Everyone's talking but no-one's listening

In today's world, we are all being encouraged to share our thoughts and opinions. Facebook this. Twitter that. In fact I'm doing this right now - I'm sharing my thoughts and observations on a blog.

It does seem that everyone's talking but no-one's listening.  Attention is scarce.  Un-divided attention is a rarity.  We are all eager to give our opinions but we are unwilling to spare the time to give the gift of attention to other people.  Giving your attention to some-one else is actually a very scarce resource.

So is the blog just yet another article that voices an opinion and changes nothing?  I hope not.  I genuinely believe that listening to what other people say makes a difference.  In sales it can really make a difference. It can be your differentiator. Since so few people are prepared to spare the time to listen, you say seem unique. People crave acceptance and listening elevates the speaker and shows acceptance.

Genuinely listen. I don't mean using the time when they are speaking to plan what you are going to say next. I mean really listen to what they are saying and taking it in. 

I would love you all to spend just 3 minutes a day genuinely listening to a loved one as a result of reading this post.  Listening in sales is just good  practice - it shouldn't be done with an ulterior motive anyone than you should give your 3 year old child your attention because you have an ulterior motive. 

We seem to have lost the ability to respect other people by listening. Let's make a change and promise to listen intently to each other for at least 3 minutes per day - after-all  it's probably 2 minutes 50 seconds more than you listen per day!

Where have all the prospects gone?

Any sales guy will tell you that it can be hard finding prospects and it's one of the most time consuming activities of sales. Building a pipeline of opportunities is critical to success in sales. No prospect. No selling. No sale.

I haven't been fortunate enough [yet] to be given a nice list  "These people want to buy our stuff. Ring then and they will buy".  It's been more of a case  "where's the list?"

Knowing where to find the next prospect, is like  the "little black book" of girls you can ring when you find yourself single. 

In an ideal world marketing is supposed to build a list of leads and these leads need to be contacted to convert into prospects and ultimately customers.  Nice dream!

Sales guys need to build their own list of prospects.  Creating that list of prospects isn't an easy task.

Selling technology has it's challenges. Let's start with something simple like water.  Everybody in the world is a potential purchaser of water. It's something we all need. Yet not everyone needs technology. In fact some technology is incredibly specific. In some cases selling incredibly specific technology is easier. You can name the people who will buy.

Let's say I was selling fibre optic transmission systems.  Your average man on the street doesn't need one yet telecom operators might. So a good starting point would be to get a list of telecom operators. OK. Do these telecom operators own or rent fibre optic cable? If the answer is yes then Bingo! They might want to buy....provided the rationale for buying or changing vendor makes sense.  When the customer profile is very specific, there may be a very limited number of customers in the world. It can therefore be a time consuming task hunting for new prospects. There simply aren't many of them.

This example is a vertical so it's often clear which companies would need what you are selling.

Now lets pick some more generic technology such as databases. Databases can be used for a wide range of things and they are not industry specific.  This is a horizontal product. Healthcare providers might use databases for storing patient records whilst a car manufacturer might use it to store inventory information for a factory.  Horizontal products often have a larger potential market than verticals yet they can be more challenging to sell. 

The market is less specific for horizontal products and therefore there are often many more  potential customers for this type of product yet this can be a challenge to figure out who will buy. People don't buy databases. They buy what it can do for them.  If I started explaining to a hospital the benefits of databases for car manufacturing inventory management, I would at best get some blank looks. A hospital is not involved with running a car factory. They want to hear what it can do for them. They probably aren't interested in how wonderful the database schema syntax is.

The challenge is therefore one of domain knowledge. To get the attention of a horizontal prospect you need to be able to communicate the value the product delivers in the language of the prospect.

The other aspect of horizontal products is they are often looking for a problem to solve. Lets look at hospitals again.  So wind the clock back 100 years.  Did we have hospitals? Yes. Did we have patients in hospitals? Yes. Did hospitals have access to patient records?  Yes. Did they have databases? No. Was there a market for databases? No.

Hospital's had a paper based system so the challenge is to find a commercial reason for changing from paper to a database. "You'll be able to access patient records far faster" [so what] "When a patient is admitted you'll have their information in seconds" [so what] "The time it saves to get the patient records could save their life".

