1010 Cambourne Business Park
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All other address details (phone, fax, email and website) remain unchanged.

The 2010 conference is in Boston Oct 4^th – October 6^th.  It’s a beautiful time of year to be in Boston and the speaker lineup is once again, awesome.  Folks like Seth Godin, Eric Ries (Lean Startup Guy), Scott Farquhar (of Atlassian) and of course, Joel Spolsky himself.  Check out the schedule, and if you can go, you should go.  Just ask someone that’s attended in prior years.

The 2009 conference was held in San Francisco and the title of my talk was “Ideas For Building Better Software Businesses”.  There are essentially two parts to the talk — the first half is about inbound marketing (how to pull customers in using Google, social media and blogs).  The second half (which starts at about 37 minutes) is about customers and sales. If you enjoyed my talk in 2008 titled “Everything I Know About Startups”, you’ll likely enjoy this one too. 

Video: Ideas For Building Better Software Businesses

Some notes from the video, for your convenience:

1. My objective for this particular presentation was to improve the odds of your survival and your success if you’re growing a software company. 
2. Types of risk:  Development risk (given an idea, can you actually build the product?), Market risk (if you do indeed build it, will anybody pay for it?), financial risk (will you have the necessary capital to build a business?) and execution risk (assuming you’ve mitigated the other risks, will you manage not to screw it up?).
3. Introducing the concept of smarketing (sales + marketing). 
4. Charge early.  Like pre-alpha early.  Like it sucks so much I’m surprised people don’t go running out of the room, early.
5. Sell early not because the revenues are going to amount to anything (they’re not), but because the data from paying customers is exceptionally valuable. 
6. Sell often, because you want reliable, negative feedback too.  Selling early tells you whether people will buy — selling often (i.e. charging smaller amounts in regular intervals) tells you whether they’ll stay.  Let customers vote with their dollars (by giving them the option to cancel their subscription). 
7. Don’t hire sales people too early.  In the early days at a startup, regardless of what your title is, you should be bringing customers on board.
8. Consider creating a sales waterfall chart that shows you daily, how the business is tracking against your sales goals.  This proves invaluable as you scale and surfaces problems in the business early.
9. Keep pricing simple in the early days.  You’ll have plenty of time to make it more complicated later.
10. In most big markets, you can afford to get pricing wrong in the early days.  If your potential market is thousands of customers, then selling the first hundred at a “sub-optimal price” is not fatal.  If you end up getting thousands of customers, getting pricing wrong for the first 100 won’t matter.  If you end up getting just 100 customers, getting pricing wrong for those 100 won’t matter.
11. You should Implement something like the HubSpot Customer Happiness Index (CHI).  It’s a quantitaive method for measuring how happy your customers likely are using available data (like their product usage pattern). 
12. Things that you can likely include in your CHI:  Frequency of product usage, breadth of product usage and actual benefit received.   
13. The CHI can be used for many things, the most important of which is predicting which customers are likely to cancel (because they have a low CHI score and are likely unhappy).  Other uses include compensation for sales people, calculating the quality of leads that marketing is generating, and making product roadmap decisions.

If you attended this talk or took the time to watch the video, would love to hear your feedback I can make my talk this year more valuable.  Hope to see you at Business of Software 2010!

Dharmesh Shah

Despite the compelling reasons we might offer for introducing coaching we can expect to encounter many barriers. We need to understand what the barriers are and how we might help others develop their understanding of coaching so that these barriers may be removed.

“We’ve got enough on our plate as it is.”

Most organizations these days seem to be working at the edge of chaos. Change is abundant and managers are rightly worried that one more change will prove to be ‘the straw that breaks the camels back’. Seen in this way, coaching, as just one more stand-alone initiative, is bound to take a back seat. But coaching should not be seen in this way. Coaching can be the glue that binds change initiatives together. After all, we know that all change programmes have a people element and that if staff and other stakeholders are not carefully guided through the changes, failure is quite likely.

Where managers are equipped with good coaching skills they are able to assist their staff in comprehending both the underlying reasons for change and the unsettling feelings that result. More importantly managers who coach will be able to empower their teams to find their own coping strategies rather than crowbar them into prescriptive methods that usually provoke rebellion rather than commitment.

“Now is not the right time.”

