Mom, I Want To Go To Coder Camp!

Salesforce’s new incubator in their San Mateo office is up to 32 partners.

A complete win-win for Salesforce and their partners.

How about a Codegear incubator in Scotts Valley?

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Posted by Matt Levin on April 26th, 2007 under Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Lake Customer Service-gon - Where All The Companies Are Above Average

Great Harvard Business School paper I tagged a while back:

We surveyed 362 firms and found that 80 percent believed they delivered a "superior experience" to their customers. But when we asked customers about their own perceptions, we found that they rated only 8 percent of companies as truly delivering a superior experience.

The article highlights the importance of the "Three D’s" - Design, Deliver, Develop:

1. They design the right offers and experiences for the right customers.
2. They deliver these propositions by focusing the entire company on them with an emphasis on cross-functional collaboration.
3. They develop their capabilities to please customers again and again—by such means as revamping the planning process, training people in how to create new customer propositions, and establishing direct accountability for the customer experience.

So basic, yet so difficult at the same time - at first it appears they are advocating 1) listening to customers 2) working together and 3) innovating. We all learned this in kindergarten, right?

Not so fast.

Point 1 is really about gathering the right data about your customers, which means understand all myriad needs and pain points of each customer segment - Distributed global enterprises develop differently than solo shops.

Point 2 requires ownership across multiple functions - when was the last time marketing/IT/finance/etc. was chomping at the bit to help out with sales/HR/etc.’s initiative?

Point 3 requires change and risk-taking in the face of success; so much more difficult than change after failure.

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Posted by Matt Levin on April 26th, 2007 under Customer Experience, Customer Service, Strategy | 2 Comments »

Throw Your Marketing Department To The Wolves

I love this kind of customer interaction they are promoting at Salesforce.com.

Giving the community the opportunity to have input into the types of messages and brands they consume and use on a daily business is a great business practice, even if it does leave some newly-minted MBA’s feeling like they’ve had the wind taken out of their sails.

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Posted by Matt Levin on April 4th, 2007 under Marketing | 2 Comments »

Software Alliance Parters (Or, The Other Guys That Sell Your Stuff)

Glenn Gow of Crimson Consulting has a great post on alliance marketing.

The overall theme of his post is that to take partners seriously, you have to choose carefully, invest, and most of all, give them respect:

"Alliance partners want more than funding and brand recognition"

The implied second half of all of this is that partners have to respect the vendor back - a culture of mutual respect and working together is crucial. When that gets out of alignment, the partners don’t represent the vendor well, and business priorities aren’t shared.

And as always, the customers get the brunt of the negative effects and they start looking elsewhere where it’s easier to be or become a customer.

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Posted by Matt Levin on April 4th, 2007 under Sales Process, Strategy | 3 Comments »

Software Purchasing - Kicking Butt & Grabbing Ears

Andy Lawrence makes an interesting observation into the mind of a CIO:

A couple of years ago, the CIO of major international airline told me why he had no plans to use open source software: “I need someone to kick when things don’t work”, he explained. With open source, there was no one to kick.

While that may be less and less true as certain OS projects develop (i.e. Eclipse), the observation remains.

On the flipside, software vendors (like us) often struggle with the converse of this, especially in enterprise sales - figuring out who’s ear to grab. Who is making the decision? Is it the developers themselves, the VP of App Dev, the procurement officer, etc.?

As a general rule, I believe that the smaller the number of seats at stake / size of organization / etc., the less of a classic "solution sell" takes place, and in development tools, it starts to become a techical/product feature vs. overall price-driven sell.

A big question still remains - how do you sell a tool to multiple type of buyers (i.e. all your customer segments) and tailor your message (not to mention the development of actual product features!) to those segments?

This question gets at the heart of building a real go-to-market strategy for software - which in general requires the following (and is NOT a trivial exercise):

1) Map out the feature framework of your product - i.e. a type of detailed data sheet that conforms to every feature aspect of that type of product and ranks your product appropriately (i.e. if it’s a database, it should include an evaluation of ACID compliance, transaction control, etc.)

2) Rank all your competitors products in the same fashion relative to your product - this creates a pure technical product landscape

3) Breakdown the entire market into appropriate segments that have the correct differentiating criteria that are relevant to your product (i.e. if you’re talking about an enterprise database, customers in different verticals often have different needs, and you not only sell directly to end customers, but often through SI partners - thus a certain customer segment may be "medical/hospital on-premise SIs"

4) Size each customer segment - IDC/Gartner/D&B data only takes you too far; you have to make some smart assumptions and analysis or if you’re lazy, hire a market research firm.

5) Map out the influencers in each product segment - who makes the buying decision, and how much influence do they have?

