Maidsfield Blog - Partnering and Business Development

The secret to establishing great Strategic Partnerships is how well the companies fit together. By firstly understanding and selecting the types of partners that best meets your business objectives, then to progress to analyse the potentially suitable companies to identify the best-fit partners. The next step is to call them up and we do the calling for you.

From project kick-off to Maidsfield calling up the Top 5 Best-Fit Partner companies is about 5 to 6 weeks. We believe in expedience and getting out there talking to the target partners as soon as possible. Maidsfield make the call as “VP of Alliances” of your company, or a similar suitable job title.

We identify the most appropriate person to speak to within the target company and then we speak to them. From this call we can pitch the partnership opportunity at a strategic level to determine the partner’s interest and qualify the fit.

Once interest is created and the target partner qualified, then we hand it over to you, to progress the discussions to establish the partnership. We step more into the background, to enable the business relationship between you and your potential partner to develop. We continue to guide the process from behind the scenes to establish a productive partnership connected at multiple levels within each organisation.

This is a sweeping overview of stage 3 and 4 in our Strategic Partnering Process that we use to help Irish Software Product Companies with their Internationalisation Strategy.

Two events of interest in the coming weeks - interactive lunchtime sessions in the NSC Boardroom: (limited seats available)

1) Tuesday June 9th 11:30 - International Services Success with Pat McGrath of PM Group and Jim Costello of SouthWestern (SWS BPO)
register on the it@Cork website - http://www.itcork.ie/index.cfm?page=events&eventId=156

2) Tuesday June 23rd 11:30 International Product Success with Denis Kennelly of Tivoli at IBM and Richard Cooke of Lincor
register on the it@Cork website - http://www.itcork.ie/index.cfm?page=events&eventId=157

Register here https://www.eventelephant.com/SalesLeadershipIreland

The Changing World in Sales - “Buyers Are Not Buying”

This is a meet event organised by the Sales Leadership Ireland LinkedIn Group. This is a not-for-profit initiative.

A practical look at how companies and sales people might respond to the current challenges and opportunities in the market.

SECTION 1: Interactive sessions with Speakers (45 minutes)
1) Introduction to Sales Leadership Ireland- Niall Devitt, B2B Training

2) “Removing the New Bottlenecks in today’s Sales Processes” – 10 minutes
Niall Devitt of B2BTraining will lead a discussion on how sales challenges are always changing with changing markets, how to identify these changes and how to respond.

3) “Partnering into New Markets” – 10 minutes
Donagh Kiernan of Maidsfield Associates will present a case study of how corporate partnering is an effective method of entering new sectoral or regional markets.

4) “Engaging with Customers through New Media” – 20 minutes
Damien Mulley of Mulley Communications will discuss how new media can be used to communicate with your market and gain new business.

Register here https://www.eventelephant.com/SalesLeadershipIreland

SECTION 2: Key Challenges Roundtables (1 hour)
Maximum attendees 30 – 3 round tables of 10

A number of identified Key Challenges in the industry today will be discussed and debated to share insights on how challenges can and are be met by members. The key challenges will be collected from the Sales Leadership Ireland - Linked-In Discussion Group.

Structure:
a) Introduce identified “Key Challenges” – (5 Minutes)
b) One “Key Challenge” will be assigned to each roundtable. Each table will select a spokesperson to chair a discussion and collect suggested actions to meet these challenges, taking notes on a flipchart page (30 Minutes)
c) Each table’s spokesperson will present their findings to the whole group (30 Minutes)
d) Session Summary and Close

COFFEE & NETWORKING

A session report will be submitted to the Sales Leadership Ireland LinkedIn Group Discussion

Register here https://www.eventelephant.com/SalesLeadershipIreland

As always, what worked very well last year doesn’t mean it will work this year. A recession necessitates the accelerated pace of change and this is not always a bad thing. The more innovative, agile and brave companies can see the changes, decide quickly and act accordingly.

What do your customers want today and how will your industry look in two years time? It may be very difficult to make money in this climate, but how do you win the relationships and smaller engagements that will secure your business when the industry settles into its new rhythm?

More than normal, effective use of your time is called for. Stop doing the same old things and think. Take a step back, think forward and understand why you had success in the past, do these past key reasons for success still apply to the current climate and how will they fit into the future? What needs to change and what companies can help you reach these new opportunities?

This is a great time to plant the seeds and secure corporate partners, to enable them to build customer relationships with your technologies and capabilities. It may mean small revenues today, but enables you to build a strong pipeline for the future. There are many hidden opportunities in todays chaos, companies are more open to discuss partnerships. Corporate Partnering is a lower cost and lower risk method of expanding and getting into new markets.