If people are claiming this then, paradoxically, it is absolutely the right time for coaching. Good, effective coaching raises awareness, generates responsibility and builds trust. There is never any sense in delaying having access to these qualities.

If we leave coaching until ‘other things have settled down’ it’s like saying we’ll put the umbrellas up once it’s stopped raining.

Our Team Leaders have a high level of skill anyway

No doubt this is true, but skills need to be developed and adapted to emerging trends and changes.

Coaching, it seems, is one of the skills of management that is expected to manifest itself in the manager by some kind of osmosis. In other words the expectation is that of course managers can coach – they’re managers! But again this is not the case. Whilst most managers would claim that they undertake coaching, few would be able to offer a precise definition of the term or differentiate coaching from counselling, teaching, mentoring or most other forms of people development. However, as we’ve seen coaching is quite different; essentially it is about helping people learn rather than teaching them things. Learning to coach requires guidance and practise. It is not difficult but it is a very potent intervention that can cause problems if used carelessly.

We would not let our Team Leaders loose on a new IT system without proper training so why let them loose on their teams?

“It will cost too much.”

Much depends on how the costs are calculated. Whilst there is an up front investment of time and money in having managers and team leaders trained as coaches this can be saved over and over again by the consequent improvements in team performance.

Compare the cost of one manager being trained as a coach so that he/she can help the team members become effective at personal organization against the cost of sending the whole team on time management courses.

Deciding whether we should implement coaching in an organization can be compared with clearing a forest. Do we stop from time to time to sharpen the axe and clear the forest more quickly and effectively in the end or do we keep hacking away with a blunt blade so that we can ‘just get to the end of this next tree’?

Matt Somers is a coaching practitioner of many years’ experience. He works with a host of clients in North East England where his firm is based and throughout the UK and Europe. Matt understands that people are working with their true potential locked away. He shows how coaching provides a simple yet elegant key to this lock. His popular guide “Coaching for an Easier Life” is available FREE at http://www.mattsomers.com

“Pray for potatoes, but pick up a hoe.”
Anon.

Despite all the energy we have put into coaching in the first four stages of the coaching ARROW we have so far accomplished very little. In truth we have thought, pondered, intellectualized and navel gazed but changed nothing.

This is why the final part of the model – Way Forward – is so vital, because it’s where we turn thought into action.

If we’ve coached well to this point we should begin to see a rise in energy levels of the people we coach as they realize that they are resourceful and can move their own issues forward and become excited at the prospect of doing so.

It can be really useful if we, as coaches, mirror this excitement to signal our belief and to encourage a definite course of meaningful action.

Many coaches report that this part of the process is largely automatic and it is often simply a matter of making sure people plan their actions in a sensible and logical way.

In many ways coaching for a Way Forward is akin to the kind of action planning that most people are used to anyway. We need firstly to have the coachee outline exactly what it is they intend to do. Detail is crucial here so challenge any vague responses. I also recommend having them state exactly when a planned action will begin and end. Such a date does not have to be considered irreversible; it can be changed as things move on. But without at least an aspirational completion date there can be no real commitment.

Next we should encourage the coachee to consider whether anyone else needs to be aware of their plans and how and when they will inform them. We should also invite them to think about any other resources that may be required and create a plan for getting them.

Throughout the Way Forward stage the emphasis is on what they WILL do rather than what they COULD do.

Towards the end of this part of the conversation it’s wise to check that the course or courses of action decided upon will deliver the aims established at the start of the session. Any assistance that we feel we can provide as a coach should be offered rather than imposed.

I like to end by asking the person being coached to rate their commitment to taking the course of action they have thought out on a scale of 1-10. We might think that because we have gone through the model thoroughly and carefully that the answer here will always be ten but this isn’t necessarily so. Sometimes a person will be reluctant to move forward despite a well-constructed coaching session and when this happens it is usually because of a barrier somewhere.

Perhaps it’s because the person believes that other parties involved in the issue will not play their part in moving things forward. Sometimes it’s because people are absolutely clear about what needs doing and certain it will work, but lack the courage to put the plan into action. Generally speaking, if we get an answer to the final question of anything less than 7, then the chances are that the person will not take action and our coaching session will have proven ineffective.

