Old Dog, New Trick

Salesforce.com meets Clint Eastwood

2009-04-02T20:11:00.000-07:00

I promised a report on my SFdotCOM experience, Clint Eastwood style (the good, the bad and the ugly) so here it goes.

The setting: I recently set out to buy and do an initial setup of SFdotCOM for a soon to be funded start-up. This was an interesting process to say the least and I definitely went at it with an eye for lessons learned and a few surprises along the way. For example, did you know that while Mr. Benioff's NO SOFTWARE badge is true, you can't actually buy SFdotCOM online...you must talk to their sales force to complete a purchase.

So, with appropriate background music playing, here goes:

The Good: SFdotCOM's sales force is excellent - at least the two people I dealt with whom I'll simple refer to as Tammy and Jenn. Professional, responsive, knowledgeable and another dozen adjective that I wont bore you with are all 100% true. They know their craft, got me the right information, closed me successfully and left me feeling great about the process. I was left believing that their people may be their greatest corporate asset. SaaS is service and they clearly get this.

The Bad: SFdotCOM is now a big, enterprise software company. The product is big, the options are big, the license agreement is big (and you do need to read it - your giving these guys your customer data). Ok - its SaaS but its no longer small and simple. Some of this is a function of scale and some a function of breadth but they could do better here.

Inside "the bad" and over the weeks that followed the purchase, Iv'e come to conclude that while complex and comprehensive, SFdotCom is also implementable and customizable for a small implementation like ours by mere morals like me! This experience has turned what was at first a "bad" into a "good" and I'm even more impressed by their product. Non programmer can easilly modify the product, create validations, add new views and generally customize the product.

The Ugly: Once you're done with nearly everything, they send you an electronic quote and for the ultra low end edition I was buying, you go through FORCE.COM checkout. This took fully two hours. The February month end checkout lines was longer than anything I've encountered on Christmas eve at Macy's. This needs to be improved.

Ok - so the Clint Eastwood format has left us with two negatives and only one positive. My impression of SFdomCOM from this experience is far, far better than this. Its clear these guys have what it takes to lead this market for a long long time - great people, great process and great products is a winning combination. They face big competition down the road but if they stay true to their roots...SaaS is service, simple is better, no software, they should continue to gain ground for many, many years to come.

B-2-B

2009-03-01T18:28:00.000-08:00

Back to Blog'n

After an absence of almost 4 months, I wanted to get back to blogging.

New dog's sometimes need to learn old tricks. I was attended as sales meeting with a company that I serve on the board of and after reviewing eveyone pipeline, it was clear that one rep had more new accounts than the other two combined.

What was he doing differently we ask?

Wait for it,,,wait for it,,, wait for it.

He was calling prospective customers on the phone.

This lead to a lengthy discussion of whether is was rude to interrupt people and whether executives preferred receiving email to which I replied "yes, I definitely prefer getting email because if I don't know who you are, I can delete it without reading it".

Is your goal to make me happy now (ie - don't interupt me) or make me happy later (sell me something of value that solve a problem, meets a need or helps me reach a goal)?

Turns out you can still reach executives on the phone. If you have a simple message, are considerate of their time and don't try to turn a first call into an info harvesting session, old ma bell is a pretty decent way to get in touch with prospective customers. Email also works and is a great way to follow up.

So there you have it...I'm now officially back to blogging.

Next up: My experience with Salesforce.com...the good, the bad and the ugly.

Rotten Apples

2008-11-08T07:41:00.000-08:00

Apple (fka Apple Computer) has been present during pretty much my entire exposure to the business of technology and the technology of business. I recall seeing an Apple1 used to track inventory at a used record store while attending UCSB about '78/79. I recieved one of the first Mac's as part of a GE sponsored MBA program in '85. Our house is full of iPod's, we've begun the Mac conversion by getting my daughter a Mac for college and I just replaced my dead iPod with a new iTouch (why no iPhone - you'll need to see earlier posts to understand my crackberry addiction, I've loved Apple products for years and think Steve Jobs is perhaps the greatest entrepreneur of our time.