You may have built up a fabulous list of corporate partners and resellers on your website and keeping busy building relationships with your main contacts in each one, but sales revenues are simply not meeting your expectations. Why?

Relationships with corporate partners need to be built at multiple levels, depending on the size and complexity of your partner company. You may determine the strategic fit and commercial terms working with Senior Management, but how effective the partner/reseller is will be determined how well your product fits with the sales people on the ground. If a sales person finds it easy to sell your product and meet their quotas then things will fly.

To have an effective corporate partnership, you need to build relationships with the sales people. You know best how to determine the need for your products and how to sell them, coach their sales team. Don’t have sales people waste their time with prospects where the need is not clear. Educate the sales people on how to qualify a client for your products, identifying the key symptoms and then to they associated key benefits that enable the sale.

If you could ask five questions of all your prospective clients in the market place, five questions that allowed you to identify those with the greatest need for your products, what would those five questions be for your company?

To grow your company’s revenues, you can partner with companies that are already selling to your type of customer. This is a fairly linear exercise in finding the companies who fit the query: “Who has your customers and wants more of them?”

To look at it a little more laterally, your company has a technology or product with a core capability – What does this capability mean to the various industry sectors and who would it bring a competitive advantage to? In Michael Porter’s five forces, who can you help become a Substitute in particular markets.

Memory of Substitute songs: The Who and The Clout

As a technically strong company eager to sell internationally, is your biggest market far away with many hard-to-open doors to break in to a lucrative market. Would a corporate partner who has access to your target customer base be of value to your organization? Who are these partners and how do you effectively get a relationship working?

Ireland has produced many strong technical companies. When you meet an Irish technology entrepreneur, notice their ease with, and burning desire to, talk about the depths of their technology. I enjoy working with people like this. They continually work to be world class at what they do at a technical level. They frequently underestimate what their business can achieve if they can effectively get to the market. I enjoy helping create partnerships to help these companies get their technology and capabilities into the market and help them gain customers and revenue growth.

Corporate Partners are a real path for these types of companies but is your business ready for Corporate Partnering? How easy is it for someone else to sell your services? Are you expecting too much of a partner’s sales team to understand and sell your services? Your service must be easy to explain, fit well with the partners offering and the sales team must see it worth their while to sell or refer your service. Will you clearly make them, and you, more money?

When it works, it’s a great feeling and well worth the effort to get everything in place.

Being sent a cheque from your partner, WITH COMPLIMENTS: “we just sold 100 licences of your software and see enclosed your share, thanks”

As CEO, it’s your job to build a business engine and continue to build and enable this engine. It doesn’t mean that you have to be the centre and control everything. If you make all the decisions, you may the bottleneck to your company’s growth.

In building your business are you focussing on what really makes your business work?
Is it clear to everyone in your team, what it takes to generate sales, delivery your services and grow happy customers?

Define and operate according to a process. Encourage people to continually experiment and test new and better ways. Know how your operate at your current level of business and understand how it will scale.

As CEO, as your business scales, you have your business engine and processes defined so that you can be removed from every stage, at the appropriate time. Then you can really focus on enabling your business to grow rather than control every fine detail.

Uncertain times delays much long term focussed spend, thus reducing everyone’s business visibility.

Although many people I speak to in the tech-sector say that their business has not yet seen any recession impact, there is much caution.

Does your company’s growth depend on your product’s adoption cycle? A product’s adoption cycle is how long it takes to prove the value in your product or service.

When you’re launching a new product to the market, we need to understand the length of time it takes for the customer to see the full value. How can you build a business case for your product without the customer seeing the value?

When you start to experiment with the market to determine the best route and approach, the length of the Adoption Cycle determines how fast you can adjust, learn and be ready test again. An Adoption Cycle of 1 month allows you to adjust every month. An online business with 1000s of customers and a short time-span to prove its worth, can experiment many times a day working to give the customer better value and beat the competition. Isn’t this one of the reasons why SaaS based businesses can move and change faster?

It traditional software businesses the cycle is slower with many months being typical. Its one thing to sell a concept of what you’re software can do if it doesn’t cost the client too much to try it out. It’s not so easy to get your client to spend money, including their cost of change, without seeing proof that what you’re offering.

It takes experimentation to get better; you get better faster with shorter adoption cycles.

On Monday December 1st 2008, Cork City, South Cork and West Cork Enterprise Boards, and FÁS together with the Plato Small Business Network will present a four hour workshop/seminar around the four core pillars essential to business survival, “Managing Business in an Uncertain Environment”

Maintaining Equilibrium - Managing Cash - Retaining your Customers - Internal Cost Competitiveness

I am presenting on “Internal Cost Competitiveness”. I have been asked to speak on how technology can help reduce the operating costs in today’s businesses. My focus will be on both technology in the business and real opportunities the Internet is presenting for businesses.

