Garth's World

Garth’s World Gets Rocked

Image via CrunchBase

As you undoubtedly have heard, salesforce.com acquired Jigsaw. Its intention to purchase the company was announced April 21 (the most intense, surreal day of my life) and since then I have refrained from posting to Garth’s World as the two companies worked out what communications from the combined company need to look like while I undertook a search for the best beaches in the Carolinas ☺.

Now I intend to pick up where I left off, starting with an edited version of the post I that I wrote from a hotel room in Vegas where I was presenting at a Sales 2.0 Conference on April 19. Thanks for all the messages asking if the blog was going to continue on - you can be the judge as to whether or not I have been tamed by working for a public company…

Rubbin’s Racin’ - Driving Business

Part of this week’s local networking orgy brought me to the 9^th annual Five Ventures Business Plan Competition and Conference at the brand spanking new campus of UNC Charlotte. I originally balked when the director of the program, Ken Paulus, asked me to coach two of the entrepreneur teams. But a combination of his hypnotic radio voice and the enthusiasm of the founders of the fledgling crowd sourcing companies (www.whinot.com and www.groupereye.com) convinced me to get involved. Once I got used to the constant reminder that bright eyed MBA students inadvertently gave me that I am an old fart (I hit forty in two months) it turned out to be well worth my time.  

Since we are in the heart of NASCAR country, the keynote speaker for the event was Richard Childress, former race car driver turned business magnate. He began his talk with the requisite over-the-top marketing video presentation that probably shattered the ear drums of everyone within 5 tables of the podium, but after that he settled into an intriguing and informative Horatio Alger story of how he bought a 1954 Plymouth for $20 and turned that into Richard Childress Racing. Interspersed with (mostly hilarious) anecdotes he outlined some basic principles that all early stage company leaders should follow. I realized that for the most part, these themes were almost identical to the advice that I had been dispensing based on my experience with Jigsaw.  Here are the dictums that Mr. Childress (I’m still getting used to calling people – and being addressed - by last names) outlined, and my take on them.

Are you Butler or Duke?

Image by RMTip21 via Flickr

Thanks to my move to the wrong time zone for watching national sporting events, I’m dragging today after staying up late (almost midnight!) three nights in a row. The two Red Sox/Yankees marathons were par for the course, but the event that had me yelling at the television was the flat out riveting NCAA championship game on Monday.  Like every sports fan that isn’t from East Japeepi, Indiana, I assumed that the NBA development program Duke would stomp on this year’s Cinderella Butler and that would be it. Boy, was I wrong. If you are really interested (and have been boycotting ESPN due to the endless loop of Tiger footage) you can go to any sports website for the game recap. What I am going to try and tackle is why I hated Duke and loved Butler – and how a good salesperson can harness that phenomenon to their advantage.

First off, the hating Duke part comes pretty naturally. GQ rated them the number 2 “douchiest college” (my alma-mater was number 1) for a reason, namely that everyone knows someone that graduated from there who thinks they are God’s gift to the world.

Account Management 101 from a Teenager

Last week I got a lesson in sales from a most unlikely source. It all started with a “honey do” (which in my case immediately converts to a “honey sub contract” whenever possible) list item that had taken over that dreaded Defcon 5 Home Alert, nobody’s-happy-if-mamma-ain’t-happy position. Specifically, spring had arrived, my kids are 5 and 3, and we needed a play set in the backyard. So I priced the (much preferred) brand where the company delivers and constructs the thing for you, but unfortunately everyone in the family had seen an identical set at our favorite retail play land, Costco, for about $1000 less. All I had to do was find someone to put it together for me, in time for the Easter party we are having today, and I was good to go. (Note: At no point in time did I consider attempting to put this thing together myself. I ran a painting and light construction company in college, but just because I am physically able to complete a task does not even close to mean that I have any desire to spend every “spare” hour that I have stripping screws and running back and forth to Home Depot for missing parts. Besides, I had testimony from multiple Dads on my street that it took them like 50 weekend and evening hours to assemble theirs--enough said---this went out to bid.)

I called our go-to friend for all things Charlotte, our realtor, to suggest a handy man. Without any hesitation she recommended her cousin, and we arranged to have him come with his “crew” on Saturday and get it built. He had already taken the step to call the manufacturer and gave the estimate that it should take 4 hours. Done deal-see ya Saturday! Well, at the arranged time a truck shows up and three guys start unloading tools. The only problem: they all look like they are 12 years old to me.

I am a Sales 2.0 Tool

Even though my wife thinks I am busy obsessing over my fantasy baseball draft and filling out multiple NCAA brackets, in actuality I am digging out from a week in San Francisco which included the Sales 2.0 Conference. Man o man has that show gotten big. While I’m not sure that I am qualified to enter  the “has Sales 2.0 crossed the chasm” conversation on the distinguished gentleman from Canada Robert Lesser’s blog, I can report that as measured in pure number of people in attendance and sponsorship logos the Sales 2.0 franchise is kicking some serious tech marketing ass. The roster of 37 sponsors, including the big CRM guys this year, made host Gerhard Gschwandtner grow so tired listing them that he slurred all the lowly bronze level sponsors into two syllables. Over 600 sales and marketing execs were in attendance, creating standing room only sessions and thronging the hallowed halls of the Four Seasons with snappily dressed yuppies buzzing about funnel velocity and marketing alignment. What’s this about a recession, you say?