With this in mind, I bring you the rotten Apple's list straight from Forbes!

http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/29/apple-product-flops-tech-personal-cx_ag_1030apple_slide.html?thisSpeed=15000

It's well worth looking at all the things Apple has tried over the last 30+ years THAT DIDN'T WORK!

Aside from many memories: seeing a Lisa at Corporate GE in the early 80's, cringing when hearing our V.P. of engineering tell our customers that Taligent in partnership with IBM was our next target O/S, watching one of my product managers proudly strut into the office with a Newton on this hip - circa 1995 it seems, this list has many products that were simple ideas ahead of their times.

The lessons for entrepreneurs here are many:

Push the envelope - "if your not living on the edge, your taking up too much space!"

Learn from the mistakes of others - many of the rotten apples listed above were certainly the genesis of future successes, for both Apple and others. Remember, the PDA has morphed into the smart phone and Apple is winning once again!

Don't take yourself too seriously - if you do, you will never truely listen to what the market is telling you about "your baby". Many companies have died clinging to a weak product too long when going back to the drawing board before it was too late would have saved the day.

Time, Timing and Being Timid

2008-10-27T11:46:00.000-07:00

It’s common knowledge that a key factor in the success of any venture investment is timing. Enter a nascent market too early and you learn many lessons but burn though capital without gaining market traction. Enter too late and you end up going toe to toe with large companies who have had time, the key factor in this whole discussion, to react to emerging customer needs.

Right now, we are entering a very uncertain time. Investors are clearly and publicly tightening their wallets (I wont be the 10,000 blog to post a link to the Sequoia pitch) and quite rightly encouraging their portfolio companies to cut back. The natural reaction for any company is to hang on to their existing strategy, take a more hands on approach to execution (CEO as chief sales guy) and try to weather the storm – be it 6 months or 2 years.

The challenge is that recessions slow things down. Customers wait to start buying cycles, existing buying cycles get delayed and phantom buying cycles happen more often. In a recession, its less likely that an existing startup company will actually be able to carve out a viable market position with their current offering. The simple reality is that lengthening the adoption cycle both gives bigger companies time to respond and ups the odds that a new disruptive innovation will appear in the form of next-gen start-ups. The technology adoption curve gets elongated. Simply put, timing changes.

Start-ups build value by disrupting existing markets and creating new ones. New market dynamics should be met with new business strategies. Products, go to market strategies and economic models need to be re-thought. This is the reality of markets. Unfortunately, recession forces us to face this reality at the most inopportune time – when money is tight and often when we are scaling back on our plans, reducing spending and cutting staff. Exploring new strategies at this point is not easy. However, each downturn has spawned a new generation of startup who combined business and technology innovation to disrupt the status quo.

Simply put, now is not the time to be timid!

I'll be keeping my Blackberry

2008-10-16T20:31:00.000-07:00

Wow, how things have changed when it comes time to phone home.

In 1977, I bummed a quarter, walked to the pay phone, called the operator with the borrowed quarter, reversed the charges and phoned home.

Today is a bit different.

I hear word across the family room that my recently off-to-college daughter is online on Facebook. This tells me she is in her dorm room and near communications gear. Important because I'm not part of her facebook network (see http://devriestechblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/facebook-effect.html for why).

So, I send her a short text message which gets a near immediate reply. The mouse has taken the cheese. I have a Blackberry which means I tend to send text messages longer than most emails. I reply with a good beefy message...and shortly the phone rings.

"hi peanut. Great to hear from you. Whats up?" said dad.

"Your text messages are too long. I had to call." replied daughter.

Game, set, match to dad!

In spite of the the great features on the iPhone, I'll be keeping my Backberry thank you very much.

Microsoft Irrelevent?

