So what do you do if you’re encountering these challenges? We recommend sharpening your product-level messaging which would include being able to answer the following questions:

• What is the pain point your target customers are experiencing?
• What does your product do to address this pain?
• Why does that matter?
• Who will care the most about addressing these pain points?
• What makes your product better than other options that customer has?

I’ll be writing more on this topic so stay tuned for more thoughts and recommendations on product-level messaging. Here are just a few examples of product-level messaging that I consider very well done: VMware, Citrix, Informatica, Timebridge, and Arena Solutions.

Please let us know your thoughts on product messaging, and examples of great work you’ve seen.

We’ve been blessed in Aventi Group by having the ear of many executives here in Silicon Valley. We’ve found that a few open ended questions with business executives can reveal much about their goals and needs while also creating an opportunity to add value to them. Here are some “high insight” questions that we found helpful:

Naturally, you can’t just pepper the executive without offering useful insights yourself such as sharing your own customer insights, intelligence on their competitors, and relevant (suprising) market trends.

Try just using two or three of these in your next executive level meeting and see how that works for you in identifying some opportunities for you to add value. We’d welcome your suggestions for other pithy, “high insight” questions.

Kearns writes about the time Lincoln was very angry with General Meade for not pursuing the confederates after beating them at Gettysburg. She reports that “Lincoln held back, as he often did when he was upset or angry, waiting for his emotions to settle. In the end, he placed the letter in an envelope inscribed: ‘To General Meade, never sent or signed.’” Lincoln saw that expressing anger in writing is never productive. He did convey his sentiments through his team but in verbal form not written. Lincoln got his point across, changed Meade’s behavior, and ultimately modeled for his staff how to handle conflicts.

Stick to the issue. Don’t personalize matters.

Lincoln selected cabinet members who were formidable rivals of his such as Salmon Chase (Treasury Secretary), Edwin Stanton (Secretary of War), William Seward (Secretary of State), and Edward Bates (Attorney General). Most of them excoriated Lincoln prior to his election because they felt he was not the best choice for the country. Conflict continued and tempers flared within his cabinet even up to his re-election. In speaking with one of his opponents, Lincoln states “You have more of that feeling of personal resentment than I. A man has not time to spend half his life in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him.”

Allow for the possibility that you are wrong

In a letter to General Ulysses S. Grant, President Lincoln admits being wrong on a strategic military route during the Civil War to capture Vicksburg, Mississippi. This was an important victory. President Lincoln wrote, "I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong." Lincoln was exceedingly humble yet tenacious in finding the best solution even if it meant admitting he was wrong.

I hope this gives you a few tips that might help the next time you’re in conflict with someone in the business setting. Please share with us any stories or tips that you’ve found helps turn conflict into constructive action.

If you’re the VP of Marketing perhaps you might feel a little intimidated to have your peer voice opinions on the very topics for which you are the presumed authority. I would say to you that it’s better to debate all the topics above openly rather than having to deal with a VP of Sales later who is clearly not bought in on the strategy session outputs.

If you’re the CEO, I hope you found the reasons above to be compelling enough for you to invite your VP of Sales to the next planning session. You’ll be glad you did.

And if you’re the VP of Sales, do what you do best. Sell. Sell your CEO on how your experience in the strategy session is far more valuable in the long run than a day or two in the trenches selling.

The economy is causing many executives to drive their teams harder to produce results. With competitors aggressively chasing after fewer bucks there’s more pressure than ever for the businesses to change sales/marketing approaches and even to tune product strategy. That leaves department heads with the impossible task of having to deliver on prior commitments while accommodating requests from above on new initiatives. The only way out is to talk goals and deliverables not priorities. Here’s an example:

What if you only got agreement on the priorities and not the specific goals and deliverables? It would be very easy for the boss to change priorities or add new priorities because there’s not an obvious tie to the business in terms of outcomes. So instead, what if the Marketing VP were to “contract” to the goals and deliverables” above?

Naturally the Marketing VP can’t control all the elements in these deliverables but it will help tremendously if you could align peer VPs along concrete goals and deliverables. It’s in your interest to align your peers because your success will depend on it and your boss will value that far more highly than reacting to priorities du jour.

Talk tradeoffs not task lists

So going back to Richard’s predicament on handling changing priorities, a short list of deliverables helped him handle new requests by describing the impact on prior commitments. He asked his boss “So would you say that launching product XYZ by February 1 is worth slipping the website project by a month?” His boss didn’t like the parental technique of laying down options but understood better the implication of his requests. Richard now has a “plan of record” with concrete deliverables laid out for the next year. Anytime a significant new request comes along, he can now have a rational discussion on trade-offs to the current plan. He's in a much better position to negotiate a win/win.

