Did you ever hear these from clients or prospective clients?
"Your fees are too high!"
"You want how much to do this?"
"I can get a <insert tech solution name> person for $10/hr why do we need you?"
I have heard these, and many others too over the course of my career.
Now let's hear how some others see this issue, these are general references not specific to anyone or anything.
Sales advisors tell us it is because we have not sold the client on us and our solution that the price still matters. If they are not sold on using us, price becomes the scapegoat. This is true.
Marketing advisors would say our value proposition is not clearly reaching out target market and we should either move down or up, depending on our circumstances and expectations of clients. This is true as well sometimes.
Financial people would tell us that they have a budget they can not exceed, which we know is not true because if the CEO, or another executive with power, want something, they get it, no matter the cost. This is true too.
Technical people will tell you they can get it done in a day or two. However, they first have to clear their existing project or support items and then involve a few teams of people and plan the change management, etc.. This is true too, except it will not get done until next year, usually.
What is rarely understood, although we do explain this all the time, is your code-monkeys will spend days trying to fix something that an expert sees and can fix in a few minutes or hours. When this is an internal resourced project, it seems, no one cares about time or cost. When it is an external resource, that is another story entirely.
A friend of mine recently spent, per their post, 5 hours on an email configuration issue.After I asked why they didn't ask my help for what I know to be a five minute fix, we then walked through the config and solved it. Even though they knew I have spent over 20 years on messaging systems, they did not ask for help until they had wasted quite some time. ( I am still hoping they used hyperbole and it was really an hour or 2 which is still too long)
Now, if they are the hourly billing type of person they have a dilemma, do they bill for the wasted hours of troubleshooting or part of it or none of it? If they bill by the project, this would not matter because things like this are expected and included in the pricing. It never makes one happy, but on the other hand, you gain valuable knowledge and experience to solve a problem for next time in seconds, and THAT is huge money to be made...when you bill by the project and not hourly.
Of course, I can't bill for five minutes of work, well I could if they weren't my friend. The bill would be like the famous joke about the guy with the hammer who knew just where to hit the machinery. I could bill anything just to solve the problem, whether it took me five minutes or five seconds.
Yes, cheaper solution providers exist, but they are not IBM Champions or Microsoft MVPs or Salesforce MVPs or whatever leaders in their respective fields that while we may not have encountered every issue, we are very battle tested and call upon our other friends to help us because that is what experts do in life.
We trust others to help us in return for the help we lend them. This for me is one of the best things about being an IBM Champion and knowing people that are the equivalent across many platforms. No one wants to ask for help, it is seen as a weakness, but once you get over this your world is much better as is all the people you engage with over the years.
If you are an IT manager, price means nothing when the issue is Enterprise important. If you think otherwise, your company will never get ahead of your competition. Work with experts who help make you look better to your boss, not cause your boss to look for replacements for you.
This was the question I had as I reserved a space at the event held today here in Tel Aviv. I was supposed to go last year but was out of the country at the time.Nice view we had.
Tableau is about data visualization. yes the same stuff we did 30 years ago with 1-2-3 or Excel but smooth, "simple" and flexible to work with many, many forms of data. They went public in 2013 and since have steadily grown in awareness and revenue. Tableau may not have been on everyone's radar but it is showing up more and more.
Dashboards are the low hanging fruit, embedded systems data, advanced analysis and problem-solving once you get some real data views is when the fun starts.
My impression was the event would be a local Business Partner running the event and maybe 25-50 people would show up for an afternoon event between 2 and 5 pm. Which would be great as I wanted time to talk to them about the ecosystem, project work and length and recurring revenue streams.
Oh boy was my thinking wrong!
My estimate, confirmed by the Tableau people, was over 300 people came and it looks like as many as 400 had replied they were coming. And this is in Israel where I have been at full events that barely had 250 people. Interestingly many startups here use it for client reporting and proof that their marketing or advertising or whatever the solution, is working.
If you wonder if this is something you should be looking into, if you haven't already, the answer is definitely yes. London friends they are coming to you June 5-7, register here.
The time was meant to have networking, for the 5, yes that is correct, 5 Israel Business Partners to get time with everyone. Even if I wanted to be a BP, I can't, this year. I don't really understand the thinking, but I was encouraged to apply anyway as they review their partners every year, similar to how SalesForce does it. More on this later in this post.
