Category Archives: Management

Observations on managing of technology companies

Sales Quality

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A sales manager asked me to suspend marketing for a couple of months because he could not keep-up with in-bound leads, ones which were achieving an 80% win/loss rate. Peter Drucker must have been smiling from above, for I had fulfilled his mandate, that “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” Salesmen/women want to sell. When marketing strategy is well developed, it generates highly-qualified leads and biases prospects before they start researching alternatives. Give a salesman an unqualified lead and I’ll show you a salesman who will never buy you a beer. Give a salesman a lead so well qualified that the customer sells himself, and that same salesman will ask you to be his kid’s godparent. Much of the legendary marketing/sales friction comes from marketing abandoning quality for quantity. Some marketers want to generate a large volume of leads (which makes them look effective) and have salespeople … Continue reading →

Neglectful Listening

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I got a great surprise after a poor response to a bad surprise. After updating Android on my cell phone, Google Maps began aborting. Being a reformed tech guru, I naturally wasted a lot of hours combing through message boards to determine if I could fix it myself instead of throwing the phone at my carrier and demanding that their technically suspect store clerks do the repairs. After a while it became clear that the bug was in a new graphics driver, and thus was caused not by my carrier, Google or even the handset maker. I penned a letter to the president of the carrier company, politely explaining that as the vendor and integrator of record, they needed to fix their products, regardless of who broke it. Realizing that the solution lay somewhere between Google, the chipset vendor, the handset maker and my carrier, I was not expecting quick … Continue reading →

Lavish Leadership

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“Maybe Microsoft suffers from too much leadership.” That surprising statement came from an industry analyst with one of the major groups. We were recently splitting lunch and enjoying some obscenely great Silicon Valley weather, discussing the tech industry as a whole and wondering if Microsoft might soon be known only as “The Xbox Company.” We mutually marveled at how seemingly inept Microsoft has become, with one market disaster after another. Since we both had experience with start-ups and big vendors alike, the discussion focused keenly on leadership and ossification. You never want to be the leader for the former. Microsoft has two primary problems when it comes to innovation, the first of which is that they remain consumed by former glories and the old ways of thinking. This same analyst told me that – at least until recently – Microsoft sized their markets based on the number of PCs in … Continue reading →

Managing Market Movement

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You have to go through Step-B before reaching Step-C … or Step-Z. Try telling that to a start-up CEO and you’ll earn some nasty looks. One of the greatest errors of leaders, political or business, is to move too fast. Many militarists believe Hitler could have ruled Europe had he taken his time and not rushed to open fronts everywhere at once. Great products have vanished because CEOs aggressively tried to push it into every segment simultaneously. Make too many changes while delivering too little value and you’ll have too few customers. This topic gurgled forth because J.C. Penny, a company born over 100 years ago and thus slightly older than my jokes, ditched their CEO. His overhaul spiraled the once legendary retailer nearly into ruin and its share price was cut in third. Nothing nice has been said about CEO Ron Johnson’s re-rigging, but a common complaint was that … Continue reading →

Smart Non-Money

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Spending money to compete toe-to-toe is dumb. But this hasn’t stopped start-ups from doing just that. Most start-ups are about as broke as college kids (and from the looks of their management team photos, may well be staffed with the same). They do need to spend money on marketing, but competing is foolish. For every face-off, someone loses face. Slugging it out with gorillas is fast suicide and shin-kicking many small competitors is the slow form. In every market, you can outmaneuver competitors, even gorillas. By understanding the position of each competitor or how they approach buyers, you can compete without competing, which is more cost effective and more effective in general. SuSE Linux remains my worn-out example because it worked against the sitting gorilla. Back when Linux was only starting to be seriously considered for mission-critical IT infrastructure, the U.S. market was owned by Red Hat and littered with … Continue reading →

Outsourcing Savvy

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Happily, outsourcing marketing strategy works for everyone. Last year I got a call from a global conglomerate that rakes in over $20 billion each year. They were launching a new product from within one of their divisions. Savvy as they were, they needed help in new product go-to-market messaging.  In the division of that giant corporation, the native knowledge was unavailable. Sadly, this doesn’t happen all the time. Nobody is universally competent. In large companies, even specialists with necessary knowledge are not portable between organization boundaries. Smart marketing executives inventory their talent and outsource as needed to assure everything that needs to be done is done, and is done well. Companies that don’t fail. Early in my consulting career I was hired to help with the pivot of all pivots, changing an entire post-IPO enterprise from a hardware company into a software vendor. The company was successful at what they … Continue reading →

Departmental Detrimental

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Businesses should not resemble circular firing squads. While presenting to the Silicon Valley Forum’s Marketing SIG last night, one audience member noted her company’s marketing, product development and sales staffs were unaligned. Well, “unaligned” might be poor wording. They appear to be as completely disjointed as drawn and quartered traitors. This is not uncommon in tech companies where the three groups have come onboard at different phases of corporate growth, believe they own the customer and move ahead despite what other teams are doing. Circular firing squads are more efficient and less violent. In early phases, techies are product managers and interface with customers directly. They believe they listen to prospects though this is often self-delusion. Techies (and particularly techie founders) only listen to customer input that agrees with the original product vision. This form of founderitus is so prevalent in Silicon Valley that my audience was not surprised when … Continue reading →