Now who do you sell this to?  Let's start with nurses. They don't understand databases. They probably want to save lives but haven't got the authority to sell.  The challenge therefore is to find someone that has the authority to make such a profound process change (switching from paper to database) and wants the value delivered - in this case saving lives. Finding the specific prospect for this decision can be time consuming.  As you are selling a vision of the future, it also means it can be difficult to get their attention.  Imagine the challenge of selling a database 100 years ago - you are talking a foreign language.

In summary finding prospects for vertical sales can be a challenge of scarcity whereas the challenge for selling horizontal products can be one of targetting and messaging.

Good luck with the prospecting!

Has the Amazon Kindle goldrush passed?

Amazon's Kindle is a wonderful thing. It has truly disrupted the publishing industry. It has enabled many wannabe authors to be exactly that by lowering the cost of publishing.  The Kindle has removed the barriers to publishing enabling authors to self publish without the gate keeper of a publisher.

This has however had some unintended consequences.  Many of the ill's and evils we have seen on the Internet have found their way into publishing.   Spam books - books which are little more than spam have emerged.  Copyright theft - books repackaged and sold under different titles.The sins of the Internet have infiltrated publishing.

In the past the Internet lowered the barriers and suddenly any one could have a web page and now Kindle has enabled anyone to be an author and monetise their words.  There has been a goldrush to get onto Kindle.

One of the reasons that goldrush has happened is that Amazon has enabled it. Amazon's KDP programme allows authors to give away their books for free for 5 days per quarter.  I've succumbed to this gold-rush myself - I've written several books such as Romancing The Sale. My thought process about giving my book away for free is that it's a great way to get my book into the hands of those who don't know me. The quality of my work should speak for itself - either they will love it or hate it.  If they love it they will tell others or buy one of my other books. The reviews and feedback for my books has been positive - this encourages me to write more.

Now you may be thinking giving books away for free doesn't make good business sense. You are right.  In 2012 Amazon's KDP programme did however create lots of sales.  By giving away your book for free you shot up the chart.  It was perfectly possible to be up there with 50 Shades of Grey in the best seller list. When the free promotion ended, you didn't automatically drop back to zero, there was some legacy sales which persisted because you were top of the chart.  People paid real money for your book.  Many authors probably sold more copies that way than through any other mechanism.

Around November 2012, Amazon changed it.  Probably quite rightly.  Now when the free promotion ends the book simply exits chart. It is listed in the free chart not the sales chart. No freebie sales for authors now.

Amazon has also closed a number of other holes such as tagging.

So where does this leave all these authors?  Well the reality is they are stuck with promoting their own book. No get rich quick options.  Writing a book is easy - it's probably only 10% of the task. The remaining 90% of the task is marketing and selling the book.  Yet the throngs of authors flooding to Kindle are still coming.

The average book sells less than 100 copies in it's lifetime.  I can vouch that if you do nothing to promote your book, you will be part of this statistic. So we have a perfect storm.  A large swathe of books being published - flooding the market with content yet I suspect people are not buying more books. Classic economics. Over supply of content and static demand of attention.

Authors are usually not marketeers or sales people. So how do they promote their book? The instant reaction is to drop the price.  The author sets the price not Amazon.  That probably has created negative inflation in the Retail Price Index with book prices jumping around on the whim of authors.  It is however classic economics and conomics tells us that if there is over supply, prices will fall. We've seen examples like Life of Pi being just 10p.  A truly best selling book priced at a bargain price.

Ultimately Amazon love Kindle.  No books to stop. No warehouses. No packaging. No people putting books in boxes. No factory. No shipping costs. Yet I suspect Amazon failed to anticipate the effect they would have on the economics of selling and authoring books.

I think the gold-rush has ended yet the prospectors keep turning up.  I'm wondering if there's a shovel I can sell them....

Selling information - it's a lottery isn't it?

This week I've been pondering the challenges of selling information.  Data is information without context.  If I said I wanted to sell you some lottery numbers, unless you were naieve,  you probably wouldnt pay anything for them since they are probably just made up numbers. In other words the numbers would be data.