Things are changing all the time, I suggest you question everything in your business:
1) Energy Usage - IT, Lights and Heating - drawing from lessons at this week’s it@cork conference
2) Phone Costs - Landline and Mobile - VoIP / Skype
3) Broadband/Internet costs
4) Travel - Can Video Conferencing help?
5) Software - Google Apps and others
6) Services - What can you outsource (anywhere in the world?)

Donagh Kiernan
Maidsfield Associates
Partnering and Strategic Business Development

I wrote before about partnering with perceived competitors.

Paisley (MN, USA) and QUMAS (Cork, Ireland) are clearly active in the same markets, selling to similar buyers and are side-by-side on the Forrester Wave and the Gartner Magic Quadrant. They are not competitors.

Even in reviewing both company’s products and services, they are clearly providing solutions to solve similar needs. Yet, they are not competitors.

In this partnership, Paisley will embed the QUMAS DocCompliance™ functionality as a feature of Paisley Enterprise GRC™

Paisley and QUMAS fit because:

• Paisley is an industry leading provider of solutions for governance, risk and compliance (GRC) including comprehensive software solutions, training, and expert GRC professional services. Paisley have more than 1,400 large enterprise and mid-market organizations including 30% of the Fortune 500.
• QUMAS is the leader in Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) with more than 250 customer deployments and over a decade of experience helping companies in highly regulated industries provide a proactive regulatory defense.
• Paisley have achieved great market penetration into a broad range of sectors.
• QUMAS’ have achieved great success in Life Sciences and Financial Services sectors.

Paisley wins because of expanded capabilities and enhances Paisley’s offerings:

We are excited about the expanded policy management capabilities that the DocCompliance solution will bring and how it will enhance the Paisley Enterprise GRC solution. The addition of this functionality will further support the GRC convergence efforts of our clients and extend the value of our solution to all organizational consumers of compliance information.

- Tim Welu, CEO of Paisley. Click here to read more.

QUMAS wins because of significant distribution channel and expanded visibility in a very broad market:

The QUMAS DocCompliance product offers significant complimentary functionality to Paisley Enterprise GRC. The Paisley relationship also provides a significant distribution channel for our solutions and expanded visibility of the QUMAS solutions in a very broad market.

- Kevin O’Leary, CEO of QUMAS. Click here to read more.

ALSO, QUMAS recently won Irish Software Association Collaboration Award 2008 based on the Paisley partnership. http://www.QUMAS.com/news-events/pr-111108.asp

Stacey and Tim Welu, Paisley	Kevin O’Leary, QUMAS

I compliment the vision of Tim Welu, Kevin O’Leary and their teams in Paisley and QUMAS.

Donagh Kiernan
Maidsfield Associates

“…delivering consulting services in Sales Generating Partnerships and Strategic Business Development …to established globally focussed technology companies.”

September 2008

After two years being CEO with Campbell Informatics, I’m back to pick up Maidsfield Associates. It’s been a great intensive two years with Campbell Informatics with many successes and many more to come. I spent much time building relationships and selling into the US Pharmaceutical market with Campbell Informatics and met many great people. I am continuing to support Cliff Campbell and the Campbell Informatics team as a Director on the Board and an advisor.

Maidsfield’s focus is on assisting globally focussed technology companies with Sales Generating Partnerships and Strategic Business Development support to the CEO.

Thankfully, things have taken a good start with reviving old client relationships and some new ones. I enjoy the constant learning experience and I revel in progressing and developing further and bringing this experience to my clients. In that vein, I was deeply honoured to have been one of the 32 Irish technology entrepreneurs to have been selected to participate in the Enterprise Ireland / Stanford University Leadership 4 Growth Programme over the past year. I learned so much and met so many great people.

In continuing with Maidsfield, I chose the focus of Partnering as it’s an area I had good successes in the past and when finding the right-fit can deliver great value to growing technology companies.

I chose Strategic Business Development supporting the CEO, as I enjoy it and can quickly understand the CEO’s visions and plans in developing their business and assist in their projects

Looking forward to it

Donagh Kiernan
Maidsfield Associates
info@maidsfield.com

I thoroughly enjoyed Jerry Kennelly’s talk last night at the it@Cork Summer Event in Murphy’s Brewery.

In StockByte, Jerry established a clear vision and opportunity early on and went after it fabulously and whole heartily with great success. That is $135M worth of success when Jerry sold his companies last year.

