Garth's World

Make that Sale

2010-09-23T10:44:25-07:00

Make That Sale! - Most Memorable Sale from DreamSimplicity on Vimeo.

Last summer I flew back to Boston to attend the Sales 2.0 Conference hosted by Gerhard Gschwandtner of Selling Power. Even though we were across the country from the home base of the Sales 2.0 mafia companies, the attendance nearly 300 people, and the vibe was enthusiastic. From the conversations that I had (with probably 200 people-everybody knows I like to gab), it was apparent that Sales 2.0 has outlived the Web 2.0 concept that took a sailor dive into the chasm sometime around 2008. In fact, many large companies have very publicly employed the new sales techniques and processes that embody Sales 2.0 while partnering with red hot companies like Marketo, Inside View, Big Machines, Xactly and (of course) Jigsaw and salesforce.com. I dare say that the underlying concepts of Sales 2.0 will outlive the bad economy and the social media bubble- but don’t start looking for me to define future trends (I thought Apple was dead in the water in the early 90’s).

Anyway, the highlight of the trip for me actually happened the day after the conference at the taping of a TV game show for salespeople called “Make that Sale.” Gerhard had contacted me about a week prior (he is the king of late night ideas turning into last minute productions) to ask if I would be on a panel of judges for the show. In a moment of weakness I agreed, and immediately afterward started regretting the decision. A game show for sales people that would get streamed on the web---how dorky can you get? Thankfully I didn’t back out, as I ended up having a blast and meeting some of the biggest characters around.

Image via Wikipedia

The way it went down was that the other judges, Anneke Seley (CEO of Phoneworks and co-author of the Sales 2.0 book) and Will Wiegler (Sr Director of Marketing from Big Machines) and I met Gerhard in the afternoon to dry run the show in front of the cameras. A crew of cool cat whiz kids from Dreamsimplicity was on hand to produce the show. Ten contestants would take part in three segments where they would 1) tell their most memorable sales story in 150 seconds, 2) find a prospect using online tools, and 3) make a 60 second elevator pitch. Gerhard and Floyd Tucker from Dreamsimplicity were the Wink Martindale-ish MCs and Anneke, Will and I were the American Idol like judges. The audience was made up of a fairly rowdy group of salespeople, most of whom had attended the conference the day before.

After a brief reception where everyone involved got to know each other and pound a few cocktails to ease the stage fright (or maybe that was just me), the taping started. All the judges agreed that our job was infinitely easier than that of the poor contestants. Even though they were all very professional and well prepared, nerves took a few out of contention before the judges got a chance to grade them. I actually got to feel the pressure first hand when Gerhard made me get up at the end of the show and do my “best Jigsaw pitch.” Luckily, I got to end it with “we sold the company,” so most people overlooked my fidgety, machine gun delivery. Despite my earlier reservations, I really had a great time.

Take a look at the first episode of Make that Sale…

* Many of you have undoubtedly noticed that it has been a while since my last confession…er… blog post. Well, I’m back to tell you that they can’t get rid of me that easily. I’m only going out in leg chains and a straight jacket--the same way I came in.

Garth’s World Gets Rocked

2010-07-01T07:37:56-07:00

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…

In January, 2004 I was surveying what was to become the original flea infested Jigsaw ("RaptorVision" at the time) office in the Bay Shore Corporate Center in San Mateo, wondering what on earth I gave up a high paying sales job to undertake. Jim Fowler burst through the door to my empty office and declared that he couldn’t decide if our “company” would be bought out by an industry leader or if we would “go it alone” to become a public company. It was the first of many times that I assumed that his glue sniffing habit had finally become an open reality. Little did I know that the crazy bald guy would come through yet again--salesforce.com has agreed to purchase Jigsaw!
That’s right - this data company founded by two fed up sales people in the wake of the 2001 tech bust is now one of the most exciting purchases (to date) by the cloud computing pioneer. Holy freaking sh^t. I’d love to tell you that I have fully grokked the ramifications of the event, but I can’t even come close to tell you how I feel about it. Because we were dead dog broke in 2003, we gave away so much of the company to investors that I will still have to work (my Office Space dream of doing nothing will have to wait), but my kids’ education is paid for. All the old timers that took a risk back then are in a similar situation. From what we can tell it will be business as usual for the 1.2 million members and 1300 enterprise customers of Jigsaw- it’s OK if you run Oracle CRM, MSFT Dynamics, SugarCRM or some funky homegrown system…. I truly believe that the technical and marketing expertise of salesforce.com will have an amazingly positive effect on Jigsaw. I am honestly thrilled that we are now about to be part of the salesforce.com juggernaut.

As for Garth’s World, I hope that my candid banter and dialog will remain intact but that is for you all to decide while reading. The salesforce.com commitment to Chatter leads me to believe that it appreciates the value of unfettered discussion- even from a reprobate like me. The Sales Jam is still on for spring of 2011- I hope that Fowler’s vision of a mini Dreamforce for the Jigsaw Community can rock like I have been planning. As to other details, you’ll have to wait and read the Safe Harbor statements that those guys (now us guys) are so famous for reciting at the start of every “Your Business is Now in the Cloud” PowerPoint.