 Now if I said that they were winning lottery numbers then you might be a little more interested. Now if I said they were jackpot winnng numbers for this weekend's draw they would suddenly have value. You might wonder how I had come to acquire such valuable information - provided I could convince you of their authenticity, you would be prepared to pay a lot for them. 

Say the jackpot was £10M. You'd happily pay £1M for my information.

Now lottery numbers are an unusual case. You are unlikely to pay me £1M up front for those numbers.  The interesting thing is I could actually do a deal.  I could agree no money up front and you agree to give me £5M of the £10M winnings.  Suddenly you're prepared to pay 5x the value for the information than I was previously asking for, to eliminate the risk of paying me £1M up front !
The risk of paying a few pound for a losing ticket is preferable to spending £1M for some losing advice.

Now let's return to the £1M scenario.  Assuming you were prepared to pay £1M for my numbers one thing that is important is to know how many other people I have sold the numbers to. If I have sold the numbers to 99 other people then the winning prize fund will be divided between 100 people so the £10M jackpot is now only a £100k jackpot. The business case for paying me £1M is not very solid - well at least for you. It would be very solid for me.

So lets review this thought experiment
- Context for the information adds value
- Timeliness of the information adds value
- Exclusivity of the information adds value

So if we were selling information, these are the primary aspects which we have to sell.
Share prices which are late are of less value than the current price
Information about shares which is exclusive is more valuable than public domain knowledge

In sales, we need leads and this might be one area we are prepared to buy other people's services.  If someone was offering us a mailing list of 1 million email addresses, it probably isn't that interesting. We don't know whether these are email addresses which have been made up or much about the people on the other end. We would in essence be buying a spam list so the price for email address that we would be prepared to pay would be very low. Would you pay £1 per address? Nope.

Now if I told you these 1 million people were prospects in the market for what you are selling and they are ready to buy then suddenly £1 per address might seem very attractive.  You might only want to 1,000 of the email addresses so you might pay £1 per address.

If the email addresses were augmented with information such as the name of the person, their status and other information to add validity to the email address you might be willing to pay £10 or more per lead.

Suddenly we've taken something which has a low perceived value and made it more valuable.  Same basic product (email addresses) and increased the price someone is prepared to pay for it.

Do you have any single friends?

According to the Internet (so it must be true) 63% of couples met through a mutual friend.
It seems that finding love through friends-of-friends is a very common way to find love.

Why is this so effective?

The answer is trust.   The person doing the referral knows both parties and will have a reasonable view on whether it's a good idea for these people to hook up.  If you know the person is a slime-ball you're probably not going to match them up with someone you like. Trust is inherent in this kind of exchange.

So does the same statistic apply in sales?

Sales referrals are very effective in sales. The same trust model is present. In fact establishing trust is probably the biggest hurdle to winning a sale. So if a mutual acquaintance is prepared to do an introduction, it's a sign that there is trust.

Getting referrals from customers is the same. Asking for the referral after you've closed the deal is not the right time.  It's when your customer is happy and you've delivered on your promise.

The best referrals are where your acquaintance or customer does the introduction directly. Getting a name from someone is nowhere near as effective. Think back to dating.  If someone arranges a blind date it works better than ringing up without any warning and saying "I've been given your number - fancy going on a date?". The stalker alarm bells will be ringing!

If dating is anything to go by, you could be getting 63% of your sales through referrals!

Do you desire to amaze your babe tonight?

Did the headline work?

I was browsing through emails in my junk folder to see what is needed to grab my attention. One of the challenges of lead generation is grabbing the limited attention of strangers.  I love looking and analysing failure - it's possible to learn from others mistakes.

At least this junk mail headline achieved that goal.  Why? It asked me a question and signalled to a deeper human desire yet I didn't bother opening it - it is afterall spam. 

The approach I use when sending unsolicited emails is to be specific and on-target. That takes time and effort. The recipient knows this isn't some automated message - it clearly is a message that has been hand crafted and personally written by me.

That being said, the subject title can be all that is between my lovingly crafted message and their attention.

In today's information overload world, everyone has attention deficit disorder.  If I make it past the first few words of an unsolicted email, something like "I want...." is enough for me to hit the delete button.  I don't care what you want...."what's in it for me". Why should I bother reading any further.