After networking, we had a quick demo from the UK Sales leader Josh and his Product PreSales specialist Rafi. I say quickly because when speaking in a foreign country, native English speakers should slow down their delivery so everyone can process what is said, and also explain as they go along what they are doing to create the demo. The exuberance Rafi and Josh displayed was great, but I would have preferred a little more explanation about the way she built the views for the demo.
There was a brief slide deck from Laurie as he tried to explain that once you build a dashboard the interested parties can start to really expand on their knowledge and play with it further.
I think there are a little way to go for this part as a non-IT person does not think the same way as tech or data people.
As an example, I, like most of you reading this, understand databases and views, SQL calls and other aspects of databases but because of a lack of education, most end users do not. They can learn, and some do, but many just don't want to learn or change. A problem we all face no matter which solution we choose to use for even basic functions in business.
Thus my impression, given the demo was already seen, is someone would become the guy in the corner that is the Tableau expert rather than many users editing it. That is how I first met a few people in the Lotus Notes world in the R2 days. And I can see people with Tableau interests ending up in the same way.
Great, I love it, let's get started! Well, hold on a second there. It is not so simple.
They have a 14 day(30?) trial period. Not long enough IMHO for your average consultant or corporate person to get their head around it.
Very pricey options, per user ($999) to get a license to work with it but to save it on a server and not just locally you need Professional ($1,999).
No developer license or option. Ok, so how do we get it?
(They have student/teacher Desktop editions)
BUT, there is a "free" public edition here for Windows and Mac and you can read the details.
Ok, so it is limited, but should be enough for us to get our head around how to work with it.
Getting back to the Business Partner discussion, it seems that the expectations are for customers to seek out Tableau partners and work with them on their projects. I can see this as companies move away from training people on new items and prefer to outsource projects. However, I also see it as an internal benefit that should be given proper training to get the most out of it, especially at these prices.
There is a fee to become a partner but once you would be down that path it would be expected.
Coming from the Lotus and IBM Collaboration space my view is tableau is seriously limiting their growth potential by not having options available for consultants or small services teams or even individuals.
Maybe Tableau really does send leads to their BPs around the world from the people that request it from their website. As an end user, this page leaves me wondering what the difference is between the 4 types of partners and why 2 of the options search by country, region, industry, and certifications while the other 2 sort only by region.
Perhaps the same confusion is what leads to the many requests to the Tableauthians (I know, somewhat Star Trek like but not sure what they call themselves) looking for consultants.
I could definitely have used this for past reporting and am looking at using it for some current projects.
The other night we went out with 30 of our friends to a new restaurant and bar in our neighborhood for my birthday.
My wife and I ate there a few days earlier and agreed it would work well for our crowd.
Who knew one can make so many friends in two and half years of moving here but we did!
While we don't always get together regularly, we do get together for drinks or late night food between 2 and 4 times a month in smaller groups and maybe once a month in a bigger way for a party or birthday.
Why do I tell you this?
Because this blog post is a lesson that any business can live or die by its management and staff. Along the way see how sales, social media, personalities, business expectations, training, psychology, and in my case, ignorance all come into play.
As we all arrived at the restaurant, we had made a reservation for 18, then changed it to 25 and the restaurant had made space in their back room for us which we proceeded to fill.
The locals and friends from neighboring cities proceeded to order drinks and food or desserts.
The people at our table ordered first and most of us got our food and drinks in a reasonable time. But, a specific dish with 4 of us had ordered, seemed to not be coming. While I did not mind, some of the more hungry guests were not amused and asked when we would get our food.
We learned that there was only one appliance to use to make this particular meal and it would take some time as now there were 8 total orders of the same item. It did not help that the other waitresses grabbed whatever was ready and delivered it to their tables without realizing or noticing the early ones should have gone to us.
Again, not the biggest deal to me.
It seems at some point some people had words with the hostess who explained that the restaurant was not prepared for such a large group. For a place that has existed for a few years and has an ample seating space outside and inside to accommodate at least 100-125 people, this was an unexpected answer. I did not find this out until later that night or the next day.
All our food arrived but not before two people left to go get burgers down the road after letting the waitress know they were not waiting any longer. I also didn't know this at the time but found out later.
Thus about 2 hours later as the party was ending and people started to pay their bills, I went to go pay for ours as well.