Communicate results not activities

My friend, Walt Thinfin, CIO of Visioneer, said that he is like Richard in many ways because his boss, the CEO, will place new demands on him while expecting results from prior commitments. He’s practically being asked weekly what he’s done for the business lately. Walt’s solution is communicating results often. No one is ever remembered for having executed their priority list. Rather, executives are seen as heroes for having achieved specific goals and deliverables. Go back to the table above and ask yourself which ones would have a bigger affect on a performance review, bonus plan, or even just recognition among the executives? The key then is to keep your boss apprised of bi-weekly on progress on these goals and deliverables.

Please submit your comments and thoughts on how to handle a tough boss. Your peers will really appreciate your inputs.

"We're excited about the results that Aventi Group is delivering with SPINops," said Raju Chekuri, CEO of NetEnrich, a leader in remote infrastructure management (RIM) solutions. "We can now forecast revenue with much higher accuracy, track lead values and marketing ROI based on closed opportunities and focus resources on high value prospects. By aligning our sales enablement, marketing collateral and messaging to the SPIN Selling model, as well as our channel and partner programs, we can empower our sales teams to deliver more revenue while lowering our marketing costs."

Check out the press release here and let us know your reaction to this exciting news.

Proven Programs Increase Pipelines, Shorten Sales Cycles and Lower Marketing Costs

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) November 11, 2008 -- Aventi Group, a leading executive consulting firm that discovers and accelerates revenue for technology companies, and Huthwaite, the leading sales performance improvement company, announced today a formal partnership to deliver SPINops--a suite of proven programs and processes designed to increase pipelines, shorten sales cycles and lower marketing costs. SPINops combines Huthwaite's patented SPIN® Selling methodologies with Aventi Group's consulting programs for sales, marketing and business development. Together, the partnership will help drive more efficient results for Fortune 500 and leading technology firms.

"Most companies are leaving significant revenue on the table," said Steve Lunz, Huthwaite's VP of Direct Sales. "According to a recent CSO Insights survey, only five percent of firms exceed their forecast accuracy expectations, and just 1.3 percent of sales teams feel that leads provided by marketing are 'World Class.' SPINops provides companies with a scientifically proven methodology that dramatically improves the ability to engage clients with the correct strategy and message at the right time in their Buying Cycle™. The bottom line is that SPINops significantly improves lead quality, marketing productivity and revenue results."

"We're excited about the results that Aventi Group is delivering with SPINops," said Raju Chekuri, CEO of NetEnrich, a leader in remote infrastructure management (RIM) solutions. "We can now forecast revenue with much higher accuracy, track lead values and marketing ROI based on closed opportunities and focus resources on high value prospects. By aligning our sales enablement, marketing collateral and messaging to the SPIN Selling model, as well as our channel and partner programs, we can empower our sales teams to deliver more revenue while lowering our marketing costs."

SPINops is comprised of consulting programs available from Aventi Group which are based upon the SPIN® Selling methodology developed by Huthwaite. SPIN Selling builds upon decades of behavioral research and employs a problem-solving, diagnostic approach to selling. Over the past three decades, Huthwaite has trained thousands of companies using this methodology, and is the only firm that has irrefutable evidence that its methodologies provide proven improvements in sales results.

Aventi Group now delivers four SPINops consulting programs for sales, marketing and business development:

Pipeline Catalyst™ Program: Accelerates revenue via SPIN-based lead qualification, account profiling, Buying Cycle™ alignment, and optimized sales operations tools including a Dynamic, Prioritized Opportunity Pipeline (DPOP™) and customized SPIN Selling integration into Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems such as Salesforce.com.

Partner Catalyst™ Program: Offers comprehensive deliverables for channels & partners along with best-in-class program design, Dynamic Prioritized Partner Management and custom CRM integration.

Promotion Catalyst™ Program: Lowers marketing costs and shortens sales cycles via SPIN-based messaging, collateral, sales enablement tools and marketing operations aligned with The Buying Cycle, customer roles and sales team capabilities.

Product Catalyst™ Program: Helps discover new revenue sources via SPIN-based vertical market analysis, optimized product marketing and SPIN-aligned Marketing Requirements Documents.