6) Map and rank the value of each product feature to each segment and each buyer in that segment

7) Cost out (in terms of $ and time) the ability to access each segment and buyer - this can be a rough number and be done with some obvious thoughts in mind around adjacency (i.e. if your product has always been sold to large aerospace customers, you’re going to have a tough time penetrating consumer electronics) and sales capability (i.e. if your salesforce are all inexperienced inside salespeople and you are now trying to have conversations with CIO’s)

Estimate conversion rates for product switching by segment (i.e. do buyers switch vendors frequently, or get locked into long contracts / use cycles?)

9) Rank each segment by size, your competitive position, cost to access, and conversion rates.

This should now paint a picture of where to aim your guns - where the real market opportunity is, where you are competitive currently, and where you have the ability to provide real value.

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Posted by Matt Levin on March 23rd, 2007 under Sales Process | 3 Comments »

Calling All Java Developers - Yeah, I know you’re out there

In buying software, there are a variety of different factors that a buyer looks at - price, features, etc.

The gains that are derived from the sum of all these features net of the cost of the software is the value.

Simple, huh?

Well, not really - we all know that in the real world the gains and costs are hard to quantify and people often value them differently, and may even differ on what is a positive and negative, such as IDE activity monitoring tools (plus for the VP of App Dev, sometimes not so good for the developer).

One of the core principles of the value of RAD tools like JBuilder and Delphi is that they save developers time (among many other things). For arguments sake we’ll stick with time savings.

One quick way to think about value of a software tool in this time saver paradigm is "component value" - i.e. breakdown all the value-generating pieces of the tool and quantify them in terms of time saved. With JBuilder, one could quickly build a case like this (note that the estimates are all overly conservative for the sake of argument).

*TeamInsight will save a developer an average of 1 hour/week @ a cost of $50/hour for 50 weeks = $2500 savings
*JBuilder’s extensive help menu will save a developer an average of 12 minutes/week @ $50/hour for 50 weeks = $500 savings

Total gain is $3000 which net of the cost of an Enterprise license is $1000 in savings. Not bad.

So here’s the question for you - When you’re looking at Java tools, how do you value the components, and how do you value the features in JBuilder?

I’m all about hearing what you have to say - and I think Ben would agree (check out his 1st line item).

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Posted by Matt Levin on March 21st, 2007 under Sales Process | 3 Comments »

The Buying Experience

There are occasionally times when I like being sold to. I enjoy the fact that a salesperson is understanding what I need and providing some sort of solution to that at a price and value that makes sense.

Good restaurants are often a great example of this - you like your waiter/waitress, they know the menu (what’s good / not so good), they ask about your preferences, and they help you pick something great, often with a more expensive bottle of wine than you originally intended to buy. Often you’re not only ok with that, you’re glad you were upsold.

Contrast that with a really pushy car salesman - where it often moves away from being a value issue, and is solely about price.

Another contrast is that of a really busy supermarket with not enough checkers- you’ve got 20 minutes to just grab 5 things, but the store has made it so frustrating that you leave the groceries and take off - a lost sale for the supermarket, and an angry customer. I had a similar experience recently at an electronics store (rhymes with Scadio Wack), and I left without buying a $40 power inverter, a $20 pair of headphones, and $50 car charger set.

Question for you all - what makes you "enjoy being sold to?" Is it the sales rep, is it solely on the value of the product, is it because there’s a full moon out, what?

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Posted by Matt Levin on March 8th, 2007 under Sales Process | 6 Comments »

About Me

Name: Matt Levin

Current Role: Sales Strategy & Operations

Previous Role: Corporate Development at Borland

Previous Life: Strategy Consultant (shhhh…don’t tell anyone!)

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Posted by Matt Levin on March 7th, 2007 under Uncategorized | Comment now »

Introduction

One thing I’ve notice about the awesome community we have surrounding Codegear and our products is that there is a lot of great technical and product related conversations going on about making it easier to be a developer, from utilizing our RAD tools to tips and tricks about testing methodology.

We have a great set of Developer Relations, Product, and Evangelist folks engaged all over the blogosphere and newsgroups.

One thing I haven’t seen a lot of is a Codegear representative to tackle some of the operational issues to make it easier to be a Codegear customer, not just a developer.

As part of the operations team, that’s what I’m all about - Making It Easier To Be a Codegear Customer.

I’m not a developer - my programming education ended after my train-wreck performance in my CS61A class freshman year at UC Berkeley (it’s all Scheme’s fault), and the most I do now is write Excel macros in VBA (which I’m forcefully told here is NOT A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE!!!!).

My day-to-day is focused on the nuts and bolts of how we do business, and all sorts of special projects in making that easier.

This blog is going to be about the business side of being a Codegear customer - I’m hoping I can provide some insight into some of the great things we’re working on to make that easier, as well as get feedback from the community.

Stay tuned for more - and please, fire away with any comments or input!

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Posted by Matt Levin on March 7th, 2007 under Announcements | 18 Comments »