Can We Maybe Kiss A Little First?

One of the many things I truly love about Basho is how our techniques help you understand not just selling, but buying as well.  As CTO of a start up, I am buying a lot of stuff right now - equipment, hosting, services from lawyers, IT consultants, creative talent.  Everything you need to get a ground-breaking technology off the ground.

That means a lot of salespeople selling to me. Every time I, or Justin (our Chief Architect and Head of Development), talk to another sales person we look at the selling behaviors of the person selling to us.  We see good salespeople who give and get and generally "get it." We see nice salespeople at the end of the month desperately giving us everything except a trip on the corporate jet without asking us for a thing. And we see the sort of salesperson I used to really dislike without knowing why - the person who asks you how much money you have in the first five minutes of the first conversation.

They suffer from a condition called Premature Qualification, a heart-breaking affliction that tricks the rep into thinking they are taking care of business when, in fact, they leave the potential client feeling pretty unsatisfied. 
Here is what happened. We needed a demo for investors of a product we are building. Nothing special - some flash, a scripted story - something to capture the power of what we are building. We had a budget and an aggressive timeline. We had to move. No time to bid it out. I had to find the vendor. I asked around, got references, and worked the phone. I spoke to a number of companies. Two stand out. 

Bob of Oasis Technology Partners responded like a champ. We talked for about fifteen minutes on the phone and made an appointment for him to bring his design team to meet us and understand our goals. We spent two hours white-boarding what we needed. Oasis gave us great input, made some fascinating observations, and generally were engaged at a level I found most pleasing.

At the end of the meeting (our second counting the phone consult), Bob asked me about budget. I told him what we expected to pay. He told us what he thought it might cost. The number was higher than our budget but not outrageous. We talked a little more and agreed Basho would give them a solid storyboard against which to nail down a firm price. At this stage, Bob was doing well. He had gotten a phone meeting, an in-person meeting, had us outline our business, and had our budget. We had a price, access to his designers, and a list of his clients.

Things progressed. Bob brought a bigger team around for an even longer meeting and we ran through the fully-fleshed storyboard. Bob secured several days of our hard work coming up with a storyboard, and gave us a meeting with even more designers and some examples of his work. Bob was doing fine. Then we received the final estimate, which came back higher by 25%.   

Bob's story ends like this...

I called Bob up as he was leaving for Christmas vacation and told him we had decided to keep development of the demo in house. I told him the reason hadn't just been cost, which we could have negotiated to a point we both could accept. Instead, I came to realize during the process with Bob that Basho could not afford to have intelligent insights and design decisions about the product -  insights and decisions Bob's team had proven they could deliver - happening away from the developers of the product. They had helped us to understand something about our business needs. Bob was, of course, disappointed but understood. He and I agreed we would look for opportunities in 2008 to work together. And the next thing I did was call the person who had referred Bob to us and tell him Bob and his team were strong and this guy was smart to work with Bob. As outcomes go, I am not foolish enough to say this was good for Bob.  It was, however, far from bad.  

Counterpoint my experience with Bob with what happened when I called another design firm with offices here in Boston. They too were referred to us. They had a solid reputation and a cool portfolio. But they also had a terrible approach.

It was a brief interaction. I left a message for the head of New Business. A few hours later I got a call back. I described what we wanted for about two minutes - not enough to understand what we wanted from them, let alone learning our business. Without asking anything else, she asked me how much we had to spend. Whoa, wait a minute. I was a little shocked. I muttered that I understood these things cost money and, recovering for a second, said I had a few questions to ask first. But to be truthful, my heart was no longer in it. I didn't want to do business with this person for one simple reason: she had communicated with 100% certainty that we were not about to enter into a partnership. Rather, she viewed me as revenue. She didn't even know if she could help me.  

She might say, "So what. You ended up keeping the business in-house. What did I really lose?"

Since I know Basho community members are smart, I'll leave it to you to answer that question.

Anyways, I thought you might be interested in hearing this buyer's perspective. 

Now I've got product to build.

Tony
CTO