"Our clients are seeing dramatic results with SPINops," says Bill Reed, General Partner with Aventi Group. "One client, a large technology solutions provider, is on track to double sales efficiency this year by realigning sales teams based on SPINops. Their account managers can now focus on prospect qualification and problem analysis and then funnel opportunities into one or more of a half-dozen solution areas. Core experts in those areas can then close deals twice as fast by focusing on customer implications and highly targeted solution offerings. Most importantly, marketing can more effectively empower salespersons by delivering SPIN®-based sales enablement tools and messaging."

SPINops programs are available from Aventi Group, which primarily services clients in North America.

About Aventi Group LLC:
Aventi Group is a leading executive consulting firm that discovers and accelerates revenue for technology companies. Formed via the merger of executives from BusinessLaunch and Pacifica Group, Aventi Group consulting executives have delivered significant results since 2001 for clients such as Adobe, Apple, Cisco, Computer Associates, Covad, Forsythe, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, NetApp, SAP, Seagate, Sony, Sybase, Symantec, and others. Offering a unique combination of Huthwaite SPIN®-based programs in concert with deep industry expertise across storage, security, mobility, wireless, networking, telecom, content management, and governance, risk and compliance, Aventi Group provides strategic planning and tactical implementation consulting combined with "roll-up-your-sleeves" executive overlay expertise to drive rapid results. For more information, visit www.aventigroup.com.

About Huthwaite, Inc.:
Huthwaite is the world's leading sales performance improvement organization. Founded on scientifically validated behavioral research, Huthwaite' s methodologies, which include the internationally renowned SPIN® Selling, guarantee sales success. Huthwaite assesses your organization's needs and develops customized sales performance improvement and coaching programs that drive real business results. The foundation of SPIN Selling is built on an unparalleled scientific study that identified behaviors of successful sales calls. Utilizing this proven methodology, Huthwaite has helped their clients achieve positive business results. Huthwaite's extensive client list includes Bank of America, Beckman Coulter, Boeing, Citibank, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, MasterCard, Time Warner, and many others. For more information, visit www.huthwaite.com

# # #

What you'll learn:

• How to gain 50% or more of your best leads from Partners & Resellers


• How to focus lead generation resources and efforts on the highest quality prospects


• How to use Perfect Prospect Profiling & Buying Cycles™ to target the right prospects at the right time


• How to leverage SPIN®-based messaging and methods to motivate prospects to act now


• How to create CRM-integrated Dynamically Prioritized Opportunity Pipelines to shorten sales cycles


• How to ensure sales & marketing teams agree on the definition of a “qualified lead.”


• How to empower sales teams to close more leads with tools that align with their sales training

To help them, we conducted a detailed analysis – covering legal, operations, promotions, competitive, revenue and P&L factors – that was very revealing. Based on that we were able to make several recommendations about how they could optimize their program, make it operationally more manageable and more productive!

While I won’t share the specific recommendations we made to them, I do want to offer up some nuggets we learned as watch-outs in developing your channel:

1. Be sure to listen to Multi-Functional input: We found that programs are often developed and deployed without the proper inputs and this can result in unintended - and often bad - consequences. Legal, Operations, Channel marketing, Finance, Marketing (Promotions) and anyone else (even website managers who will enable any self-service online) who might touch partners should be invited to give their feedback to the proposed programs. What we learned was that you can circumvent many issues by doing this upfront. Don't reinvent the wheel. Someone in your organization already has one.
2. The evergreen KISS principle (Keep it Simple, Stupid): Incentives for performance should be easy to understand and uniform for all. While "kicker" rewards are tempting to offer, be sure to only institute them if you can offer something really powerful for a potent return. Offering kickers just for the sake of it only adds complexity. You will be surprised at how many partners prefer simplicity to meaningless rewards that take up mental "space".
3. Be Competitive – "holistically”: Ask what alternatives your partners have? What will they do if they do not choose to partner with you? How will that choice affect your competitive standing? Be competitive in your offering to tip the balance in your favor but look at the whole picture – not just the monetary offering. Is your company more or less stable from a partner's perspective? What's your credibility vs. your competition? What's been your history on partnering – real or perceived? Are there other strategic reasons (e.g., related offerings, geographical presence, strength of parent company?) why they might prefer to partner with you – or not?
4. Don’t think of Monetary Incentives as the end-all: It's true that partners are in it for the money but often they will forgo the last few dollars to partner with a player who makes their lives simple. So look at your whole offering, the whole experience you offer them (how complex are your contracts? how hard is it for them to sign up? get paid?) and make it attractive so that you're "easy/iest to do business with..."
5. Ensure Operations can support the program as it grows: Often companies make the offering very attractive so everyone wants to sign up - but then everyone cannot sign up because the company cannot support it. Automating repetitive tasks, enabling self-service and minimizing and planning for exception management are critical in these matters. As you develop the program and involve legal also involve the operational side of the company.
6. Ensure the Programs do not become a Millstone: Once the partner is inactive and/or non-performing what happens? One of our findings was that a large number of contracts could be interpreted to entail "evergreen" commission payments even after the partner was terminated. As a result a large number of partners were collecting very small checks forever – not efficient for our client or for the SMB partner. While we recommended a solution to ease this, the best way is that such eventualities should be avoided upfront.
7. Apply the 80-20 "prune" Rule – but smartly: As in all things we found that it was the top 10-20% of the partners that were delivering most of the value. However be sure to segment your partners by performance to see who is performing and who's not and try to understand why. A lot will be revealed by this segmentation. We found that the next 30% (below the top 10%) were not performing but collectively accounted for a huge portion of the business. They could not be terminated without careful consideration. With deeper analysis and further market research we recommended keeping them but modifying their contracts to reflect their business realities and the client's needs.

