Archive for August, 2009
August 29, 2009
Below is a post written by Laura Benold, ATI’s Marketing Associate about a recent Lunch & Learn we held at Austin Technology Incubator. It was originally posted on our new ATI blog and called If You Don’t Close Sales, Your Company Won’t Survive.
ATI’s Lunch and Learn panel on sales management on August 12, 2009 began with a question: “Who in here sells?” A roomful of arms stretched upward. Everyone sells. Whether on a sales team, to prospective employers, or as the acting “every man” of a start-up business, the act of convincing others escapes no one.
While 40+ ATI member company CEOs and Founders, ATI staff, and TechBA company CEOs and Founders ate lunch in the Alamo Room of the WPRC Building on Braker Lane, the three panelists introduced themselves:
Michael Osborne (left) is the Senior Vice President of Sales for BazaarVoice: a company that makes word of mouth marketing work by enabling services and technology to gather, respond to and amplify content.
Janice (Jan) Ryan (middle) has worked in technology for 28 years and came to Austin to become the founding VP of Sales for Vignette, an early internet enterprise software company. She is currently the CEO and Founder of Social Dynamix, a new company in the social media space.
Mitch Jacobson (right) has worked just about everywhere the last 29 years in sales from Tandy Corporation to Dell to Tech Data Corporation. He started at A.B. Dick and says that, “if you can sell with a name like A.B. Dick behind you, you can sell.” He founded Eyes of Texas, an angel investment firm, and is currently the co-director at the Clean Energy Incubator advising ATI’s clean start-up companies.
Over the course of the Lunch and Learn, panelists spread significant words of wisdom. Here’s what they said:
Jan:
Results-oriented selling. Remember you’re not selling a product, you’re selling the results that a customer wants to achieve. Slide to the other side of the table and look at the process from their viewpoint.
Paint a ‘zebra.’ Include all the stripes of an ideal customer in profiling who really needs your product (like Morphine, not aspirin). Understand exact needs that would cause him to write a check. All else is secondary.
Hiring - Hire people who know why they’ve been successful. They’ll be able to repeat that process in a new situation. When you hire sales leadership, don’t assume the highest ‘pedigree’ translates to an early stage venture. Their hunger is more important.
Find the maverick. In early stage sales, there’s always someone who wants to look good in the company. Find the maverick in your sale that wants a personal win. Study what his win will be, and shape your strategy around it. Help him succeed, and you will too.
Michael:
Sales should be enjoyable experiences. “Sure, there are contracts and money involved, but it’s an enjoyable experience,” and those have been the greatest sale cycles, he says.
Look for intelligence, passion, and an ability to communicate when you hire. Sales experience previous to the job doesn’t necessarily matter; but intelligent people can answer questions or find answers, passionate people are likeable, and good communicators can drive the deal forward.
All salespeople are motivated differently. There are trailblazers, road builders and truck drivers. Trailblazers are motivated by ego, for example, and truck drivers by cash. Evolve your hiring process based on the current company needs.
Identify your target customer’s persona to increase sense of urgency. Innovators want to be first. Those who are behind want to catch up. Some work internally and think it’s about time for change. Others have a deadline. Find the pain.
Mitch:
Be persistent. In the early 1980s Mitch sold copiers. One day, while on a pitch, the copier jammed. “I was taught to say, ‘I’m glad this happened, so I can show you how easy it is to fix’, but it I couldn’t fix it,” Jacobson says. Ultimately, he made the sale because he came back later that week to follow-up.
Spend a day in the life of your customer. Someone might really need what you’re selling, but they don’t know why and you don’t know why, because you haven’t walked in their shoes.
Although you have little money to spend at the early stage, you have resources to find knowledge.
Keep track of your wins and losses. Repeat what you’ve done well and learn from what hasn’t worked out. Create and distribute ‘how the deal was done (or rejected)’ documents.
The Group:
Know when to draw the line. If you pick the wrong customer and get mired down in the details, it can kill you. That’s worse than waiting a few more months to get the right deal. “When a sale becomes a negotiation and you feel like you’re buying a car, it’s a good time to walk away. A lot of the time, they’ll come back at your price, not theirs,” says Mitch.
