years? Talk about over engineering something.

No one ever demands to use Exchange. Sad but true. Even Exchange administrators respect Domino for it's ability to stay up and keep running no matter what chaos is going around it.

So come on all you Redmond readers, hit me with it, or anyone else.

I'm bored by the usual answers, provide me with more to think about. Extra credit if you can justify the same function is available in Office 365 as it is in the outlook client.

In case you were wondering, LotusLive Notes is the Domino iNotes client and it does 95% of everything like the 32bit client.

BLF in the sign above stands for Bluff, or so the site said.

Google and Microsoft got you down?

When a CEO lets you know they want to discuss alternatives, while you are building them a new Domino 8.5.1 server, you know this discussion is not going to start off well. Sales people might know where I am going, but having trained sales and technical people on this type of discussions, few EVER do it in reality. Some of the bloggers on Planet Lotus do this regularly, but not enough of us do in the corporate world sometimes.

You will hear all about how "easy" it is to "just work" with Google or that everything "works with Exchange", "Outlook is much faster", "everyone uses x" among other nuggets of generalities. There might be a list a mile long or only 2-3 items but either way, what will you do when faced with this test of your integrity and defense of your workhorse Domino infrastructure?

Before you get all defensive, remember, it's your job to teach, train and help the client/customer/employee/executive. If they are asking these questions then you at least have a good relationship and don't do anything to change it. Otherwise you would have been told "we are moving to X" next month.

But if they are asking these questions, you also have not been doing your job as well as possible and this can happen too. To be fair, you may not always get the CEO's time to "train" them but I will tackle this issue in a related post today or tomorrow.

So what do you do? Show up for the meeting or call or online conference, take a minute to ask about work/family/sports whatever just to relax yourself, then ask if the executive can elaborate on their thoughts for you so you can better assist them in their efforts and then SHUT UP. Seriously, let the person talk, however long they need to, because you should be TAKING NOTES on everything they say. Oh and let them know you are taking notes or working off an email or list they sent you already.

You can and should ask them to repeat something or ask for clarity but DO NOT under any circumstances try to defend or reply to anything they are saying.

When they are finished, thank them for bringing all of this to your attention. If there is a major point or thread that all else flows from, you must hit it first. If you don't see any logic, start with what you do understand or know about, then work your way backwards to items you may not have the details.

Many times the real issues stem from one thing and if you can address it first the rest does flow very well. In this case, an issue which had to do with an application was at fault. There were also issues about a lack of awareness or training about some newer benefits in the 8.0.2 and 8.5 and 8.5.1. Not entirely our fault as we have been waiting for them to commit to new hardware for a while and we just sat on it for a little too long.

After addressing the application issue, which really was more a configuration problem than an issue, we go to the discussion about everything from Traveler and it's benefits to iCal and backing up phone contacts among other items. It wasn't easy, the boss had read online forums complaining about this and that, Traveler was a heavy client he didn't want to use, (never heard that one yet) he was using Google to synch corporate details(we discussed security as well as why IBM Mobile Connect might be of interest) because "no one used Notes for calendaring". This of course is never true, and usually means they do not use it but nonetheless one must work out each point. He had no idea he could easily send and reply to Outlook users or Gmail users and have it all work well. He had never tried is my guess.

Keep in mind you may have to be honest and open about what does or doesn't work in your environment, but also be positive that it can be resolved if it doesn't work. Sometimes the promise of fixing it works really well. (See anything Microsoft has claimed for the last 20 years that is always coming in the next release) If you can't be honest with your client, boss, then you will not get any place with them.

Ask more questions, ask how they tried or what was wrong. Let them know you understand the issue and then when you think you have finished, ask them what else to cover or anything they still have questions about. If you have been asking and following your notes there really should not be anything major left to discuss.

So when all is said and done let them know what you will do for them and also what they need to do for you. Without buy in from them, you may be wasting your time. If you say you may need their help to troubleshoot some issues, and they don't say they will help, then you missed a step, possibly the honest answers part, go back and find the problem. You may not get a second chance.

If your job responsibilities included anything that was mentioned during the initial monologue from the boss, apologize for having not provided them the information appropriately and ask what the best way to keep them updated is. You may be pleasantly surprised to get 15 minutes a week with them because of this or at least sending them an email once a week with new ideas that will be read.

In the end, this post can't tell you what to say or how to say it for every possible discussion nor would I want to as it also would help the competition :-)

I can only provide you with the basics, the rest is up to you. If you don't feel comfortable in these discussions, ask me to help you or ask someone else you trust, because that's what we are here for, to help you and in some cases even save your job because of discussions just like this one I had today.