We need to discover what the barrier is by asking a further question – “What would make it a 10?” In answering this question the person being coached will come to understand what’s preventing full commitment and we will perhaps have uncovered a more deep-rooted coaching issue. Sometimes by the time we get to Way Forward we find that the person has articulated the same solution two or three times in the session. This is perfectly okay and suggests that such a solution is one to which the person will be most committed. In this way, going through the coaching ARROW is rather like going up a spiral staircase. We will see the same things each time we go round but always from a slightly new perspective and so we build a more complete picture.

Matt Somers is a coaching practitioner of many years’ experience. He works with a host of clients in North East England where his firm is based and throughout the UK and Europe. Matt understands that people are working with their true potential locked away. He shows how coaching provides a simple yet elegant key to this lock. His popular guide “Coaching for an Easier Life” is available FREE at http://www.mattsomers.com

We now need to help our coachees think through the various options they have in dealing with their issues and moving towards their aims.

The greatest pitfall here is for the person being coached to grasp the first idea that comes to mind. It may well be that this proves to be absolutely appropriate but the good coach will encourage their people to be highly imaginative and creative in considering options and to be constantly alert for new insights.

‘Stuck’ thinking

Most days I walk into my office via the front door and take the same route to my desk. I have done this for years and it can be evidenced by the carpet between these two points being markedly more worn than elsewhere. Imagine I was being coached on how I might arrive at my desk more alert and stimulated for the day’s work. It would be very difficult of me to think of any alternative to my tried and tested route of the straight line from the door to the desk. In fact if any one suggested a different route to me I would be likely to say “It would take to long” or “it’s a waste of time” or “I’ve never done it that way before” or “that’s just not how it’s done here”. All of which may or may not be true.

But if my coach encouraged me to think creatively I might consider walking round the edge of the office past the window. As I thought about it I might realize that this would give me an opportunity to look at the river which I always find stimulating. In other words I will have hit upon a novel approach to achieving my aim.

Similarly, because I’m enjoying the coaching session and feeling free to allow my thinking to run a little wild I might think about moving from the door to my desk in a figure of eight. As I thought about that option I might realism that this would take me right past the table where I keep the books and articles I keep meaning to read but forgetting about, past the kettle which I could switch on as I went and finally past the computer printer which I don’t normally pass and end up having to get up again to switch on later in the day.

In other words I have developed fresh insights and found new benefits just by unsticking my existing thinking.

New thinking almost always leads to new benefits:

In the early 70′s Art Fry a technician at 3M wanted a bookmark that would neither fall out nor damage his book. He knew that a colleague, Dr Spencer, had developed a glue that could stick to most surfaces but that left nothing behind after removal. Art applied a little of this glue to a piece of paper and the Post-it note was born.

Breaking assumptions

Similarly people labour under certain assumptions about what is actually possible within situations at work and we tell ourselves that “there isn’t enough time” or “we haven’t got the budget” or “I don’t have the authority”.

Again these thoughts may or may not be true but it is very useful in a coaching session to allow people to be free of these constraints to see what other options might become available. So we might ask “What if you had more time, what could you do?” or “What if you had more money…?” and so on.

Of course we cannot pretend that there aren’t any barriers or restrictions but what we’re really trying to discover through coaching is whether these barriers are genuine or just assumptions. It’s even possible that what was a restriction some time ago may not be the case any more – we just assume it is.

A distribution manager wanted to reorganize the routes his company used to supply dairy products to a number of grocery stores in their region.

He was told his new routes would not work because the stores furthest out wanted their deliveries on a Monday and would not accept any other day.

However, the distribution manager spoke to the storekeepers and discovered that, although they wanted a fast reliable service, they were not concerned about which day of the week their deliveries took place.

Sometime later, at a social event, a retired delivery man explained that deliveries to the outermost stores had always been made on a Monday because the horses were fresh after their Sunday rest!

In my next article I will examine how we decide which option to pursue as we map out the Way Forward.

Matt Somers is a coaching practitioner of many years’ experience. He works with a host of clients in North East England where his firm is based and throughout the UK and Europe. Matt understands that people are working with their true potential locked away. He shows how coaching provides a simple yet elegant key to this lock. His popular guide “Coaching for an Easier Life” is available FREE at http://www.mattsomers.com