The pipeline is a set of stages. The stages must be easy to understand, such as “meeting scheduled, prospect, opportunity, will close” or “cold, warm, hot, closing”. Evaluate the stages of a deal daily as an individual and weekly as a team.
A deal isn’t ever really closed. It closes on some level for you when the customer signs or gives you money and for the customer when your product is implemented and they’re paying. However, good salespeople retain customers, so the cycle never really ends.
Social media creates connections that are not work-related. It allows you to “learn about the prospect and connect via a legitimate connection,” says Michael.
The session ended one and a half hours later with networking and knowledge sharing. If you’re interested in learning more about Lunch and Learn events, or how you can sponsor one, please contact Aruni Gunasegaram, director of operations.
Lunch and Learn events are an exclusive offering for ATI, ATI member companies and ATI affiliates. Speakers must be entrepreneurs and business people who can share their valuable experiences with ATI member company Founders and CEOs.
by Laura Benold, ATI Marketing Associate
August 23, 2009
School starts next week for most kids here in Austin – public or private. Many parents are in a flurry getting ready to get their kids back into a routine if they haven’t had one during the summer. For dual working parent families, like ours, who probably had our kids in summer camps it’s probably a shift back to more stricter bed times and potential looming home work days.
For us this is a very special first week of school because our kids will be attending the new Magellan International School (MIS) founded by their dad, Erin Defosse! It is Austin’s FIRST multi-language (Spanish, English, Mandarin), International Baccalaureate, Primary Years Programme school (pre-K to 2nd) ever and has already set the record for enrollment numbers for a new private school with about 45 students on Day One! Most private schools start with significantly fewer students.
They will be offering art, music and physical education as part of the standard education and will be teaching using the ‘units of inquiry’ model. You’ll have to go to the site to learn more about how that model works. As a person who is rediscovering her passion for singing, offering music is well ‘music to my ears!’
The kids have been involved in getting the school ready from helping to paint, potting plants, running errands, and assembling furniture. It’s been a great experience for them to see how something that never existed before comes to life. They might just get the entrepreneurial disease bug. 
As an entrepreneur, it’s amazing to see how much has happened from vision to fruition. In March 2007, we moved our son to the Austin International School (AIS), a wonderful school whose primary language is French. Erin grew up in Mexico so he had a strong desire for the kids to be fluent in Spanish. We really enjoyed the environment and teachers at AIS but given that neither of us knew French, Erin began searching for different alternatives and didn’t find anything suitable so in the Spring of 2008 just before I took the steady, day job, he decided to look into creating one.
Since that time, he along with someone he hired to help him get things off the ground by finding the right Head of School, not only found the perfect Head of School, Marisa Leon, from Colombia but also 3 great teachers – one from Spain, one from Colombia, and one from Chicago. They all have very sweet personalities and awesome backgrounds. I’m excited about the kids getting to work with their respective teachers. It will be interesting to see how they all adapt to living in the United States in a city that’s had over 100 degree temperatures for quite some time now.
So 20 or so months ago, MIS was a vision in Erin’s mind and now it is reality. I know it will positively effect thousands of kids who will surely go out and make a wonderful difference in this world in not only one language, not even two, but three languages. As a writer, I have come to appreciate the power of language both written and oral in changing one’s own world and the world at large. Oh to have such power in more than one language…what a gift to our kids.
So cool! 
August 18, 2009
Last year I submitted a panel for SXSW Interactive on Building A Web Business After Hours that got selected. It went really well and we got a lot of great feedback. I really enjoyed pulling it together. I’ve since learned that for me building a business like Babble Soft after hours is not something I can continue to do given the many things I’m juggling so we are looking for a new home.
This year I proposed a panel called Online/Offline Networking in the Age of Social Media inspired by one of my co-workers, Bart Bohn, Director of our IT/Wireless incubator at the Austin Technology Incubator. I’m hoping to get some great speakers from key social companies to talk about the importance of leveraging online tools to enhance your offline networking in order to meet your personal and professional goals.
Please vote for the panel at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/2851 and if you have any great speaker recommendations, let me know. You do have to register to vote.
Thank you and I look forward to seeing some of you at SXSW Interactive next year!
