September 02, 2004 - 15:42
The Truth Experiment
By Mark Stuyt A senior software exec vows to tell the truth in every business meeting for one year. It doesn t work out. What words cross your mind when you think of a salesman? Do integrity, honesty and trust race to the forefront? I suspect not. More likely your eyes narrow, hackles rise and suspicions awake as visions of used cars, vacuum cleaners and Herb Tarlick overwhelm you. Rest assured you re not alone. For years I wondered to what extent telling the absolute truth would impact my sales results. So, partly as a creative strategy to make the mundane task of flogging Enterprise Resource Planning software more interesting, and partly as a self-imposed social experiment, I committed to telling the complete truth to customers for an entire year. You read correctly. The absolute truth. Not the watered-down, it s not a lie if you really believe it in your heart, acts of omission don t really qualify kind of truth either. I committed to being completely honest and forthright in each interaction I had with my customers and prospects for the entire year, and I was prepared to risk my income to satisfy my curiosity. Little did I know at the time that my self-indulgent experiment would ultimately lead me to resign from PeopleSoft and move my family to Mexico. When asked to participate in dysfunctional Request for Proposal (RFP) processes, I declined. When asked to share my opinion on product quality and stability, my responses were not filtered through a corporate agenda. When I discovered customers making undisciplined and/or naive decisions that would result in expensive long-term ramifications, I gave them clear guidance. When asked a direct question during a sales cycle, I told the truth. That being said, I didn t wield the truth like a club. I was professional, appropriate and sensitive to the position and objectives of the individual I was speaking to; but I told the truth. At the end of 2003, a year in which I worked harder, longer and provided more strategic value to my customers than at any other period in my career, I found myself far short of my revenue target for the first time in many, many years. To put this into proper context, it s important to understand that my employer, PeopleSoft, is an empowering and supportive organization with a strong management team, sound products and ethical business practices that are largely in alignment with my own, and customers that are, for the most part, content. So why bolt? SLAPPED IN THE FACE
Shortly after embarking on my honesty will enhance my results lab experiment, I assumed responsibility for one of PeopleSoft s larger Canadian public-sector customers. During one of my initial meetings I was reprimanded by a senior executive, who declared that he was tired of dealing with salesmen intent on selling him software. (Huh?) He strongly suggested that instead of trolling for purchase orders, I should instead work with his organization to extract more value from its existing investment. With that direction, I convinced PeopleSoft to invest more than $80,000 in billable resources to remedy some immediate problems (related to process and implementation challenges rather than product issues), then embarked on a nine-month project that culminated in a compelling business case promising a $50 million payback. This initiative required minimal upfront investment, leveraged the organization s existing solution and focused primarily on internal compliance, rather than software acquisition. During this process I facilitated strategy workshops with a broad cross-section of the customer community, interviewed dozens of functional and technical stakeholders, analyzed the customer s existing business data and validated our conclusions with the functional business owners. After nine months of work and countless flights (I qualified for Air Canada Elite status on visits to this account alone), I requested a meeting with the aforementioned executive to present our findings. Not only had my team successfully mapped significant measurable cost savings back to dysfunctional business processes, our research also uncovered a disturbing fact: only a fraction of the customer s employees were actually using the finance software that had been implemented. To be blunt, our customer was operating one of the country s most expensive general ledgers. The meeting did not bear the fruit we anticipated. Instead of appreciating our investment and commitment to addressing what was clearly a shared challenge, we were branded as biased, the data dismissed as invalid and our intentions judged as self-serving. In this executive s opinion his staff already ran a world-class purchasing organization despite the damning nature of the data. I had spent countless nights working on the project, skipped my sons sports activities, bypassed school plays and declined social and family events in order to research and craft this report, all to produce an analysis that was undeniably compelling, yet soundly discounted. Ironically, to this day this organization continues to complain about the value it receives from its software investment and the single-minded, self-serving motivations of our sales organization. Had this been an isolated experience I might have simply chalked it up to traditional bureaucratic impotence, but events were simultaneously unfolding on the private sector front as well. While in process with the aforementioned customer, I inherited responsibility for one of Vancouver s most respected and successful companies, which, at the time, was