2008-10-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

The headline of the attached article "GE Drops Google, Selects Zoho" , while quite interesting missed (or perhaps captures) the bigger story. Ok - this is a big deal. One of America's greatest corporations has selected upstart Zoho over tech. titan Google for an enterprise wide, 400,000 desktop rollout of a solution.

We are talking about a major desktop (you might say office) software decision and Microsoft doesn't even get mentioned.

Ouch.

Epiphany Interupted

2008-09-19T15:44:00.000-07:00

I've been on the edge of my own epiphany for the last couple months (which keeps getting interrupted by the melt down of the financial markets). So... here it is! The web is changing the very nature of marketing in a profound way. Yes, I'm not deaf and have not been asleep for the last 10 years. We have all heard this before, but on inspection, the Web 1.0 world changed my marketing tactics, but not the nature of the marketing mission.

My career in technology has been and will remain centered on marketing as a discipline. The marketers job is to get the product in front of the customer. In the past, this meant push the product. Get the attention of customers and march in a highly motivated sales force and some brilliant technical sales people. Parade through some carefully chosen and well coached customer references, discount appropriately, close hard, and you stood an excellent chance of getting an order.

Information was scare and information flow inhibited. Vendors knew little about each other and customers knew little about vendors let alone each other. Web 1.0 made the linear flow of information much smother. My marketing budget wasn't spent so much on printed material as it was on slick web communication. Here the web changed the nature of marketing communications tactics.However, my marketing remained the primary source of information for customers. Sure, word of mouth was still the best marketing but no customer was loud enough to be heard without a vendor acting as an amplifier. Since we all remember Milli_Vanilli, no one trusts anything unless they are sure its 100% real.

The buying process today is different. First, the binge buying of the buddle has been replaced by a try-and-buy mentality best epitomized by saleforce.com and its ubiquitous CRM offering. More importantly, my customers’ social and business connections are increasingly becoming a huge electronic network that can be searched and queried as needed to find trusted references for most product choices.

We quickly are moving away from a world where marketing’s principal requirement is to push a product into a customers view. The future looks like a reference driven world where customers pull products based on information gleaned from trusted sources. These source will increasingly be part of unique individual networks. Looking back in 10 years, I’m confident that we will point to this as a Web 2.0 phenomenon with things like blogs and social networks getting much of the credit. However, these tools stand on the shoulders of 10 years of innovation and cultural change. In particular, the global adoption of email as a business-to-business tool has enabled the non-trivial cultural change that makes communications between businesses who view themselves as competitors acceptable.

The implications for marketing stretch far beyond the walls of the marketing organization.

Stronger Together

2008-09-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

It now clear to all in the wake of this week's financial market meltdown that the IPO window is closed tight for the foreseeable future. In fact, I would argue that it never really reopened following the meltdown of the last tech bubble. Sure a few companies who built businesses with significant revenue went public, but for the most part, the equity markets have shown little interest in most technology companies during this decade!

So where does this leave VC funds with their portfolios of investment? For many, particularly in the Web 2.0 and consumer internet space, good exits have come from acquisition. Companies from Utube to Kaboodle have provided great investor returns by quickly exiting into the waiting arms of internet giants and media firms. Open source vendors have done equally well, with a long list of attractive exits as the remaining enterprise players gobble up these evangelists of a new business model. Consolidation is the SaaS market, while happening around SF.COM has not yet caught fire.

Yet the brass ring of the public markets remains down the road for those capable of reaching requisite scale. However, getting to this scale seems to take longer and entail more risk than most VC's are willing to bite off. In this light, I'm surprised we have not seen more private - private mergers designed to build companies geared for the public markets. I can think of several spaces with excellent growth prospects were private - private consolidation would make sense. Next generation database and analytics along with on-demand marketing automation are just two example of markets where numerous funded companies are getting decent traction but won't reach public market scale on their own in a reasonable timeframe. Certainly the complexities of private - private mergers can't be underestimated but with the public markets closed and M&A slowing, I would not be surprised if VC's became more flexible in getting deals done in this light.