Posted by Aruni
6:38 pm •
conferences •
August 10, 2009
I’m on a winning streak! Not only did I just win a bunch of I-Spy stuff, but I also got a call this morning from our local radio station Mix 94.7 and they told me I won a special viewing with Diane Birch, a great up and coming singer. I first saw her at SXSW earlier this year at Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop party. She really has such an amazing voice which is so mature for someone in her mid-20’s. She’s been on David Letterman and played with Prince. Fortunately, I could shift my schedule to make it there for about an hour in the late afternoon before I had to pick up the kids.
Last week I got an email about her visit to Austin, so I went to the site and signed up for a chance to win. I didn’t really think I’d win so when I got the call I was pretty surprised.
I even got a picture with her and an autographed little poster, that I’m not really sure what I’ll do with. I’m wondering if I should take these unusual wins as a sign that I’m on the right path in my life journey right now or just chalk it up to mere coincidence?
I have been really interested in learning more about music, getting into the music scene and my kids could certainly use some more brain exercising games so they are both nice coincidences.
Many great things in life and business can only be attributable to luck. But you have to be open to the opportunity. There’s a difference between the person who walks by a $5 bill and sees it because she’s looking around and open to opportunities and the one who walks right on by because she’s looking straight ahead absorbed in the incessant thoughts in her head. I often wonder how many opportunities I’ve missed because I’m too caught up in thinking and worrying too much about things I probably shouldn’t.
Posted by Aruni
8:32 pm •
music •
August 5, 2009
Sometimes I get lucky and win something. Out of the blue I won the following just for being a subscriber to Parent Reviewers.
One (1) Grand Prize winner for the Grand Prize Pack including:
Wii Video Game ‘Ultimate I SPY’
Board Game ‘I SPY Memory Game’
I SPY A to Z: A Book of Picture Riddles
I SPY Treasure Hunt
Grand Prize Pack valued at $85.99
It arrived the other day and I opened the package this evening. My daughter ran to show her brother the Wii game and he said “Whatever, it’s not Lego Star Wars.“ I told him he had a bad attitude and he said “Sorry” but didn’t really mean it because he has been dreaming about Lego Star Wars for quite some time because one of his best buds has it. I’m sure he’ll like the I SPY game when he plays it. Then we played the Board Game and he really enjoyed it and ended up winning by getting the most matches and beating me and his sister. She’s a good sport because she’s two and a half years younger than he is so she usually doesn’t win unless he lets her win, which he frequently does so she’ll keep playing with him. However, she often beats him at Bowling and Boxing on the Wii, which I think perplexes him.
He read one of the books and my daughter and I skimmed through the other but we were horrible at trying to find all the things in the complex pictures so we just talked about what we could find. I think it’s a bit much for a 4 year old but she was excited to see the light houses because she remembered that we went inside one when we went on vacation to South Padre.
Thanks Elina at Parent Reviewers for being so cool and giving away cool prizes!
The random pictures of some lovely fuchsia/hot pink colored roses above are on my desk at work. I got them this past weekend from Central Market (a grocery store here in Austin). They opened up so beautifully and this mediocre iPhone picture of a few of them on my desk doesn’t really do them justice, but they are so pretty I thought I’d share. They were 25 stems for $12.99! I took some to work as well for some of the other women in the office.
August 3, 2009
We’ve all heard about the pluses and minuses of multitasking. We’ve also heard that women tend to be better at multitasking than men. I think it depends on the person. I’ve worked with some men who have been excellent at juggling many things, but overall I think women are wired to be better at it because of having children. Children, especially more than one (I can’t imagine having 3 or more), tend to pull you in 5 directions at once and if you don’t have one eye on a kid, he could fall into a lava pit or a crocodile could eat her.
I’ve always been fairly good at multitasking or should I say serial tasking. I can jump back and forth from thing to thing and get most things done timely. It’s probably somewhat of an ADD trait that I’ve heard many entrepreneurs confess to having, but there’s a point when it becomes counter productive (see Dilbert comic below).