So what tactics do I use to improve the success rate of people reading my unsolicited emails and even better replying?

Firstly the subject title. I opt for some word which has relevance and meaning to the person - it takes time to research that person but usually the information is out there on the web. If you don't have a keyword, the a cryptic or ambiguous title is something which you can use to arouse curiosity.  Questions can be effective but the challenge here is that questions like "Do you desire to amaze your babe tonight?" can position the message as junk rather than a hand crafted personal message.

Now to the subject body. Again asking a question right at the beginning can be dangerous "Would you like to double your sales ?".  Sure I would love to double my sales yet this position the email  as generic fluff.  If however my email said "I noticed that you attended xyz event - did you get a chance to listen to abc's talk on def ?" is far more specific and relevant for this person - it can't be junk as you're revealing information which is personal to them.

The purpose of an unsolicited email is to establish some kind of dialogue. Don't tell them your life story. I aim to keep the email short - 4-6 lines of text max.  I also aim  to end with a question which they feel they should answer.  I've also experimented with wording where I ask them direct closed question and say "If the answer is no, please delete this email".  It sends a clear message that I have a very clear target and they are not it. I doubt many people get unsolicited emails asking them to delete it so my approach is unusual - I often get a reply saying "we have xyz but not abc" so the tactic is effective at soliciting a response.

I'm always keen to improve my approach so would love to heard what works for you. 

Selling Software Defined Network / OpenFlow

Software Defined Network (SDN) and OpenFlow are the latest networking hot buzzwords in the word of high tech. I've just spent the last 2 days at the pinnacle of SDN by attending the ONF summit which has been an interesting experience. I've been on the bleeding edge of SDN as I've been involved in its development for the last 18 months and it is getting to the point where the hype is turning into reality and that means this new hot tech has to be sold.

This article is more technical that my normal posts – we are after-all selling high tech!

Before I delve into the challenges of selling SDN I thought it would be interested to explain what it is, why everyone is getting excited and my personal perspective since in reality SDN is an old idea in the telecom world but very new in the networking world.

At the heart of OpenFlow is the idea to separate out control from data. In data networking, that means messages to control set-up, build routing tables etc are all carried in the same channel as the data for example these control messages are carried alongside the web page you're downloading.

Routers and networking switches have in-built intelligence and when configured correctly will make decisions about how your data gets from A to B.

Separating control from data happened in the telecom world around 40 years ago so the concept is far from new. In fact it happened several times in telecom. The very old systems used tones carried in the speech path for signalling purposes. The problem with this is that users could “hack” the telecom network to trigger the controls. This problem still exists to some extent and is called freaking. DTMF is a signalling (control) mechanism to signal to the network on your fixed line phone what number you want to dial – this control info is carried in the data (speech plane). Hackers manipulate PABX, voice-mail and other systems which use DTMF for control. Hacking the core telecom network in this way is not possible anymore. Mobile phones send call set-up signalling information separately from the voice since they use more up-to-date technology.

The other change in the telecom network which happened 30-40 years ago was in the core and was more fundamental and had a profound impact. Telecom circuit have a separate channel in which signalling information is carried. The fundamental change was not the physical separation of the signalling from the data which was already present but the centralisation of signalling. Digital telecom networks relied on the dialled digits to signal to the next switch how to route the call. The numbering plan was cleverly designed so the dialled digits described how to get the call from A to B. You can kind of think of it as source routed packets. However the problem was all this signalling channels were difficult to maintain (read labour intensive) since each switch needed to have part of the information about how to get from A to B. The transition to centralised signalling or STPs (Signal Transfer Points) was a fundamental change – it meant each switch simply needed enough signalling information to know how to handle queries and the STPs handle the details of the call set-up. It is this change which has a close parallel to what is happening in networking with SDN.