refusing to pay its annual software maintenance bill due to a perceived bug in our software. While we empathized with their situation, our software was operating as designed and as documented, and PeopleSoft carried no legal obligation to provide this customer with anything other than its condolences. Yet in spite of this customer s lose/win negotiation position, I persuaded PeopleSoft to commit to developing a custom solution that addressed this unique business process problem. Ethically, it was simply the right thing to do. Unfortunately, while we were securing internal development resources to resolve their issues (at our cost), they were negotiating with one of our competitors prior to the completion of a lengthy product selection process we were involved in. PeopleSoft invested more than $50,000 in pursuit of this opportunity only to discover near the completion of the process that it was not being afforded the same degree of disclosure and guidance as the competitors. We were essentially used as cannon fodder to ensure a leveraged negotiation position with the eventual winner. Losing a legitimate competition is inevitable when you sign up for sales school, but being manipulated and deceived (especially when it results in lost nights and weekends with my family) is maddening. This experience not only negated the respect I previously held for this company, it resulted in it losing me, on a personal level, as a profitable customer. BOTTOM-LINE DOLLARS
It s difficult, if not impossible, to measure the financial impact of poor purchasing decisions that result from mistrust. Project management disciplines don t measure the time, money and resources that would have been saved and/or spared had the right product been selected. That said, in my public sector example, $50 million of taxpayer s money will be unnecessarily spent over the next five years to purchase commodity supplies. In my second example, the organization will potentially forego incremental business value and/or cost savings as a result of running a dishonest selection process. If we play the above examples out across the millions of sales campaigns run each year on business application software alone, the aggregated impact on the economy is staggering, ultimately resulting in inflated project costs, lost business opportunities and unrealized shareholder value. These prices come as a result of the imbalance of power that exists between buyers and sellers during the procurement process, with buyers wielding absolute control over bidding vendors. This counterproductive imbalance has been in place since Eve sold Adam on the idea of a fruit salad, and I suspect it won t change anytime soon. What amazes me, however, is how account executives involved in selling strategic business solutions solutions that ultimately drive business flexibility and operational efficiency are often treated no better than the average retail appliance salesman. I ve worked in technology sales for more than 15 years, with some of the largest and most respected companies in the industry, and continue to find myself astounded at how little trust is placed in relationships with vendor representatives regardless of their tenure, experience and content. For a business executive to accept that a salesman is a peer is to accept that the imbalance of power between buyer and seller is inappropriate. And as I ve seen on countless occasions, most executives would rather retain control, or prove themselves superior, than be successful. Fortunately there are notable exceptions that make the negative situations easier to digest. When I worked with Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), its business executives were deeply engaged in project definition, selection and implementation with success criteria predicated on functional requirements that mapped to measurable business objectives. My sales and implementation team members were treated as peers and respected as professionals throughout the project, which was, not surprisingly, completed on time, under budget and deployed with more capabilities than were originally scoped. And while there were issues and challenges along the way, the lack of finger pointing and vendor bashing, coupled with a mutual commitment to success, saw us through the inevitable issues that accompany large projects. At no point during the engagement did any member of my team feel like anything less than an equal, which resulted in CPR receiving an enhanced level of personal performance and an unwavering commitment to shared success. POWER PLAY
Despite the CPR experience, the conclusion I reached at the end of my limited social experiment was that while executives desire stronger strategic value from the account executives who service their organizations, in reality they re unwilling to create an environment that allows a true peer relationship to develop, especially if it entails relinquishing their position of control. Unfortunately, trust-based relationships take time to develop, whereas the bulk of us operate in a business cycle driven by the financial quarter. And producing quarterly results often comes at the expense of doing the right thing. So as much as the buying community has trained us to act as high-priced seals, the selling community has given customers ample reason to be wary and distrustful, resulting in a classic chicken-and-egg scenario that plays itself out quarter after quarter. There s no easy answer to this age-old problem, but at the micro-level there is room for optimism. As I discovered, for every two customers mired in