With the vision at the very start and quickly establishing that they were ahead of the market, Stockbyte established themselves as market leaders and acted accordingly. StockByte were innovative on business model, marketing, delivery of their offering and collecting feedback from the market.

I really really liked:
1) how they marketed the ‘personality’ of the business to set them apart.
2) the constant objective to drive more streamlined scaleable business across the entire business
3) the fast response feedback loop to generate new product directions
4) the focus on high quality, high value and premium service at a relevant high margin price
5) the fast pace
6) the fun of it all, constant innovation coupled with constant business growth, there’s nothing better!

Well done Jerry.

This story and how Jerry delivers it should be bottled and used by Enterprise Ireland as one potential model in building an international successful business. BUT it’s definitely a lesson that it’s well achievable with the right mindset to start with.

I’m going back to work.

also see great write-up on the event at http://www.waveson.com/itcork-and-jerry-kennelly/trackback/

To carry on the theme of certainty from a previous blog post, facing reality allows us to plan for making the best of it. Being more certain is about leaving less to chance or luck. Reality is the best basis to build our plans on. (Definition of Reality: When you stop believing in it, it’s still there)

Reality can frighten the life out of people. Courage is required. (Definition: Courage is not the absence of fear, but realizing there’s something more important). Ignoring realities leaves things to chance. Facing realities provides greater certainty.

You can only prepare for what’s to happen if you accept that it can happen, good and bad. You are more certain to make things happen for you if you face reality early and prepare.

- Understand the client need
- Understand how your offering solves that need
- Understand the buying decision and process, the decision makers, influencers etc
- Define how will implement your solution

When you face realities early you can appreciate possibilities and act fast.

We can always reap greater rewards if we are prepared for all the good things that can happen and conversely if we are prepared for the bad things we can manage it better.

The two sides of not facing reality are, probably, Over Optimism and Panic, whereby we are over-reacting to some information that may not be reality that brings us to bad decisions and missed opportunities to progress.

I am currently reading Jim Collins’ ‘Good to Great’. I really really like it.

In discussing the “Hedgehog Concept” in deciding your business direction, the question of ‘What you can be best at’ is raised. The question emphasizes taking a reality view based on facts, rather than based on a challenging aspiration. I think its probably a healthy balance of both facts based and aspiration as collecting all the necessary facts may be time consuming and costly. Gut Instinct should come into it also.

If you want to be a market leader then what would you do if you were leader? If its 5 or 10 years from now, how would your company look? What type of people are part of the team?
How would you act? How would you market? How would you sell? What partnerships would you have? How would you deliver your solutions? What does the market see and think about you?

You would no-doubt operate to a set of uncompromising standards.

Start today, act like it today, carry out all actions as the leader you have in mind.

Dress for where you’re going, not for where you’re coming from.

In the middle-ages, when people didn’t understand something they either put it down to an act of The Gods or superstition. As science explains more and more we seek to control more of what happens by being better informed.

In sport, we see the weaker teams leaving a number of things to chance rather than being better prepared and experienced to know that its not luck that wins games.

In Marketing and Sales, the more experience and knowledge we have of the solving the needs of a market then the more certain we can be in selling solutions to that market.

Its not chance that understands how to win sales with the least effort and in the shortest time. Its not chance that understands the market, how to reach clients and effectively progress the sales process.

All along the sales generation process there are many hurdles and they can be very different for different types of sales. New concepts and products bring their new challenges. These challenges are in understanding what it takes to generate optimum revenue, from defining the offering, making the sales and down to creating satisfied customers and building a track record.

I had a view ten years ago that so much of marketing and sales was about chance. Now I see that was totally incorrect and inexperienced. Today I have a view of what is certain with still many areas of uncertainty left a little to chance.

I’m looking forward, impatiently, to replacing chance and uncertainty with near certainty in marketing and sales as we gain more experience and knowledge of our market.

ShareIT is a free seminar for small businesses. Damien Mulley organised the first session for UCC last Saturday, with strong feedback from participants.

My powerpoint presentation on Sales Generation is attached here.

Don’t talk about what you’ve got.

Don’t talk about what you do.

Listen to what the customer needs. Understand what the customer needs. Talk around and all about their needs, even if you don’t provide all of it. You might refer them to someone to resolves some of their needs while you resolve others. Be a person their seek objective advice from.

Then talk about solutions, in order of the priority to the customer.

Customers want to know that you:
1) Understand, (be passionate about understanding the real pain and problems)
2) are knowledgeable in solving their needs (you know more that your customers on the topic as you solve it for the industry)
3) Have the capacity to deliver a solution
4) Take responsibility to “Make it Happen”
5) Deliver value for money, (providing greater comfort/guarantees commands greater price)

« Previous entries