One of the most colorful guys I know worked with me on a technology sales team back in Boston. Whenever he sat through a particularly useless or unproductive sales meeting he would describe it as “ just anuthah hawt tub meetin with the boys.” Now before you call the politically correct police and have me Don Imused off the dorkospere, let me quickly describe that this is in no way a homosexual slight. What my friend is talking about is the pointless chatter that occurs between two single guys in a hot tub. They might be drinking wine, talking up the night’s prospects, checking out the view, barely clothed if at all, but when it comes down to brass tacks they’re just passing time until the girls show up.
Having worked in mostly early stage technology companies, I have always extended this analogy to Business Development. All those guys talk the talk, have “deals,” take up tons of support resources and executive time, but in the end all you have is a bunch of hot air to show for it. Sales guys without a quota. Two guys in a hot tub.
I understand the basic math behind the advantages of having partners sell your product. The problem is that in early stage technology companies, they usually haven’t really figured out to sell their own product directly, never mind train some other companies’ sales guys how to spin their crap. The biggest waste of time occurs when a small company is trying to partner with a huge company. Usually the BD guy pushing the deal from the small company is a former big company sales guy (or better yet “Channel Sales”) trying to push what he knows on an unsuspecting group of entrepreneurs who are intoxicated by the size of the potential channel. $250K in “Co-
Marketing and Training Fees” and thousands of hours later the small company takes a dive into the chasm.
Jigsaw is the first company where I have seen the partner strategy work, and it isn’t because I started the business development department (gasp). It is because Jigsaw sells a simple product in very high demand and there is well established reseller channel for lists. Our biz dev guys still struggle to get the data dinosaur folks to speak our specific, community driven language, but the product stands for itself.