being right or driving a dishonest process, there is a Canadian Pacific Railway out there that values integrity and partnership, and is open to hearing other truths and evaluating their merit. If organizations are going to move from today s pride-based procurement model to one grounded in value and relationships, they need to appoint open-minded business sponsors to make strategic technology decisions, then provide account executives with unfettered access to them during the selection process. The resulting dialogues and exchange of ideas will manifest in creative new solutions and expanded perspectives. Clarity always leads to better decisions. Conversely, when account executives cultivate a trusted relationship with a customer they should hang on to it like their career depends on it not only because it will ultimately return enhanced financial dividends, but also because it introduces an element of meaning and fulfillment into their day-to-day experiences that makes the balance of their relationships easier to bear. Not surprisingly, the reactions to all this from my colleagues have been mixed. They unanimously agree with my analysis of the unbalanced relationships that exist between buyers and sellers, and the subsequent price buyers pay to retain their illusion of control, but few are prepared to adopt my radical approach (especially after reviewing my T4). The general consensus is customers don t want to hear the absolute truth, and telling them so will negatively impact a salesman s income. It s far easier and more financially rewarding to answer RFP questions than to challenge them. As one of my co-workers stated simply, We ve been trained by the buying community to appeal to their egos rather than their business needs and to do otherwise is too costly. Ultimately, my experiment forced me to question the value I derive from the 50 to 60 hours I exchange each week for an income, and convinced me that continuing at this income level could only be achieved if I wanted to act the role of the salesman: positioning and spinning my value propositions such that they coincidentally match the perceived needs extracted from my prospects during the discovery process. While financially rewarding, this approach is uninteresting at best; there are far too many career possibilities to explore in life that don t require compromising my dignity for an income. I ll concede that it s possible I m letting a handful of parallel incidents set an entire chain of events in motion unnecessarily, or that I m simply overreacting to an uncomfortable pair of negative business results. But I doubt it. I ve been dealing with variants of the above scenarios for years, be it with Computer Associates, 3Com, Pivotal Software or PeopleSoft, though playing a far more complicit role in the process than I realized at the time. And if I am wrong, 12 months on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta evaluating my next step in life isn t necessarily an unbearable consequence.
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November 10, 2003 - 01:52
No One Cares About Your Free Time But You
By Mark Stuyt Technology has blurred the traditional lines between office and home and work and leisure, and in so doing has challenged us to accept greater personal accountability for maintaining a balanced lifestyle. Corporations have begun issuing alwayson communication devices like the Palm and BlackBerry, en masse, to enable realtime access to corporate information.
They ve gambled, astutely, that employees with ubiquitous access to email will engage and respond to work requests, regardless of the time of day or night. And they guessed right. Beyond just PDAs, organizations are increasingly deploying business applications over the Internet, enabling all employees with a home PC and broadband services (or dial up and the patience of a saint) to access their office environment 24/7. Throw in a wireless router from your friendly neighbourhood computer retailer and presto, your house becomes your office. Clearly these business tools empower employees to be more effective, but at what cost? A balanced lifestyle is essential to maintaining sustainable productivity. Revised extended health and benefits programs now endorse a host of progressive new services that include acupuncture, massage, personal coaching, naturopaths, nutritionists, online anonymous counselling and health club memberships. Philanthropic management teams didn t expand these costly programs through random acts of kindness; the change resulted from a growing body of research
that links the physical and emotional well being of a corporation s workforce to its productivity and profitability. Yet while one corporate arm understands the financial benefits of free time to a healthy, balanced employee community, the other is simultaneously accessorizing it with a smorgasbord of bleeding-edge gadgets in hopes of rooting out untouched units of productivity. Unmanaged, these productivity tools chip away at the few remaining moments of solitude we have left between conference calls, proposals, corporate travel, expense reports, business plans, customer visits and briefing documents. COMPETING GOALS Given that each corporate arm is acting on legitimate, sound business strategies that align with corporate growth and profitability objectives, the accountability falls squarely on employees to maintain the balance that allows them to operate at peak (or near peak) performance, without sacrificing their souls in the process. As family and work priorities shift and evolve, balance