If you have a sales force that doesn't know how, that is doesn't WANT to discuss the competition with the client, let me know! We have ways of making them talk, or walk, but at least you will know when it happens and can protect your business before it gets too late.

Really going to Exchange? Have you seen this?

From Microsoft's technet forum, you know the site where they help you with your problems?
Redmond, we have a problem:
Go here for the whole article

How to Upgrade to Exchange 2007 SP1
Applies to: Exchange Server 2007, Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Topic Last Modified: 2008-03-11

"It is not supported to upgrade your operating system to Windows Server 2008, and then upgrade to Exchange 2007 SP1. It is also not supported to upgrade to Exchange 2007 SP1, and then upgrade your operating system to Windows Server 2008. To deploy Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008, you must install Windows Server 2008 on a computer that does not have Exchange installed, and then install Exchange 2007 SP1. "

So not only do I have to get another piece of hardware, but I can not do an inplace upgrade? Of either my OS or my email server.

And this makes perfectly logical sense does it?
A nice ROI and TCO....for Microsoft, not for you the customer.

Because last night and most days I upgrade Domino servers to R801. Takes not even 5 minutes from R8. Maybe 30 from R7 to R8 if that much.

That is ROI and TCO at it's best. Do I need any configuration changes, not usually and it JUST WORKS!

LS08: Customers and their problems

I attended a session where customers spoke about their decisions to not just go to Domino or Websphere et al, but how they got interest from the masses at all levels to go along with it.

Sure some laid it out as a direction and business decision, others did it be bringing it to a personal level. The medical health provider had an average age of 56 and was worried about their uptake on Sametime and other solutions. But it went well.

I loved this session. Ok it also included a client from South Florida which we would like to work with but I did not know that before attending.

After each one spoke for 5 minutes there was an open bar and discussion area. My more interesting discussion was about how to convince line/plant workers or even the guys on the delivery trucks to login for email. We also discussed executives that fear Lotus Notes of course.
You can not force people to change their patterns, but you can give them a choice.
If you run a promotion internally, the first 50 or 100, or some number which make sense, people that email you at prize@yourcompany.com will receive a (insert gift item of value or interest). But instead send it to everyone that logs in, make it either company specific or holiday or personal redemption.

Once they are in, you can show options, possibilities and remind them about being green, reducing paper and paperwork, faster payments on expenses, maps provided with full directions with delivery orders, instant answers to your questions via instant messaging, updated benefits, calendar scheduling, legible work orders or instructions.

I can go on but you get the idea.

Late, late, late last night by Jelly Roll's on the Boardwalk I ended up speaking with a guy that just left Boston for Orlando and also recently graduated college. We were discussing sales, competitive analysis and management, in addition to what all the people with badges were from and why IBM would do a conference like this or if IBM liked macs or not.

He is ambitous, not to the larry Ellison level, but wants to move up in management(he is in retail in Downtown Disney) and we discussed some basic tenets that can work. I put it in his terms and when I didn't he did ask what I referred to and I did this without acronyms.

I explained competitive analysis is like the (apologies to my non-US readers for this american football reference)New England Patriots being reviewed by the New York Giants for ways to win. Everyone knows if you hit Tom Brady he is a mess for a quarter or 2. But aside from that what else is the Patriots weakness. You watch films, see which side they run or pass to or if someone sometimes gets flagged for holding or maybe a linebacker that jumps too early.

I also told him if he wants to make more sales to NEVER ask a yes/no question until you are ready to ask for money/signature/contracts.
Just like the bartender that asks "Which beer do you want?" instead of "Do you want a beer?" I suggested he greet people in his shop with "What character do you like?" or "what's your favorite sport/musician/country/state?" depending on the shop in question.

So my question for you is, what do you ask your customers?
"Do you use Domino?"
or
"How do you communicate within your organization?"

The answer, or in this case your question, may help you in Orlando this week.

And now on to the Worst Practices - the Bets of the Worst from Bill and Paul.

Live Blogging from the Sphere, MS Pricing

I probably can't publicly write this up but I am in the session on Microsoft pricing, competitive practices.
If you think you need to discount your offerring, you need to come here andlisten to this or ask me later how to deal with it.

your customers need to udnerstand just how much the Sharepoint solution will cost. I will try to post a detailed discussion(without pricing) to understand the layers of confusion.
All I can say is WOW! Percy go get them!