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

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.

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.”

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)

Relatively speaking creating and implementing a technology solution is easy compared to changing peoples’ behavior.

If you are selling new or better ways of doing things present a baby-steps transition from the old to the new.

Don’t expect your customers to take the big-bang approach. It’s may just be percieved as too much of a risk.

“Make it easy for them to say yes.”, Larry Quinn at Enterprise Ireland Class of 2006 showcase.

“Brave was the man who bought the first fax”, ???

This is in response to, or to add to, Annette Clancy’s post “Costing and Pricing” about an exercise with artists.

But first, I enjoyed Jeff Nolan’s presentation on “Emerging Trends in Pricing & ROI” at the IT@Cork conference recently.

What is the relationship between how we price our product or service and what it costs us to deliver?

To point out the obvious: Price - Cost = Profit

So which is most appropriate for calculating the cost of your product or service?

1) Price = Cost + Margin (where Margin is % profit you decide to earn on each sale)
2) Price = The perceived value to the buyer adjusted according to competitive forces
3) Price = X% of Return on Investment - where X% might represent one year’s savings as a result of your offering

A construction company was commissioned to build a really grand five star hotel in New York. They decided to use their best engineer, a founding partner with the firm, Jim O’Reilly (he was originally from Cavan, Ireland). The managing partner, Chuck Houlihan (of Irish ancestry) was a strong business man but a little hard headed.

In building the hotel, Jim was at the core of engineering design and construction until business differences separated Jim and Chuck. Jim left the company.

The hotel was completed and all went well and opening with a grand celebration.

Then one day, there was a problem with the air conditioning. This became a big problem and all the expertise with the company couldn’t pin point the cause. Chuck was forced to call Jim to ask him back to check it out, whatever the cost. Chuck asked his engineers to follow Jim everywhere in finding the problem.

Jim toured the hotel checking the system at different points, asking questions and moving on. Then after about two hours he stopped. He had found it. Taking our a piece of chalk marked an X on a piece of equipment. The other engineers saw instantly what we meant.

Jim sent in a bill for $50,000 dollars to Chuck. Chuck nearly had a heart attack and smartly replied to Jim for his billed to be itemised.

Jim responded:

$1 for the chalk, $49,999 for knowing where to put it

Being able to do forecast sales and meet them is magic. Isn’t it?

Recently, I’ve being reading many books on sales management. Many of theses books were from a large company point of view, with 268 sales reps and such. They were typically public companies with quarterly results to report and shareholders expecting the continuous growing sales and profitability. These companies would talk about the certainty required in the measurement of the sales process. “Having a few in the bag, just in case” was always a safety being used. “You must be paranoid”, another would say repeatedly.

When you can pay for the best of everything:
1) You have strong market intelligence of what the buyer wants
2) You know what the markets’ purchasing plans for the coming year
3) You know what you can produce and can move fast to add capacity for contingency reasons
4) You know your sales cycle and lead time to sales
5) You have a pipeline and understand the probabilities at the various stages
6) Your team of 268 sales reps are well trained and managed by the best

So what if you have none of these.

The principles still apply. Do what you can do.

Progress is everything.

No matter what you do, everyday we are all always faced with situations in which we have to get a message across.

In every discussion:
i) We have to understand the views on the audience we are addressing
ii) Start delivering our message from this point of view and
iii) Then demonstrate the value of what we’re suggesting with direct relevance to our audiences’ point of view
iv) And win over agreement and support

Is this not the same as:
i) Gather market research to develop a Market/User Requirements Specification
ii) Construct and deliver a customer relevant marketing/sales message to capture their attention
iii) in order to get the opportunity to demonstrate the full value of our offering with direct relevance to the customer
iv) in order to win a sale

This is true of all scenarios whether for individual or company driven goals, within small or large organisations or generally in society.

