Far Far Away (before_dawn) wrote in excerpts, @ 2004-04-11 09:36:00

Excerpt from Nudist on the Late Shift
True Tales of Silicon Valley: The Nudist on the Late Shift

By Po Bronson


Chapter 5: The Salespeople
(I chose this chapter because it will give you a good idea of My Daily Life at work, but I do inside sales/telesales not field sales.)

“In the official history of this industry, there is no chapter on selling. The idealized entrepreneurial life-cycle begins with an idea; ideas become products, products become start-ups, and if a start-up can grab a few early adopter beta users, it gets bought out for millions. End of story, back to hunting for the next idea. Let whoever acquired the company ramp up the customers.

Bill Kellinger is a career salesman. He was at Oracle in the late ‘80s, he was at Netscape back when it was Mosaic. Now he’s landed here, on just another arterial street in Santa Clara, inside just another ordinary office park at just another very ordinary high-tech start-up on the verge of facing the Reaper.

Most entrepreneurs scurry around this industry totally in denial of the fact that one day, the Grim Reaper will be at their company’s door. They can be the buzz of Internet World and send everybody home with a pocket full of decoder rings, but still the Reaper knocks. They can float a public offering and create a balance sheet so top-heavy with cash it wants to stand straight up in the air, but still the Reaper knocks. They can pay Yahoo! Millions to get their share of eyeballs, but still the Reaper knocks. The time has come.

Someone has got to move units.

At Manage.com, Bill Kellinger has been brought in as employee number thirty to ramp up his firm’s sales organization. According to the business plan that is about to get its second round of VC financing, he is supposed to bring in $1.5 million in sales this year, which with a $3,000 price point breaks down into five hundred closes. The average sales cycle will be thirty to forty-five days. He gets to hire one telesales rep and one field rep, both of whom will be coming over from Netscape when Bill gets the okay.

Kellinger offers me a media-savvy menu of product explanations—the Wired level of detail, the Information Age level of detail, the MIS Journal level of detail.

“I’ll take the Wired level of detail.”

In the Wired level of detail, the new firm he’s just joined, Kellinger says, “Is a plane up in the air.” And this plane has been flying around for nine months—basically, completely removed from society. The programmers had to build the plane, and the system engineers are the air traffic controllers, and it’s his job just to land the plane.

You can read that explanation again in case it was too technical for you.

The only problem with this is that Bill Kellinger’s firm doesn’t officially exist yet. It won’t announce its existence for three more weeks. There’s not even a Web site to produce leads for him. Founded by engineers, the company has been paranoid that if it announces its existence and idea, its product will get coped by someone else. They’ve been up in that plane refusing to identify themselves on the radar screens. Employees one through twenty-nine are actually quite nervous just having Bill Kellinger around; they eye him suspiciously over the rim of their cubicles. They’ve asked him to come in only half-days. “They’re terrified of me,” he says. He’s too high-energy, talks too fast, and they’re afraid he will sell their wine before its time. Their product is basically 98 percent done. To a salesperson accustomed to selling vapor, 98 percent done is 100 percent salable. But engineers are perfectionists, and to them salable is a far cry from shippable. This is the X axis of the psychic space that divides engineers from salespeople: technical elegance versus pragmatic compromise.

So Kellinger has to get started on his $1.5 million without any product to sell, without even a company to announce. This doesn’t seem to bother anyone but him, and to tell you the truth, it doesn’t seem to bother him all that much either. The reason is, his product has a clear niche for an established need. Basically, over the last few years, all these Fortune 1,000 companies bought way too much intranet software, (INTRA, not inter) – primarily from Netscape, and now can’t manage it all, Kellinger’s new company (which doesn’t yet exist) is selling software (which doesn’t yet exist) that manages the logistics for department-level network administrators. It’s sort of a real-time CAT scan for the bloated body of network systems.

Maybe this is just the Wired level-of-detail-explanation, but it sounds to me as if Bill Kellinger oversold a bunch of customers some intranet software when he was at Netscape, and now he’s come to another firm to sell them a solution to the problem he helped create.

Just in case this seems out of the ordinary, I should explain how this company that doesn’t exist got its quota for the year of $1.5 million—progressing to $8 million next year and $20 million in year three. Bill says, “The marketing director looked at the business plans of ten other start-ups. And the common denominator for all ten was that their first-year expected sales were one and a half million, then eight million, then twenty.” Then Bill takes another peak at the cover of my novel, but Bill looks at it and says, “Yeah, twenty million. That takes about three years, doesn’t it?