I’m dealing with about 5 really big things right now and each has its own complexities. Way beyond what one person should advisedly handle at one time. And because I can’t focus fully on one thing, everything seems to be suffering or shall I say I’m not executing 100% or able to play my A game at any of them. I even published a blog post I didn’t mean to publish and I’ve never done that in the over 2 years I’ve been blogging! There are constraints (time, money, stamina, fear, etc.) that seem impossible to work around in the near term and ‘impossible’ is a word that I usually smile at. And in between there are birthday parties to plan and bills to pay.
I remember dealing with so many things when I was founding CEO of my first start-up from customers, suppliers, investors, board members, to employees, etc. Each area needed special attention and invariably one or more suffers at some time or another. You had to have your shit together when facing each constituent even if you felt like everything was just a hair away from falling apart. You have to play the part superbly (no room to mess up your lines) and make sure your customers know you aren’t going to disappear tomorrow. And you have to make sure your investors and Board haven’t lost faith in you and can see that the customers still have faith in you. And you have to keep morale up with your employees and assure your suppliers you’ll pay them. So many entrepreneurs get lost at times like these because it is hard to keep all those balls up in the air while at the same time making sure you take care of yourself (i.e., minimize the fast food and lack of exercise).
So what do we do? We get up. We put our pants/skirts on and we show up. We put a smile on our face because we have to, and we know no one really understands how we sometimes feel like we are free falling with no safety net and no parachute. Of course, if you aren’t anti-social, you have friends and family to listen to you when you feel like crying or punching the wall, but unless they’ve also walked a mile in your shoes, they can’t fully understand the sensations or lack thereof that you are processing. And sometimes they let you down because they don’t know how to be there for you like you need and that hurts. Or they think they are trying to be there for you and instead they inadvertently hurt you. And most of the time when you feel like punching that wall, you can’t! So you put your game face on. You hide and fake it until it eventually turns around. It does eventually turn around but it feels like a hurricane while you walk through high winds putting one step in front of the other. As an entrepreneur, you have to be optimistic or at least optimistically pessimistic or is that pessimistically optimistic.
And if you have kids, they can all of a sudden give you a reason to keep on going as my son did today. One of my good friend’s father died last week and they are going to miss my son’s upcoming birthday party. They have a son a year younger who he loves playing with, and I took both kids over to visit them this evening. I told my son, let’s bring him one of the little Hot Wheel cars that we got for your goody bags since he can’t make your party. He said, “Let me look for the best one…my favorite one. I want to give him the best one.” He knew his friend’s grandfather had died, although he doesn’t really know what death means. He showed me the car he wanted to give him and it was the special one he had chosen for himself, and I started to cry. I hugged him and told him how proud I was of him for doing such a nice thing and how special it was to show how much he cared for his friend during this time. He hugged me back because he saw how happy I was with him. My daughter asked me why I was crying, because I never cry in front of them (or cry often for that matter) and I told her I was happy that her brother was so thoughtful and she hugged me too. I thought to myself “I guess I’ve done at least something right to have an almost 7 year old son with such a good heart.”
On the car ride over I told him to play with his friend and make him happy and laugh. And he said “Just like I do with my sister when she’s upset? I do this and that to make her laugh.“ They both started laughing in the car and I said “Yes, just like that. It’s nice to make people smile in hard times.” Then I cried some more silent tears of sadness and happiness at the two beautiful kids I have been blessed with.
So the moral of this post I guess is Don’t over multitask. Have kids. Although kids are a big cause of over multitasking, they help you keep things in perspective and give you the reason to wake up in the morning, put your pants/skirt on, put your smiling game face on, and figure out how to do the impossible! 
August 1, 2009
I realized just now that the post I was working on about the Difference Between Boys And Girls got published before I finished it. That’s what happens after a hectic, draining week and you just start hitting buttons in a blurry state of exhaustion and you think it says Save Draft and it says Publish and the neurons in your brain don’t connect to what happened until the email shows up in your in box the next day. UGH. Anyway, when I finish it, I’ll re-post with hopefully more clarity on the point I was trying to get across. I’ve taken it off for now.
I hope that builds some suspense to see how much more understandable I can make it. I apologize for the cliff hanger…
I need to add a category called Oops to the blog.
Posted by Aruni
9:50 am •
random stuff •