Web 2.0 - Lession #1

2008-06-03T08:27:00.000-07:00

Blog'n takes time and when your evenings get filled with end of year school events, no blog posts for a couple weeks. Ok - that my story and I'm stick'n to it.

Also - been exploring Facebook. Some interesting observations (ok - get you to decide if they are interesting) on the way.

The Facebook Effect

2008-06-03T08:04:00.000-07:00

No... not the one everyone else is blog'n about.

Lots of buzz this year at TiE about Facebook, Facebook applications, and the like. Clearly a pretty big phenomenon so your 's truly needs to give it a try.

...fast forward a few weeks.

Ok, great service, cool product, etc. You have heard it all a million times. I was quite surprised at the number of folks out of my various professional and social circles that are on Facebook. I guess that just means I'm fashionably late to the party as usual. I did right away find a buddy from my old GE days that I had long since lost track of, get reconnected and now share fishing stories. However, that's not the real story.

My biggest surprise is the reaction of my kids and of my buddie's kids when they discovered I was on Facebook. It was as though dad had arrived at the Friday night college keg party. Bad enough that I showed up and worse still that I even knew where the party was. I could literally watch the Facebook cool factor disintegrate right before my eyes. Admittedly, my sample size of two isn't statistically significant. However, it does seem to me that Facebook, in going mainstream, has compromised the trusted relationship it had with its initial "college dorm" user base.

However, tongue-in-cheek, I predict the survival of Facebook. In fact, given the size of the Facebook juggernaut, any erosion in their share among college age kids should have no meaningful impact on their business. It does raise several interesting questions about the sustainability of the buzz inside any given social network. For example, does someone exploit this by launching a new network for each successive generation? Does Facebook do more to create "space" for various demographic groups?

In the end its all about trust. We take it for granted when its there. When its compromised, we look at everything in a new light.

TiECon 2008 - Whats Hot, Whats Not

2008-05-17T22:37:00.000-07:00

Great event - more to come in the days to follow.
All the morning keynotes were strong. The Tesla was cool!

The lunch today with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft talking about their respective acquisition strategies gets "Best of Show" in my book.

In terms of the panels and based only on how packed the room was:

Whats Hot? Social Networking and Mobile Applications
Whats Not? Cloud Computing and Managed Services

If you take the view that the masses lead to market crowding and valuations ahead of reality, go short on Social network and Mobile app's and bet the farm on Cloud Computing and Managed Services ;-)

The bottom line is, IMHO, there is absolutely no place like TiECon. The passion was palpable and once again, Saturday was absolutely packed!

Davos for the Working Class

2008-05-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

I'm really looking forward to spending the next two days (both Friday and Saturday) at TiECon 2008. The opportunity to see new ideas is almost as compelling as the chance to reconnect with the many friends that will be at the event. Nowhere have I experienced the level of engaged intellect, excitement and general willingness to engage, share and learn that happens every year at this event.

Many people over the years have tried to lure me to TiECon but in '05 Manish Chandra won me over by asking me to help organize the conference program. Working in a volunteer setting with a group of people new to me , we organized very compelling panel discussions on "Building the Buzz" in '05 and on "Open Source - Show Me the Money" in '06. I've been hooked on TiECon ever since.

TiECon draws a great crowd of people. One of the real wonders of the event is that Saturday is often better attended than Friday as many entrepreneurs with day jobs turn up to join the fun. The format of keynotes and panels with good, long networking breaks creates a level of information exchange and interaction that is unmatched in my experience. I always leave with more than a couple new ideas and many interesting opportunities to follow up on.

Truly Davos for the working class!

Just Be The Ball, Be The Ball, Be The Ball (from Caddy Shack)

2008-05-10T08:17:00.000-07:00

Just know your customer, know your customer, know your customer. Trite but true. The hard work comes in what you do about this. Is it an annual survey or do leading companies go a bit further?

