Water Under the Bridge

This is awesome and it is similar to the process thread earlier. In fact this client is all about process and the process of implementing process. Client CEO of mine has been building process in his corporation (50+ people) to “know what we need to know to grow.” As you can imagine the pace of process building is dragging back the pace of growth. Some examples; Four people can possibly be involved in approving pricing for a quote to the customer; the sales rep, the VP of sales, the CFO and the CEO. Nice velocity on that one, these four typically cannot agree on lunch or the definition of a “lead” let alone pricing. Average Selling Price per transaction? $30K. Red Flag number one. The discounting structure is fluid. And by fluid I mean like the liquid metal hottie terminator on T3 fluid. The rep can negotiate some discount and of course since there are no limits he can call the VP of Sales for even more discounting permission, and then the CFO gets to see it and he can modify the discou

Nice turn of phrase and very appropriate for a client I am working with. The client is growing; in fact it is growing so fast it has decided to implement process to handle the growth. The process is so detailed that it is actually slowing growth and in some areas, forcing a decline in growth. So I was asked why. The why was very straightforward to discover. You have a sub-$10M company implementing the same process as a $3B company. Not only is the process decisioneered beyond rational thought, it is so complex that asking a single person to manage it is crippling. For example; When a company sells a product that adds onto or works with another product, infrastructure, or application the process should reflect the “aftermarket” nature of this business. Look at Home Depot. They do not sell houses, but they sell about every aftermarket part and piece for homes (and outside the home) you can imagine. And they make no bones about it. One does not go to home depot to re-engineer their house

There is no there, there. Gertrude Stein might as well been talking about technology pitches of all kinds and not Oakland (or the Oakland Raiders). I still hear the phrase, “they didn’t get it.” In fact I realize now that when someone says the phrase that the audience, person or whomever “does not get it” it really means in all likelihood the audience is not open for business on that topic. Open for business. What a simple straightforward qualifier for any interaction predicated on a commerce taking place as the desired outcome. For those times where a person does not get there is a person or persons who are open for business on your topic. Let me explain. Miscommunications are the standard as far as forms of communication in the tech business. Often the result is too much discussion generated on that take on a life of their own and simply never seemed to get resolved. Often both the sender of the message and the receiver cannot even agree on what it was they are talking about; see De