So why was the change to centralised signalling in telecom such a fundamental change? Up until that point, dialled digits were geographical – the call was set-up hop-by-hop, with each switch holding lots of configuration data. It meant things like freephone numbers were difficult if not impossible to establish. In the old model each node would need to know how to route free-phone numbers. With the centralised model it was possible to add new functionality (Service Creation Points) which sat above the STPs allowing number abstraction – suddenly numbers were not tied to geographical locations. This meant someone dialling an 800 number could be routed to a physical phone based on their originating location or based on the state of the destination eg busy. Because signalling was centralised, operator based controls became possible for example call blocking. These were not services for users – these were services to protect the network. If a telephone number was in high demand for example ticket booking or voting, call volumes could be throttled to stop excessive network load.

So let's jump forward to SDN. Separation of the control and data planes is actually giving routing information to a controller which is analogous to the STP. Controllers will be connected via northbound interfaces to systems allowing applications to control the network (analogous to SCPs) . The service abstraction was labelled under Intelligent Networking.

So one of the key problems with selling SDN is actually “what problem does it solve”. The messages for the past 2 days at the ONF conference have been about

• Lower costs
• Flexibility
• Responsiveness

We may think of IP routing as being fresh and modern but the reality is it has progressed very little in the last 20 years. There have been lots of bolt on protocols attempting to overcome shortcomings. SDN concepts have been born out of frustration. Cloud services and virtualisation in the server space have enabled the time to create a new server to be reduced from days to minutes. Creating a new server is a low cost, almost labour free activity and yet the bottle neck is now the networking. The moment networking changes are needed there is no automation, it takes days to implementation the manual changes and because humans are involved, they are error prone. Companies like Google have therefore resorted to writing their own SDN since they want networking to be exactly like the server space. This covers the points of flexibility and responsiveness.

The other area which has been covered over the last couple of days is lower costs. The same networking vendors that have progressed things little in the last 20 years have kept prices high. There is nothing fundamental in SDN to make things cheaper – at least from a capital cost perspective. What is really happening is SDN is a disruption change allowing new players to emerge and it is shifting value from boxes to the higher layers. Networking boxes therefore become more commodity. It is this area where I have been involved for the last 18 months with the LINC OpenFlow switch which enables new low cost vendors to enter the networking space.

Returning to our telecom parallel, it is the STP (OpenFlow controllers) and SCP (OpenFlow applications) where new opportunities and players are emerging. The volume is in the switch/router layer whilst the value and therefore profit will be with the higher layers. Switches will be commodity with little opportunity to differentiate.

The fundamental change in telecom was not the cost element since in reality this was extra boxes to buy so actually higher cost. Operators moved to a centralised control model since costs were reduced from a support perspective. It was far easier to maintain since routing could be changed dynamically (least cost routing) and adds and changes made in a simple manner from a central location.

Throttling before, was complex configuration activity and therefore prone to human error but with a centralised control function it became possible to automate the activity.

Number translation and number abstraction was also a powerful and fundamental change. It meant numbers were no longer tied to a location. Call control became more flexible allowing dynamically change to call routing and call manipulation. This lead to virtualised PABX type service like Centrex. The operators had a powerful new tool to create new services in a simple way. For example private dial/numbering plans.

So fast forward to today. The sales messages for SDN and OpenFlow are about lower cost and flexibility (easier support and faster provision). The reality is OpenFlow will probably not lead to lower capital costs – at least not initially. If you already have a router network and it works then you won't save money by replacing it with OpenFlow since you will have new investment costs and scrappage costs for your existing network. Depending on how much service and network provisioning change is taking place in your network you may have reduced support and administration costs resulting from OpenFlow's flexibility – this becomes a simple business case. Are my support cost reduction gains worth the capital investment?

Contrasting with telecoms is useful. Load control and throttling is comparable to today's denial of service threats. Today if we have an attack, it can be quite a manual task to apply blocking rules across a large distributed network. Ironically building resilient fault tolerant networks actually creates more problems compared to a simple linear service chain. More meshing means more options for threats and attacks to find alternative routes.

OpenFlow's centralisation enables similar functionality to telecom's traffic management. Centralised blocking control means that policies such as block all traffic from this IP address or all traffic to this IP address can be simply created and applied on a network-wide basis. If you are in the firewall business you better watch out. OpenFlow is going to impact your business.

For example it now be possible to block queries to particular DNS lookups. Schools may restrict access to facebook.com during specific hours so that the lookup simply fails!