And the fun began.
I let the waitress know what my wife and I ordered and paid the bill and thinking we were the last ones we should head home.
Not so fast.
There was an amount due.
Okay, I figured some people drank shots or maybe didn't realize their spouses did, so I figured, my party, I can cover it, right? It turns out we were short about 600 shekels or roughly $150!
Now I know my friends here and trust them to be both honest and full of integrity, even when drinking, so I asked to see the full bill receipt. I then sat down to go over everything listed and asked them to verify the payments received.
It was at this moment that I must claim ignorance. I was not involved in the other conversation that started between my wife, or the few friends still lingering and the hostess/waitress.
It seems that the choice of words, this is all in Hebrew, was accusatory and rather indignant that our friends skipped off without paying. No, it could not be the restaurant's error, everything is on the computer and what were we trying to pull.
Reminding any of you of client meetings over billing hours yet?
I eventually found out that the meal, I and 7 others ordered, had been entered into the computer as 18, not 8, orders!
Simple math 10 x 60 = 600. The actual numbers came out and showed that my drinks were paid for by my friends, which is usually how we all do it for birthdays so I, in essence, received a small amount of money in a refund. Thanks everyone!
The management, hostess, and waitress provided no explanation nor any apology.
Culturally I understand this and it didn't bother me at the time, again, because all I knew was I found the error, they fixed it and all was good.
My friends, a mixed group of Americans and Israelis were not very happy with the entire situation. They wanted to post bad Yelp reviews, wanted to tell our whole community about the way we were treated, and do what people do most with social media, gripe. Before you say, "but you are doing just that", my hope is that the owner will see this, but also to parallel it with our own business situations.
Our bill which was about 3,000 shekels or about $750 got me thinking about the business side of this situation and what everyone can learn from it.
Yes some of it is obvious, but as a case study in hospitality management, here we go.
My friends go out quite a bit as I said, many of us either run our own business or, at our age, are high-level sales people or managers. We have money to spend when we want to go out.
Some of us have small invitation events for artists or non profit benefits during the year that we need a nice, and new, place to invite people. And as a business lunch option, this could work too.
In short, there is quite a bit of revenue that the restaurant loses out because they:
did not train their staff properly
did not have any buy-in from the staff to benefit the business or themselves
did not recognize that the issue was on their side and although they backed their own people initially, should have admitted the mistake
will not see any more birthday parties and with 30 people, even if only half went there, that is over 40,000 shekels a year they are losing
and the waitresses miss out on a guaranteed $75 in tips or more which knowing what they get paid, they really need
have now also cut themselves off from a very social media and referral network of people that could have sent them dozens and dozens of people
lost out on our weekly get together which while only 2-6 of us might show up, still would be a recurring revenue stream they were lacking
Doing some back of a napkin math, with the number of restaurants extrapolated and annual sales defined from here and here says the average restaurant makes 700,000 shekels a year.
I don't think it is a stretch to say that if we all liked it and told other friends our combined spend reaches 75-100,000 shekels a year. 10% of their revenue to me sounds like a big deal based on what I read.
Similarly we have no idea who is at a table or in an audience, on the train or randomly walking by us when we are unhappy about a situation at work or with a client. It may cost us our jobs or our bonuses or future jobs at the time.
This is a tough thing to overcome because trust once lost is very hard to regain, especially in this case where we would have no other interaction with the establishment.
The restaurant could have filled a void for us that we need in our community, a kosher bar and restaurant, and had high hopes for it but it seems they do not share our hopes or have any interest in filling our needs.
By not engaging with the clients in a reasonable fashion and laying blame on them, you can see how service contracts go bad in businesses so easily when vendors take a one sided view.
This one sided view is "taught" to the staff because they will naturally be influenced and then follow their leader.
My friends, like you reading this out there, have various expectations about dining out.
Some want value for their money, others want high end cuisine, some expect the staff to be as professional as business people (hard to ask from teenagers or even college age people), others are okay with waiting if they have were warned about delays or like me not bothered about it all.
The Snickers commercials in the US hit the spot on this one from both sides of this discussion because maybe it was all just late at night and everyone was hungry.
When your focus is on the wrong information, attitude or goals, your business can not survive because you send your staff down rabbit holes that have no way out.