It is the coldhearted imposition of the top-down/product-indifferent quotas like this that makes engineers so distrustful of sales. So deep is this collective distrust that the sales of the new machine is routinely kept hidden from the general public. We never hear about the salespeople. The bias is so entrenched that a recalcitrant coder with purple hair, nose ring, and hands heavily callused from his punk guitar is considered a more acceptable public figure—he better represents the industry—than an overfriendly family man in a Nordstrom’s suit who carries the company bag. What’s going on here?

The guardians of the official history suggest that the real brilliance in the software business is in strategic decision-making. It’s all about cutting the right deal—reserving a crucial right in the contract or partnering with the company that’s on the cusp of becoming the protocol standard. Product. Marketing. Deals. These are all cunning solutions that demonstrate virtuoso brainpower—and there is nothing more esteemed in this industry than virtuoso brainpower.

But sales is not about brainpower. Sales is about manpower. While chip speed has been doubling every eighteen months, an average face-to-face sales call still costs $400 and takes half a day. It’s labor intensive. The methodology of sales is still fairly much trial and error—you knock on fifty doors, you find five good leads, you close one sale. Don’t like it? Go hide in your cubicle.

Dare you do more than peek over the cubicle rim? Dare you risk learning what really saves the software industry’s ass, quarter after quarter? Can you stomach confirming your worst suspicions all of which have to do with sales being sleazy, in order to go where you’re only unofficially allowed; into the soul of the sales machine?

Field Call
The most notable characteristic of Mars Garro is his voice it’s the resonant pitch of a television sports announcer, quick to lend exuberance to ordinary drama. Sometimes he does his own play-by-play commentary, offering observations to the other half of his broadcast team, an imaginary presence whom Mars addresses as “Jim.” If you are one of the worker bees deep in the honeycomb hive of a downtown city, a visit from this human bumblebee will take the lull out of your day. His love for life is infectious.

Mars, a pseudonym I’m using to preserve his anonymity, is a field rep for Oracle. In the last week before he was to leave town for another region, we called upon a division of Wells Fargo Bank. Rep territories are always being divided and repartitioned, and reps are frequently moved around so that they don’t have to live with the consequences of overselling an account. There is an opportunity for Mars to do that today—to load up Wells with software it could go without. He blew out his annual number three months ago, so he’ll earn a triple commission on any orders taken today. When I ask him what his income is, he replies, “Tasty.” I do know that he’s been looking at open houses on Sundays, and a mortgage is an option, not a necessity…

Quarter End

I hate the silence. There is something wrong. There is something evilly wrong. I am on the road again this morning with a salesman from a major software firm. I hooked up with him in the parking lot of the McDonald’s on Bowers Avenue in Santa Clara, got out of my Jetta and got into his Porsche, and now we are on the way to a major bank to close a sale. He is silent. He has never been silent before. There have always been words coming out of his mouth. His silence is a wall I am afraid to climb.

Caffeine dizzies. The subtle noxiousness of rush-hour traffic exhaust. A whisper of carsickness from my stomach. His cellular jars us with its ringing. He doesn’t look at it. It rings six times then cuts off. A moment later, he reaches to his belt, removes his pager, and sets it on the dashboard.

We have found a mutual respect, he and I. In my mind, I have nicknamed him the Burn Artist. From our first meeting I had always enjoyed him for his excessive character, in the way one has a sick fondness for John Malkovichian villains…

“Sometimes a product that we know doesn’t work very well should be dropped,” The Burn Artists said at our second meeting. “It will burn the customer, and it will create support (tech support) nightmares for us for years.” Might this be the situation today? The Burn Artist is expecting to close a sale of an ..Merchant System. It will be an enterprise-wide sale, thousands of seats. He is going to drop his pants from $15 million to $10 million to make the close. He’s already over his quota for the quarter, so the commission he’s expecting would be two points, $200,000.

He seems uncomfortable when we arrive at our destination. Tells me to wait in the car. He says, “All year I’ve been telling them we should drop this product. Now that I can close the deal they don’t want me to sell it. But when the money’s on the table, they won’t be able to say no.”

… “All I had to do was drop my pants (drop the price),” he said. “They were expecting it, I was expecting it. But I didn’t do it. My boss would have kicked my ass. But he can kiss that ten million good-bye.” (A few days later, the Burn Artist told me that his firm had officially stopped selling the product.)

“I gotta get out of this business,” he says, aggressively downshifting as the Porsche hits standstill traffic.