Any of this ring true? Write to us.

Who is going to help make the trade-offs in requirements that are needed to deliver a winning product on time and of acceptable quality? Product management owns this critical prioritization and trade-off task and it takes a lot of talent, skill and experience to know what to let go and what to not comprimise in terms of requirements and quality.

And that's why product management needs to be outside the engineering function. That does not mean that product management is not to be held accountable for developing requirements that are sensible yet market-worthy. It just means they need to be able to operate independently to negotiate with engineering in a way that is in the best interests of the customers - and company.

Write to me if any of this rings true -- or not!

I have a few key reasons for how and why I came to this conclusion and I want to share them with you. I will share the first one in this blog post and it has to do with the fact that the role of marketing is often misunderstood — or worse underestimated.

Marketing misunderstood: Strategy first!

In many hi-tech companies, Marketing is often misunderstood, sometimes even mistaken for being only marketing communications. But marketing should be much more...it starts with helping you define what business you're in, who you're selling to, what your offering is, how does it create value....and only then the nitty-gritty of promotion tactics you may employ. Of course you may decide that you can think through these important strategic marketing questions all by yourself. But whether you do it yourself or get help, you're indulging in marketing, properly defined, whenever you do so. More often than not it pays to understand and address these questions in a disciplined fashion. Successful companies know that these questions are the basis for their business plan -- for even the coolest of widgets.

What this means is that a person who can act as a strategic marketing sounding board should be intimately involved in your efforts before one serious line of code is written. Of course I fully understand the need for inventors to develop prototypes and show them around to gather some momentum before they seriously get behind an idea. But the sooner a sound strategic marketing brain is part of your team the better. One of the first orders of business for this (marketing) person would be to conduct a strategic assessment of the market you're going after — as well as of alternate markets and uses your technology could be applied to (I will talk about the content of such an assessment in another post). This exercise will only make your plan stronger and help you alter course if needed, while it's much easier to do so.

Following this marketing should be responsible for developing a solid market requirements document (aka MRD) which reflects the voice of your future customers — their desires, (unarticulated) needs, wants and aspirations — and not what engineering can build. That trade-off is critical but comes later. That's a key role for marketing: ensure that the voice of the customer is reflected in any product planning. And this is the second factor I want to talk about. Look for my next post very soon.... In the meantime, please write to me if you agree or see things differently

Aventi Group executives and consultants will continue to act as an extension to our clients’ management teams in order to:

• Launch new products/services
• Drive more sales through the channel
• Identify and capture new market opportunities
• Expand revenue with aligned sales/marketing efforts

Aventi consultants have domain knowledge in security, storage, networking, compliance, business intelligence, and wireless/mobility. And we’re experienced in business models such as software-as-a-service, open source, and managed services. A partial list of our combined clients includes Adobe, Cisco, Computer Associates, Covad, Forsythe, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, NetApp, SAP, Seagate Sony, Sybase, Symantec, as well as many early stage technology firms.

Please see the bios section to “meet” the team of seasoned executives and consultants. I am especially privileged to be working with Jeff Thompson and Bill Reed as fellow general partners and co-founders of Aventi Group. Elise Bauer will continue to be my advisor and confidante though she is fully immersed in her highly successful venture at www.simplyrecipes.com.

More and more technology firms are turning to outside firms to handle telesales, inside sales, or teleprospecting rather than doing it internally. They hope to gain advantages in cost, speed, and expertise. But, unfortunately, not all these outsourcing partnerships deliver the expected results. Come to this session and hear about:

• What are the different types of telesales models?
• Why do companies outsource telesales?
• What criteria should you use to decide which firm to choose?
• What are the pitfalls to avoid in this outsourcing relationship?
• What are success metrics that help drive best results?

