M & A Rainmaker

IT services and solutions provider 365iT appoints Pieter Hooft as non-executive director

Appointment of Non-Executive Director

Basingstoke 21st December 2009: 365 iT plc, the IT services and solutions provider, is very pleased to announce the appointment of Pieter Hooft as a non-executive Director of the
Company.
Pieter Hooft is currently Managing Director of UK Investments for LMS Capital plc, the LSE listed international investment group. He has over 15 years’ investment experience in
management buyouts and development capital in the UK and across Europe.
Commenting on this appointment, Peter MacLean, 365 iT’s
chairman and chief executive, said: “I am delighted to
welcome Pieter to the Board. He has extensive experience of
helping companies achieve rapid and profitable growth and I
look forward to his contribution to the Board and to his
expertise and support for the continued development of the
Group.”
Pieter previously worked at Apax Partners and JPMorgan
Partners. Since joining LMS Capital in November 2006, Pieter has joined the boards of
Updata Infrastructure Holdings Ltd, Entuity Ltd, Kizoom Ltd, ITS Engineered Systems Inc and
First Index Inc.
Pieter is a Dutch national and is fluent in French and German. He was educated in The
Netherlands and at HEC Paris.

Notes to the Editor
365 iT plc was founded in 2005 and now employs over 85 people. Through its wholly owned
subsidiaries (365 iTechnology Ltd, 5i Ltd and 7 Global Group Ltd), the group provides an extensive
range of IT services and solutions that address the nine strategic functional areas in IT operations and
management: IT Managed Services, Unified Communications, Business Continuity, Data Backup, IT
Security, Virtualisation, Networks, Storage Solutions and Infrastructure solutions.
Enquiries:
Stephen Bean
Marketing-Alliance,
Tel: +44 (0) 7747 100000
www.365iTechnology.com

Do you remember this blog???

http://mandarainmaker.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/16/the-perfect-salesperson-and-the-perfect-sales-meeting-structure/

Well, my client and I have been doing some more work on this. We reckoned that we needed to get down into a bit more detail and sub-divide some of these areas.

Activity

Here we had a discussion about what we think the activity targets should be.

Based around a week as follows, approximately:

1 day cold calling

1 day proposal writing

3 days meetings ( or if no meetings then calls to get meetings )

The target number of cold calling phone calls per week ( my recommendation is to go for researched, targeted phone calls rather than purely numbers based ) -should be say 30 per day? ( Any meaningful conversations to be followed up by a letter, so say 15 letters ? )

The target number of meetings per week – say 3 per day for 3 days = should be  9 ?? ( All appointments confirmed by email/letter )

The target number of proposals per week – should be, say, 6 ? ( All proposals to have summary of meeting, key needs and objectives, how we meet those needs/objectives, pricing and ideally ROI )

Knowledge

Here we divided knowledge up into various segments:

Company – ( The companies background/history, key philosophies and main strengths )

Products –  ( The top 3 – say, for an ICT company, 1. Telephony, 2. Computer Hardware – Switches, Routers, PC’s,

Servers 3. ????? TBD )

Services – ( The top 3 – say, for an ICT company, 1. IT Support, 2. Billing Services – Lines, Minutes 3. ???? TBD etc)

Competition –  ( The top 3 – say, for an ICT company 1. ABC Ltd. 2.  DEF Ltd. 3. GHI Ltd. 4.  JKL Ltd. 5. ???  We would highlight thier strengths and weaknesses ).

Suppliers –  ( The top 3 – say, for an ICT company 1. Cisco, 2. Microsoft, 3. HP )

Marketplace –  e.g for an ICT company – Hosted Computing versus Premises Based, Virtualisation trends, Cloud computing trends ( SaaS etc )

Skills

Here we divided skills up into seperate areas:

Meeting structure ( as before )

Proposal structure ( eg summary of meeting, key needs and objectives, how we meet those needs/objectives, pricing and ideally ROI )

Presentation structure ( eg Intro, summary of needs/objectives, how we meet them, discussion, agreement on way forward )

Demo structure ( eg Understand what we need to prove, prove it, next step )

Questioning skills

Closing skills

Objection Handling

Negotiation Skills

Psychometric profiling ( this is an advanced selling skill )

With each of these areas we can either record achievement as a percentage of the target or mark each area out of 10 as before. 

Now we had some way of focussing on the areas that needed to be addressed.

We could sit down amongst ourselves and give our own targets and also agree these with the salesperson.

Then we could write an action plan to address any areas of weakness or shortfall.

 Forecasting is one of the most important activities in a salespersons calendar; it needs to be both reliable and consistent.

Over many years I have seen some amazing forecasting methods most are too complicated and require the salesperson to complete endless forms and questions which is time consuming and totally unnecessary.

KISS – keep it simple, stupid: is my motto

Traditional forecasting tends to be rear view mirror stuff with the salesperson often justifying why the sales haven’t closed.

Lets take a fresh look at the subject and consider our forecast looking forward and from the buyer’s standpoint.

Key questions:

What is your customers buying cycle?

Where are you relation to this?

What level of commitment do you have?

What level of commitment do you still need?

Are there any compelling events?

What are their buying criteria?

If your sales people don’t know the answers to these questions then your forecast  could be at risk.

Have a simple step x step approach to your information gathering.

Qualification using ‘MANU’ for smaller deals and ‘SPORTSMAN’ (which I have trademarked) as the most comprehensive approach to the larger high value sales.

If you want to know more about how to achieve reliable, accurate and consistent sales forecasting: 

Contact Richard Spooner +44 (0)7887 720006

Answer – it’s both an Art and a Science!

One company that I invested in kept asking for more money from me and its other shareholders. The investment opportunity originally came from one of my ( share ) brokers. ( Not proved to be a very reliable source of investment opportunities ! ). The management team were supposedly “ very experienced “. It was being run by a Venture Capital outfit. It was, of course, a “ surefire bet “.

After a couple of rounds of investing there was a big change in the senior management of the company and a new Chairman took over from the old Chairman and M.D. Clearly something had gone on !

In a letter announcing the change of management there was yet another request for more money. I decided to make an appointment with the new Chairman and flew up to meet him.

I said that I had obviously read what he said in his letter but I was looking for more detail on what had happened and why it might be worth investing yet more money bearing in mind that nothing much had happened with the money that they had already been given and that the old management team was now mostly gone.

Is this “ off the record Chris ? “ he asked. I said that I was happy for it to be if that was what it took to get the full picture.

“Well”, he said, “ the truth is that the M.D. and the Marketing Director ( a lady ) were having an affair and they spent more time in bed together than they did running the business “. In addition they had managed to establish a couple of businesses “ on the side “. These businesses included one that acted as a reseller to the business that I invested in which was basically a manufacturer. Profits from this business were going to the old M.D. ( They obviously had time for some things then I thought ! ).

I thanked the Chairman for his honesty and then asked him where, exactly, were the former Chairman and the Board of the venture capital company when all this was going on ??

There was, of course, no good excuse for this. These “ highly experienced  people “ simply did not have their eye on the ball. They were not watching the business closely enough and the M.D. and the Marketing Director were able to run a business, unimpeded, in an awful state, establish side-line businesses and indulge in hours of sex together whilst being paid for it !!!

Morals of the story:

– Just because you have experienced people overseeing the company does not mean that they are actually doing their job
– Warning bells should sound when repeated requests are made for money
– If you are not getting regular financial updates there is probably something wrong
– Sex and relationships often get in the way of good business!