Image via CrunchBase

This isn’t going to be a “reflections on the Sales 2.0 Conference” because I’m 10 days too late (9 days behind the Twitterheads).  Also, my ADD/chatterbox personality resulted in the fact that I only sat through the first 2 hours of program content. What I can tell you is that the introductions were flawless (short a crappy microphone), Brett  Queener’s (SVP Product from Salesforce!) keynote/commercial for Chatter was very interesting to me personally (a Facebook for enterprises- right up my alley), and Jigsaw’s customer from On24 was part of the first panel on Lead Generation and we looked great- thanks for asking.

Sales Jam, Baby!

As any regular reader (there is a large handful of you-thanks, mom!) of my blog knows,  the posts where I can tear down the subject are better (at least funnier) than when I am endorsing something Jigsaw related. I like to think that I always retain an edge beyond marketing copy (OK - maybe a jagged ice pick compared to standard corporate speak), but let’s face it, Jigsaw is paying the bills and I can’t lower the boom in public on everything that strikes me as idiotic about my company.  Sometimes I have to promote a positive pose while portraying a personal product, person, partner or predicament and entertain myself in other ways - like say using as many “p” words as p-p-possible.

My topic today is one that you are going to hear about in some form every week until the event happens, because it is my baby: the 2010 Jigsaw Sales Jam. Hopefully, the fact that I am so bullish about the whole thing, which is very much a Jigsaw related gig, will not turn off the loyal Garth’s World fan.  If so, tune back in after July 13-14, when I will return to ragging on people that say “utilize” instead of “use” because they think it makes them sound more professional. Or maybe August 1^st, because I will need at least 2 weeks to recover from how flat out great this party….er….industry summit is going to be.

Cold Calling is not even on the Endangered List

Al Gore inventing the Internet by SOCIALisBETTER via Flickr

As part of my furious promotion of the Jigsaw Sales Jam event, I had a recent conversation with Steve Richard, co-founder of a sales training and outsourcing group called Vorsight.  Because I had never spoken with him, I did a little research beforehand (OK- I clicked a link in his email signature that led me to an article he had written) in order to see what kind of cat he was. What I found was Cold Calling Lives, which is the best commentary I have read on a question that has been bandied about ad nauseam since Al Gore invented the internet: Is the Cold Call Dead?

The New Dalai Garth

Bill Cosby via last.fm

Is it just me, or is 2010 so far all about lousy health? It’s true that I have just spent the last 2 hours wading through a mountain of “Explanation of Benefits” (which is a gross perversion of both words) documents while I attempt to recover from Bill Cosby’s Mushmouth syndrome after a particularly lengthy trip to the dentist. And I have two kids in pre-school and we’re all surviving a “real” east coast winter for the first time, which makes for almost daily visits to the doctor to treat the green plague. So maybe I am not a scientific survey sample. But it seems like everyone I come in contact with (and that’s a ton of people) is stifling coughs, has a raspy voice, or is just completing their third round of antibiotics. The H1N1 didn’t kill everyone all at once; we’re just going to all slowly retreat into self imposed quarantine.  Good thing our fearless leaders can agree on a course of action for remedying the situation…OK, enough of that. I assume you don’t come here to listen to me gripe about personal maladies -that’s what Twitter is for. What I really wanted to report on is a topic that is a daily fact of life for the busy salesperson (redundant, I know) and is closely related to poor health: stress.

It’s 2010. Make a Decision Already!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

People that have never been in sales (particularly finance guys and lawyers, for some reason) always simplify the entire sales process down to the final stages of deal negotiation. They glorify your job as one money call after the other where all you have to do is hold tight on price, fend off the competition jackals and watch the money roll in. Oh to be so lucky. In my experience, the true enemy of the salesperson (besides self doubt, time, the IRS, head-in-the-clouds management, faulty products, traffic cops and the airline industry) is corporate inertia: where the customer just decides to do nothing.

When you are in a dogfight with the competition (assuming you both are reasonably well informed), it means that the customer is going to make a choice and actually buy something. Someone is going home with the PO. After the initial sting of receiving the call that is the customer’s equivalent of the “Dear John” letter wears off, I would rather have lost a deal to another company than to realize that I had wasted my time chasing butterflies. Sales Managers take note: if the “Lack of DM Decision” tab is your team’s favorite reason for deals exiting the pipeline, you’re in trouble. This ain’t hockey: a tie gets no points.

So how do you avoid this situation?

Sales is for Humans

Image via Wikipedia

Monday I celebrated the legacy of the great Martin Luther King Jr.by going to an afternoon movie (hey, at least I admitted it) called “Up in the Air.” I chose that film for two reasons: A) I read the book-on a plane, no less- and I wanted to see how much Hollywood would water down the sarcasm and satire of the original and B) because I have a man crush on George Clooney. Both inclinations were fully realized, although there was still a high enough concentration of corporate buffoonery for me to be entertained. Also, the screenplay was completely re-written to the point where every scene and character was new, which was a good thing, because the book didn’t bother with simple details like having a plot.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to give into the secret belief that all people who write blogs have that they really would be great film critics if given the audience. Any jack^ss with a gift for synonyms for the word “awesome” could fit that bill. I want to relate an idea in the film that struck the sales person in me as true, and if I can be so bold, important.