The talk is based on my recent blog entry on teleprospecting.

When: Monday, September 8th at 6:30pm
Where: DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary LLP office, 2000 University Ave, East Palo Alto, CA 94303

We hope to see you there. Enjoy networking with fellow entrepreneurs, marketers, and high tech folks in general.

• Comparison of MSP service offerings


• Benchmark on how these services are priced


• Insight into the next big offering in managed services

For your convenience, there will be two sessions:
Wednesday, July 30, 2008 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT
(10am Pacific, 11am Mountain, 12pm Central, 1pm Eastern)
Click here to register.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT
(10am Pacific, 11am Mountain, 12pm Central, 1pm Eastern)
Click here to register.

Here are FIVE strategies for successful consumer marketing that product management can own and influence. I've observed and learned these from my P&G, Kraft Foods years and my HI-TECH years. I want to very briefly share these with you:

1) Ideation & Idea Exploration: Don't cut short this process. Sometimes we have a technology, we have a few ideas on how it can be used for a consumer application and we start moving ahead with it. We also have a lot of very smart people giving us ideas and that's great. Sometimes that's enough. But often we miss out on bigger, better applications we could have started with only to have the next competitor launch with that. Sometimes companies start with what consumers lack and consumers can articulate this well so talking to consumers is always a good idea. But another methodology is to observe what consumers do today to see where their unmet needs or unarticulated desires lie. You'll be surprised how much is revealed by simply observing what consumers do today.

2) Testing, Testing, Testing: Online and other technologies have made market validation so easy that there's no excuse for not doing this at every stage. Don't assume you know your consumer and don't disrespect her. When there is even a shade of doubt, test. Ask consumers. And get the experts to test it right - get quantitative on the testing where it's appropriate and go with the evidence. Often it's not enough to ask consumers what they like — make them make choices, and decisions. When appropriate, tell them what the service will cost — pricing, advertising, and other costs. Make them make trade-offs and tell you what they'll buy. Ask them and know why they chose something. In today's world of online services and Web 2.0 (going on 3.0?), you can launch an alpha /beta, and effectively test your way to success but testing much earlier in the new product development process is equally important. Know why you threw out the 6 other application ideas you had and why you chose to launch with the features you did. As all good product managers know architectural decisions get made early on and you better have data to support why your products chose to go a certain route.

3) Pricing & Value: Spend time on this. Often the value is not simply about $ pricing and we may give away services for free, say in exchange for exposing consumers to advertising. And your basic service may be free but what about premium versions - what do consumers have to pay for that? Perhaps that's a future decision. No matter what the case, there is no excuse for not knowing exactly what value your consumer gets from your service. Ask your consumers. Articulate it. Enshrine it. And deliver on it. If you're going to change it know what's changing and why and what effect is it going to have on your consumer pull (how elastic is the demand for your offering?)

4) Tell them HOW they want to be told: Once you have something you want to expose to consumers - tell them. You can and should control the communication for a beta but beyond that getting the word out is really important. But that does not mean blasting the universe with a bucket-load of promises. Get your messaging right for the right audience and via the right vehicles. Ask yourself how your consumers make decisions. This is something often missed but crucial to success. What factors are important to them and why and how do they go about enrolling in and purchasing services like yours? If your offering is so new then look at adjacent market spaces or interviewing "early adopter" consumers in your target market. This will take less time than you think and can be invaluable. I've even seen cases where companies develop "consumer advisory boards" of highly articulate and highly interested consumers who give them feedback from time to time. Once you understand your consumers' decision making process, your marketing launch plan will be much more targeted and smart. Sometimes this might mean telling them BUT actually spending the bulk of your resources telling their influencers — key social "nodes", reviewers, endorsers, industry mavens, magazine editors, etc.

5) Positioning: This word is so belabored and so abused that I've been thinking about calling it something else. But for now I just want to define it properly. Actually positioning always comes back to good product management practices. Here's how. Positioning is about telling consumer why they should care about your offering. I've written a lot about this subject so I won't belabor it. Suffice it to say that good marketing entails that the product actually delivers on the promise and that the promise is meaningful to your target audience. All three of these elements are critical: tell the truth, make sure your promise is meaningful (which comes back to making sure you're working on the right stuff), and tell it to the right audience (which consumer cares about your offering).

Write to me and tell me what you think.