I had the pleasure on Thursday of spending time with Michael Costuros and Andy Patrick of LiveBooks. These guys are building a great business helping professional photographers market their work on the web. Michael made the point that photography is deeply ingrained in their company's DNA, that most of their people are hobbiest and that in particular, their sales force comes entirely from the ranks of professional photographers.

I've just wrapped up a couple years working with Instill - the leading provider of spend intelligence to the food services industry. The solution involved translating billing data into a standard format for analysis. While the technology did a fantastic job of this, exceptions still required manual handling which meant recruiting folks directly from the food industry into technology jobs. Over the years, many of these folks at Instill had grown into mid and senior level positions in the company, with their food industry experience being a key factor in their success with the customer.

As a competitive sailer, I'm often spending time looking at gear (too much time my wife would say). My favorite location, Svendson Boat Yard has a good selection but goes well beyond this by staffing the store with folks that actually know their stuff. West Marine also used to do this though less so as their sales continue to decline (this rather obvious chicken or egg problem is left as an exercise for the student).

Just know your customer, know your customer, know your customer.

In all three examples, these leaders in very diverse industries understand that to serve, you need to first understand. They have gone well beyond the typical board room rhetoric and integrated an ability to know and serve their customer deeply into the DNA of their business. This is giving them a level of competitive advantage that is both powerful and highly defensible. The quality of your relationship with the customer has far more to do with winning and losing over the long term than other any single factor. It shows up in customer loyalty (net recommender scores), reduced churn and more repeat business. In the simplest terms, it makes you the company that customers want to do business with - which end the end, is competitive advantage define.

Web 2.0 Wonderland

2008-04-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

Spent today at the Web 2.0 Conference. Lots of great stuff happening in many, many place. The steady replacement of Web 1.0 - the published web, with Web 2.0, the user created web seems to be in full stream. Many folks in attendance, lot of start-up in all modes of existence (unfunded to seemingly flush with cash), piles of great idea and an overall good buzz to the place.

I was struck by the degree to which many of the attendee's, observers and in particular vendors seem to speak a whole new "web 2.0" language. After spending the last couple years serving large conservative companies in an entirely unrelated market, I was left wondering why in the world all these interesting companies were so focused on inventing a language to communicate with each other rather than figuring out how to communicate with the larger world. Clearly we are still in early adopter wonderland here.

Full credit to the folks at tellme who launched their new blackberry voice interface with the tag line "Say what you want and get it" While the demo was less than perfect due to poor cel coverage on the show floor, it was instantly clear to everyone what they did. I suppose they could have described their new product as a portable IVR front end for mobile web applications and been technically correct, or even as a multisensory interface capability to the web 2.0 world, but then only the web 2.0 crowd would know what they did.

Say what you want and get it...sometime the simple answers are the best ones.

First Blog Post - welcome to the brave new world

2008-04-22T18:03:00.000-07:00

Well, time to jump into the brave new world and actually try blogging, or do I simple say blog? Those who know me have gotten tired of long emails on various topics so here I go with a format that all of you should benefit from...no need for even a polite reply.

As I wrap-up my most recent venture and begin looking at new things, this seemed like a logical point to dive into the world of Web 2.0 (yes, I officially like the term - more on that another time) and start sharing some thoughts and observations on things around me.

So - as to the title of the blog "Old Dog, New Trick". Well, I recall getting out of college (Class of '81 - hence the old dog part of the name) and picking technology as a career because I enjoy change and learning new things. After 25+ years (isn't it great that after 25 years in the industry they simply stop counting the years) of exploration I still love the constant innovation and the change it brings. Moreover, these 25+ years have brought a little in term of understanding how people and organizations embrace (some would say cope) with the type of change I have a passion for. So here we go.

What's next - well who knows but I'm off to a Web 2.0 Conference on Thursday so stay tuned.