becomes elusive. By virtue of reading this magazine I suspect your laptop is a familiar sight around the house most nights and weekends, you find the intrusive vibration of a BlackBerry too seductive to ignore and you ve entertained redirecting personal e-mail to your corporate address to ensure it s viewed in a predictable and timely manner. More importantly, if you buy into the belief that life experience is moreimportant than life accomplishment, and yet find yourself negotiating (internally) every Friday afternoon over which weekend activities can be compressed to accommodate your unfinished workload, then something clearly has run amok. Until you fall upon that elusive perfect job that weds your passion with your ability to generate a desirable income, I suggest you commit to leaving your laptop at work two nights a week, restrict Web surfing at home to topics that feed your curiosity (not your bank account) and switch your BlackBerry s vibrate feature off when you pull out of the parking lot at the end of the day. With this pattern in place, start to systematically work your way through every last offering your benefits program allows. Bare your soul to the e-counsellor; schedule an exploratory trip to the naturopath for a cleansing dose of dirt, roots, herbs and twigs; ink a weekly massage into your schedule (on company time) then gleefully wait for the reimbursement cheque to arrive in the mailbox. While it may take some time to release the guilt that accompanies your newfound balance, I suspect you ll be pleasantly surprised with the positive impact it has on your work.
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January 06, 2003 - 06:07
Buyer be warned
By Mark Stuyt This frustrating scenario plays itself out with predictable regularity because the procurement processes organizations rely upon to facilitate technology selection are flawed. By way of example, I recently reviewed a 200-plus page RFP, requesting solutions to a simple business problem. The challenges and desired end-state were well articulated in the first 10 pages, but the following 190 went on to describe in painful and excruciating detail how the solution had to look, feel and behave. It was clear that the IT artist responsible for crafting this 21st century rendition of War and Peace was bound and determined to embark on an unnecessary, employment-preserving custom development effort rather than follow the pragmatic path of least resistance and choose from a half-dozen commercially available solutions designed specifically to solve the stated business challenge. Due to the bias oozing out of the document, no self-respecting sales executive with a shred of experience would expend more than a nanosecond contemplating this opportunity; it was clear who would be awarded the contract from the manner in which it was drafted. Smart application software vendors will enforce business rules which preclude their sales teams from responding to high-risk RFPs due to historically disappointing success rates. With the average cost of a complex sales cycle ranging between $20,000 and $50,000, investing in a pre-determined beauty pageant brings unwanted attention and notoriety, regardless of how attractive the solution might appear to an optimistic sales organization.The net result is that viable, creative solutions never see the light of day and the business community is none the wiser. Traditional technology procurement processes generally follow a predictable path. After months of analysis business executives look to their IT colleagues to convert a results-driven body of work into a successful technology-based project. IT filters the business challenges through their technology bias and then scurries away to craft an RFP that, all too frequently, comes out reading like their preferred vendor's latest brochure-ware. The problem lies partially in IT biases; they're unavoidable but dangerous, as the business community relies on IT to coordinate and facilitate the selection process itself. Business has to take a stronger role in the creation of RFPs if they're to benefit from the wealth of experience and knowledge available in the marketplace. Application software is far too strategic to be shoehorned into a procurement process designed to select laptops, Web servers and office furniture. There are rays of hope on the horizon, however. I was delighted to stumble across a recent BC Premier's Technology Council report recommending "the BC government address the unique nature of IT procurement through the adoption of a benefitsdriven model based on business objectives rather than the technology requirements of government." In other words, the report suggested it was time the BC government stopped buying tools and started partnering with the private sector to create innovative solutions. This ringing endorsement of a Joint Solutions Procurement (JSP) approach, from the public sector of all places, is encouraging and private enterprise would be wise to follow the BC government's bold leadership. JSP is predicated on a belief that business partnership and innovation are more important than database structures and technology preferences. It's about asking for creative designs to build a new home rather than providing a detailed blueprint demanding obscure building materials found solely in the remote rain forest of Borneo. JSPs aren't appropriate for every technology-related business project, but for those that require a novel approach or unbridled creativity, they're well worth the risk.
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