Everything is sales….www.everythingisales.com

Listen to interview with Jeff, recently podcast by Tom Raftery on the IT@Cork blog…

Jeff Nolan is a Silicon Valley veteran who just recent moved on from SAP into a CEO position with Teqlo.

I’ve been a reader of Jeff’s blog for while and am looking forward to meeting with him and hearing his presentation at the IT@Cork Annual Conference on November 29th.

Jeff blogs about, among many other things, new business models for software companies, “Emerging Trends in Pricing and ROI”.

What Jeff has to say has implications for:

1) Software Product Companies
Should you continue to seek up front perpetual per seat type licensing deals or should you seek a recurring revenue model?

This changes the dynamic of your business significantly. It changes how you sell, who you sell to, the nature of your customer relationships, your support structure, your product development plans, your cashflows, etc……

2) IT Departments

As Jeff points out, Business Functions are buying solutions without consulting IT. They have their own budgets and require no IT infrastructure apart from a web interface SO they don’t need IT expert input in the purchase.

Where is the ‘Authority’ and ‘Power’ of the IT Department going?
Where are all the CIOs gone?

3) Financial Managers and Investors in the Software Industry

When big lump-sum up-front licence fees are gone, how does this affect your cashflows and working capital requirement to fund a growing business?

Software As A Sevice (SAAS) is happening at all levels of software to consumers, small to medium business and at enterprise.

Salesforce.com is an example at enterprise level and there are many more….

I have a number of unresolved issues and unanswered questions with SugarCRM, but I dont just have time to deal with them all right now.

The common data respository, common processes, standard collateral etc are the reasons to implement a CRM system as opposed to boxed individual MS Outlook.

My main issue is with SugarCRM is it’s MS Outlook sychronisation

I want to synchronise:
a) contacts
b) attaching associated emails to contacts, opportunities
c) calendars for group calendars

There are too many problems with the SugarCRM Outlook plugin to start listing them but just to say, dont even consider it.

So I’m looking for another SugarCRM Outlook synchronisation plugin.

Does JRabbit work? I see a beta release Dec’05 and no activity since. That’s not a good sign.
Do Funambol’s products do the job i want?

I’m not looking for free software, I’m looking to invest in a system that works. If I cant get it soon with SugarCRM, I am moving to Salesforce.com. I cant waste anymore time.

any help is appreciated

Donagh Kiernan Appointed CEO of Campbell Informatics.

As a result of my move, Maidsfield Business Development is being transition to Whitehorsepoint Business and Marketing Consultants.

Whitehorsepoint is a privately held Irish company providing International Marketing, Business and IT professional services to a wide range of Irish and international clients. Whitehorsepoint and its founders have a proven track record in the software and telecommunications industries and an impressive list of client relationships.

Irene McGoey is one of the principles of Whitehorsepoint. Irene did great things at Euristix in assisting with market definition and general marketing activities. I first heard about Irene at the time around Euristix winning the Irish Software Association Marketing Company of the year. Vistech was a supplier to Euristix at that time. I also worked with Irene in more recent months as fellow Enterprise Ireland Mentors. Irene is also helping us out in Campbell Informatics on the Marketing side.

From yesterday…

The features of the SugarCRM Outlook plugin look good. Synch selected Contacts, Activities and Calendars. You can create Accounts from a Contact and other useful features.

I’m having trouble establishing a connection between my Outlook and my Blacknight hosted SugarCRM.

I registered (I’m a junior member) and posted a query on the SugarCRM Forum - SugarCRM and Outlook - I cant even Connect

But it’s like this:

I cant even get started.

What is wrong?

Following on from my previous posts on CRM systems; Salesforce.com versus SugarCRM for a growing business and Seeking CRMing Excellence - I uninstalled Microsft Business Contact Manager today.

I have purchased a SugarCRM hosting package from Blacknight.

I’ve started adding in my Leads and Accounts. I want to update my Contacts through the MS Outlook integration.

The I need to get the Sugar Plug-in for Outlook working yet.

I must check if it does Shared Calendars and Activities.

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