For all of the top members of Jigsaw that saw us through the early years, please don’t look at this as selling out and stop entering the data that is the lifeblood of the Jigsaw Community- too many inside guys depend on us for their everyday grind of calling people they don’t know and asking for money. Our cloud data strategy is the real deal- just wait and see.

That’s it for now. I’m on the Disney ride to crazytown just like the rest of you – Hee haw!

Are you Butler or Duke?

2010-04-08T09:37:56-07:00

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.

I was lucky enough many years ago to work at company filled with Dukies and I used to describe in great detail to my cube mates about how I was going to order up a wrecking ball and crane from Acme to destroy the building Willie E. Coyote – style. As far as basketball, their Aryan nation, academic all star team seems to always be a top seed in the NCAA tournament, which means all they can do is bust up your bracket or predictably win. Then there is that Christian Laettner shot in 1992 that we have to relive every 15 seconds on CBS – what a whiney, insufferable prima donna that guy turned out to be. Now that I live in Carolina Country, I even know a bunch of reasons that Coach K sucks.

But why love Butler? They are anchored by a kid with the cheesiest rodent moustache of all time who defines ugly white basketball. Their other hero has the squeaky clean, bright eyed Ron Howard (from the Andy Griffin days, certainly not now) look that just makes you want to slap him. Their 33-year-old coach could be easily mistaken for a player, except that he came off like a smug Monchichi doll as Butler was upsetting their way to the Final Four. They played the least entertaining type of basketball: low scoring due to tenacious defense and a horrendous shooting percentage – even in the final. This is not the profile of a team that most would pick in a blind taste test to root for on just any day.

The reasons are as follows, which I have matched with qualities that salespeople should try to highlight to make themselves more likable to prospects.

Everyone loves an underdog. This works better in the NCAA tournament, where even the hoops purists pile on the bandwagon for much smaller schools than Butler every year. But as long as “all other things are equal (or you can make them appear so),” your customer will be attracted to you as David fighting Goliath. IBM, Microsoft, Google, Oracle are all competitive candidates for this strategy – the hard part is being even remotely equal from a product point of view.

We’re just regular people. Coach K is so recognizable he is almost a caricature of himself, like Dick Vitale or John Madden. His team is made up of nondescript robo-giants, efficiently dragging down rebounds and knocking down threes with perfect form. Butler had a collection of rustic paperboys (and one cute–as–a–button twin sister in the stands) with Pookie from the city center Y playing point guard. I’ve leaked out fact that I lived in a trailer park until I was 6 to the point where I almost have convinced myself that it was the ideal childhood playground. Showing your “down home” background makes you seem less threatening and thus more easily relatable to many prospects.

Before I stretch this analogy into the completely absurd, I’m going to cut myself off here. There are times when I really want to be a sports blogger (oh, if I could be half as cool as Bill Simmons I’d have the world by the short hairs), but I’ve got this Jigsaw/sales thing paying the bills. Tune in next week for more sales related talk – unless I give in to my pop culture fetish and bust on this year’s crop of American Idol finalists….

Oh – and register for Sales Jam already – you definitely do not want to miss out.

The New Dalai Garth

2010-02-11T09:30:26-08:00

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.

As part of my recent networking binge I attended a BIG Council meeting last week that featured a Wellness Expert named Dr. Cynthia Ackrill. When I first saw the topic, I instantly had the “yeah, that looks interesting but I don’t have time” reaction that flashes through my brain about 50 times a day. Luckily, the event was hosted by JetPool who promised a tour of their fleet of private jets, so I decided to check it out. What I got in return was well worth the time, and provided me with some follow on suggestions for managing stress that I first listed in Stressed Out Sales Guy.

The main point of the session was that “stress happens,” and is intertwined with traits and lives of even the most successful people. However, it is creating a humungous drag on the economy in terms of health and lost productivity costs. Dr. Ackrill suggested that the first step in combating this trend was for people to recognize and confront the stressors in their individual lives and then implement the “3 R’s of Stress Balancing: Reduce Exposure, Realign Perception, Raise Resilience.” She then went on to demonstrate some amazingly simple and effective breathing exercises- I was shocked to find that the more or less continual ringing in my ears actually tempered during the session!

You can find out all about Dr. Ackrill and her magic cures at www.well-spark.com. Here are a few new ones for me:

Image via Wikipedia
Let go of items based on old stories. (example, being stressed about cleaning the house when you can easily afford a house cleaner - you just don’t get one because your mother always cleaned the house)
Make sure your “authority matches your responsibilities.” I see this imbalance crippling employees at Jigsaw and customer executives alike and it makes us all crazy!
Align your actions with your values - make sure you get the most fulfillment out of the things, activities and relationships that cause you the most stress.
Work on your breathing - yoga, meditation, whatever works for you.
Be mindful of yourself - make a plan, prioritize you, don’t just run around half cocked and ready to blow all the time.

Just like with all educational endeavors (sound familiar, sales training veterans) I’m sure most of this will dissolve into the ether of daily life over time. All I know is that I’m going to keep an eye on my breathing, because my involuntary process is not doing all it can.

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