It may also help to deliver the goods or services on time and feed your staff and customers within reasonable times.
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.
I am at Entrepreneur magazine's Winning Strategies conference on Miami Beach today. The morning keynote was Gabe Zichermann and he discussed Gamification for those that have not heard of him.
While I personally do not "get" Farmville or the Angry Birds desires, I do like better business ideas and theories.
Taking Gabe's session to real life, how can you gamify the training systems your company uses today?
Usually companies ask employees to watch a video, use online courses, use e-learning or whatever you want to call it. But how many of those employees are really engaged by any of it? It's rarely exciting or interesting and generally a tick box on a chart that you did what you were told. Vendors make us get certification, not so we know what we are doing, but to be able to sell their products. Ideally we should know what we are doing but the testing rarely is about practical reality usage.
Instead of making everyone tick the box, why not encourage them to reach a level of status, within the education. One could just click, click, click, and be done or one could interactively be part of that learning process. Provide more feedback, ask better questions or any, recommend it to others. In return, as one example, the company could offer you a status of Student, Intern, Teacher, Professor. They could offer monetary gains too but in the long run that may not be so practical. With each level attained, either through quantity or depth of topic, one progresses up the chart.
Some companies do this in various ways, for external people, say if you post blog posts on their website or answer questions in forums. They do this to encourage the outside world to engage with them and expand their influence. But do they do this for internal people?
The simple effort to change the drudgery of learning to at least some modest base of interest has far reaching benefits to you, employees and your company. With less and less in person training and more online/webinar training, the lack of interaction creates a login but not listen attitude.
This is for real, and although I would like to see IBM for Lotus do something similar, my state appreciates the effort.
In an email link I received from the InternetCoast which is intermingled with the CIO Council I am part of as well as the South Florida Technology Alliance, they discussed Microsoft's new training initiative.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
A new training effort spearheaded by Microsoft will offer free tech training to millions. Elevate America, the initiative launched by Microsoft Sunday, aims to give 2 million people during the next two years tech training both online and at regional telecenters.
The online resource is focused on helping users figure out what types of technical skills are required for IT jobs, and provides resources to help acquire these skills. The Web site offers access to several Microsoft online training programs, from very basic (e.g., "How to use the Internet") to much more advanced (e.g., "Implementing and Supporting Microsoft Windows XP Professional").
To provide a variety of training, Microsoft will partner with state and local governments. Florida, New York and Washington will be the first states to offer Elevate America courses.
The odd reference to XP aside, this is a good thing for many of the out of work people in the country. In the IT industry one can and usually will make more money, up to a point, than in many other jobs in the world.
That article will lead you to this page which outlines various people and ways to get trained or enhanced your knowledge of Microsoft products.
But what is truly amazing to me, and I love the way it reminds me of the NY subway maps, and makes it easy to follow is this pdf found if you select the "Expand Your Skills" option of "Find the IT skills needed for jobs you want".
Maybe IBM can do this as well and provide a similar chart for certifications.
I hope the people I trained over the last 2 days retain some of what we discussed. Sure they have the books and notes but will they make changes? I tried to impress upon them that they, and their manager, can change the world. But it gets done in a process one step at a time. Can't do everything in a day. What was interesting was the feeling from them that they are just the IT guys and have no input to the workings of business, even if they may know h0w to perform many of the non-IT jobs in the company. If they decided to propose a solution to something to the proper(and listening) executives they would probably get further in their careers. I hope they follow this path, it leads to great rewards and at least a Lotus Exige(MSRP $56,990) in their future like the one we saw at lunch.
It's a shame when good people can't see their future. Many of us have this, we can't see how we can make a difference or produce more revenue, sell more tickets/seats/cars/licenses. Few have the ability to see the open seas amid the storm, find the correct route and lead a course to a better life or way of working. Still others are perfectly content in their livelihood or place in life and that works as well.
As we edge closer to Lotusphere, my thoughts are of course on business development and you can't gain clients in Orlando if you just have the feeling your "just a Lotus guy or girl."
Open up your mind and see the Evangelist inside and realize everyone you meet is also and that is a bond which does not come easy in many other software brands. You are your companies evangelist, gather your knowledge!
Lastly, for all those that complain there is no corporate solution for iPhones.... Lotus gets hip again by being on the iPhones as a corporate solution, this should get interesting very quickly now.
