The Legend of the Purple Squirrel

Part II

Being a virtual team we had people stationed all over the country. I lived in Georgia, my primary Sales Engineer lived in Providence, and our corporate office was in Boston.

A few years ago, in the middle of summer, our inside team finds an opportunity at a DC non-profit organization. This was a common event that was made special by the first phone call "Yeah, we meant to call you guys, but we forgot, but we have you scheduled for an onsite presentation this Wednesday".

"Whoa" was my initial response. Without giving us any written requirements, 36 hours notice, and no real contact to any of the decision makers, we were supposed to assemble our team and come into their organization and be relevant to their project based on one phone call. A project whose requirements where not going to be documented until after our first presentation. Lovely.

Frankly I wanted to take a pass, but unfortunately, it would have taken more effort to get out of going, than actually doing the meeting.

So Cahill and I meet up in DC, in July, wearing suits, looking suave, and with the lowest G.A.D. (Give A Damn) factor imaginable.

Its interesting, when your G.A.D. factor is that low, you come across as extremely confident. So confident in fact that when we met the project lead, who happened to be French, we corrected his English on our way into the board room.

We enter the board room and the consultant leading the evaluation(the one who was late on documenting the requirements) politely introduces herself and gives us the instructions. There was to be two segments to the presentation; "business requirements" and "technical requirements". She would monitor the questions during the demonstration and only the appropriate questions should be answered in each section. To clarify, if a technical question was asked during the business portion of the presentation, we were not to answer, but she would right down the question and we answer during the technical portion.

We had made reservations and announced to the consultant that we had a lunch meeting down the street from the Capital and would be finishing fifteen minutes earlier than the allotted time. She nodded her head in approval.

So the team for the Business portion of the requirements files in. Very nice people. After a brief conversation I realized it was the consultant's lack of performance that has caused the mad rush. But the G.A.D. factor still remained in the cellar.

We gave one of the most sincere, straight-forward presentations of our lives that afternoon. "No, our software doesn't do that", "I wouldn't try that if I were you, it will be expensive", and ,my favorite, "Our competitor does a better job in that area". I don't know if you ever had the Porterhouse at the Capital Grille in DC, but yeah, its worth it and I didn't want to be late.

During our meeting, no less than 20 times, our responses were interrupted by a shrill "Don't Answer!, Please save that for the technical portion!!!!". In fact the consultant stopped our presentation to scold the evaluation team (the people that were paying her) that they should limit their questions to only the topics listed on the requirements document (the one they told us that didn't exist 36 hours earlier).

So fine, we power through the business requirement, being polite, professional, and very succinct.

Finally, the consultant announces that we have reached the end of the business requirements. We were to take a 5 minute break and allow the technical team enough time to file in, and the business team to file out.

So we grab a coke, check our watches, and expect a mad rush of people.

One person gets up to leave.

And that's it.

No other people come in.

The exact same people are on both teams. The one who left was a secretary who was curious to what a content management system could do.

An group eye roll commenced in the direction of the consultant as we continued on.

We thanked everyone for their time. I had my steak, and we left DC.

Two days later we learn the evaluation was down to us and Microsoft. Microsoft hadn't actually shown up for their presentation, they barely returned phone calls, and no one at the client actually had seen the product. But they did know that it was doing the site for the XBox, so it had that going for them. (Disclaimer: My Microsoft stock is underwater right now, please buy as much Microsoft as you can).

So it was my team, who had jumped through hoops, paid prime travel dollar, and had 3 days invested in this, vs. Microsoft who was almost too busy to talk to the client in the final round.

It was time for the Purple Squirrel.

Continued......

Whats in a Name?

The post below was forwarded to me in response to a question posted on linkedin.com. After initially reading and laughing, a horrible thought struck me "Uh, oh I might be one of the guys he's talking about".

Thank you Gerald for sharing

"I've had business development people greet me in public places in a highly enthusiastic manner, which diminished not one iota after I advised them that I did not actually go by the name by which they addressed me.

In fact, I am an entirely different person and have an actual acquaintance with the real people they thought I was.

The five times this has happened, I was pressed to accept a business card and a luncheon invitation, both of which I have not further pursued."

-Gerald L.
www.linkedin.com

Purple Squirrel's Performance Anxiety

Sales meetings come in many forms - educational overviews, service level negotiations, real estate tours. For those of us in technology sales, "Proof of Concept" meeting brings the sort of peril that can take three seasoned professionals and strip them of all their confidence.

Government agencies, unlike private industry, need to justify each step of a purchase process, documenting the many ways that their requirements, which often strain reality require a 50% discount for the pleasure of doing business with them.

Back in the early 00's, Sasser, "Steve," and I presented to the agency developing the project scope and specification for a website spanning all Federal agencies, and bringing information resources together in one spot. The agency compiled a panel of two outside consultants and internal technology specialists to compare and evaluate the companies bidding for the work.

Our instructions were to arrive at the appointed date and time with a virgin laptop (If you knew our company, there was no such thing. "bada bing, I'll be here all week, don't forget to tip your waitress") and await further instructions.

Upon arrival, we had a schedule timed to the minute, with sections charmingly titled -

"install software"
"receive materials"
"build site from scratch"

During the break, the three of us happened to be using the men's room at the same time, and luckily, all had brought all of our bags, jackets, whatever.

"Whaddya think? They're all inside, we could leave now, and just pretend the whole thing never happened."

"That's an option - they don't know our hotels?"

"You leave anything behind in there?"

"No, we're good - let's jet."

Of course, being wusses, we didn't.

Point being, even given a structured evaluation process and intelligent people running that process, the temptation to ask a company to create a Purple Squirrel out of thin air, on a moment's notice, keeps smart people and good products from getting to the market.

The Back Button

A few years a go, one of my Sales Engineers was involved in a bake off at financial services firm in Manhattan. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a bake off in the world of enterprise software is used to described when a company, evaluating solutions, brings in a multiple vendors and submits their systems to a series of scripted tasks. The company's evaluation team monitors the performance and attempts to get a handle on what they can reasonably expect from the system, and look for those hidden gotchas that may come back to bite them in the butt.

So we make it into the bake off, and there is a lot of excitement around the office because if this financial services firm is a house hold name and to have them as a client would do wonders for enhancing our reputation as a major player in our field. Needless to say we threw our best people onto the project and sent a small army to pull this off.

Each vendor was assigned two days. We go in for our first day and things are going along reasonably well.

A word here about content management systems. The beauty behind them is that they separate content from its presentation layer. This allows someone to simply fill out a basic web form and have it published into HTML, PDF, XML simultaneously with the proper tags, formatting, etc. The user interface for our system was all browser-based. So you could have two windows open, one where you are typing in your content, and the other as your content appears on your website.

As I mentioned, things were going along great, and we were in the middle of showing how to create a press release by simply filling out one of our web forms, when a member of the evaluation team stops us. "Hit your the browser's back button right now" he ordered.

"Excuse me?" came our reply.

"Hit your back button. I want to see if it saves what you have typed so far or you would lose everything when it goes back to the previous page"

"Ok". Our Sales Engineer navigated back one page. Its at that point that the question was answered. Unless the user clicked on the "Save" button at the bottom of the screen, the newly typed content would be lost.

Awkward Silence.

The evaluation team left the room.

More Awkward Silence.

After 20 minutes, the head of the team came in, thanked us for our efforts, but politely dismissed us by stating that we have failed in one of the major requirements and that there would be no need for us to return the following day.

After our attempts to stay were politely denied, we left.

The bake off was held in Tower 1, World Trade Center. The date was September 10th, 2001.