It's worth briefly considering IP v4's addressing. In reality it is hierarchical with the numbering having a geographical binding. This sub-net relates to a country and sub-net location. It is not so different from old world telecoms yet we like to fool ourselves that IP is a fresh new idea!

The decoupling of the control of the data forwarding plane in telecom allowed address abstraction – the numbers pretty much became irrelevant. We still needed “unique” numbers but they were no longer cast in-stone.

It is this decoupling in telecoms that spawned service innovation and flexibility. I believe that exactly the same will happen in IP and OpenFlow enables this control abstraction.

So let's look at telecom services and see what insights we can gain for the future of SDN. Firstly numbering abstraction. We probably won't have freephone equivalents since IP bearer costs are not exposed to the end user (yet) however being able to route traffic to an address (telephone number) and route traffic optimally is an interesting and potentially powerful feature. Consider Google. Currently there is coarse granularity traffic routing eg google.com, google.co.uk etc and there are data centre load balancing similar to ACD functionality in the telecom world. We now have IP addresses which the control plane can decide to route in different ways to today. We could for instance allow the network to handle routing to the nearest Google data centre without lots of special hacks such as DNS, or special routes to do the data centre assignment.

Virtual, overlapping or private address spaces suddenly are possible. The traffic can be routed based on the originator. The actual address becomes in many respects irrelevant.

OpenFlow is currently based around applying routes for persistent flows yet this doesn't have to be that way. Telecoms services allowed calls (flows) to change their route based on conditions (end-point was busy so forward to voice-mail) or actions such as “I'll forward your call onto xyz as they can help you”. Doing the same in the IP has some challenges since TCP assumes that endpoints remain constant and have state information but there's nothing stopping this model for UDP traffic sources or future protocols. It's probably easier to adopt redirection approaches for TCP.

It is not clear what SDN based applications and services will emerge yet it is clear that this base functionality will simplify the creation of innovative new services.

Telecom may seem old world but it has continued to move forward, particularly in the mobile space. Today's mobile networks are IP based with specialist boxes to overcome the limitations of IP eg GSNs for mobility functions. The latest generation is adopting a key element called a PCRF (Policy Control Function) which manages the service level and privileges at a user level. These parallel worlds can learn from each other!

So back to selling SDN. Today the message is one of flexibility and cost. It's hard to sell these application layer services when we don't yet know what they will be or the value they deliver. If the customer values on the fly network provisioning and dimensioning then there is real value which can be sold. It's feasible to randomly wire an OpenFlow network and it will sort it out. Today's legacy IP networks struggle. The types of customers that would value this dynamic network provisioning are cloud providers or companies with large constantly changing data centres.

Customers that place a high value on service availability and up-time would also value OpenFlow. Many IP boxes have found their way into the traffic path creating long serial service chains. When there are lots of boxes in a chain there is more chance of a service outage if one fails and more chance for unexpected interactions between boxes. Examples of these boxes are firewalls, load balancers, deep packet inspection. Generally these boxes are control functions.

It is rare that these types of boxes modify content in the payload. Usually they make a decision do I allows this or where should I send this. These are control functions. Occasionally there are boxes that modify payload for example content caches, content adaptation and maybe deliberate injection of jitter on VoIP calls! For the most part they are control functions so they can be moved into the control plane by OpenFlow. The end result is the data path becomes much shorter with fewer boxes which means higher reliability.

Today building fault tolerant IP networks is a challenge. Adding protection, redundancy and fail-over creates complexity. Complexity often leads to reduced availability so ironically the additional equipment built to provide resilience and higher availability can lead to reduced availability!

As the saying goes “every change has a consequence”. The consequence of simplifying the data path is the control layer potentially becomes more complex. The network has the potential for the network to become more fluid and dynamic. Particular services such as Video traffic, might request routing for low latency and therefore have a very different traffic path to web browsing. Sure the services get the best available performance for their needs but it creates a new problem for the operations staff when they want to trouble shoot an issue. Where was the traffic?

OpenFlow does allow traffic forwarding so the job of monitoring and troubleshooting can be assisted. Just like firewall vendors, if you're a probe vendors then watch out. OpenFlow is set to change your business!