M & A Rainmaker

The Silicon Crossroads Technopolis based in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England has helped Inbound Marketing Megastars HubSpot decide on Dublin,Ireland as the location for their European Headquarters. The official announcement from Hubspot is here. Chris Windley, Managing Partner of the Silicon Crossroads Technopolis and of the Silicon Crossroads V.C.T. ( Just voted #100 of 1000 Tech. Investors globally by PeekIndex – full story here ) said ” Some time ago HubSpot asked our opinion on where they should base their European Headquarters – we highlighted as possibilities London, Lichfield itself  and Dublin, Ireland.”

The story of that early conversation with HubSpot is here . ” Whilst we would have been proud to welcome HubSpot to Lichfield and perhaps even the Technopolis itself, we are delighted that HubSpot decided on one of our recommendations. ” Chris said.

As highlighted in our early conversation above there are some compelling reasons why U.S. companies should base themselves in Dublin, Ireland . In all likelihood this will be followed by sales offices in Benelux and London. This is a well worn path that e.g. Google, Twitter and Facebook have followed.

You have to admire the Irish and Irish ( Inward Development Agency ) I.D.A. for the way that they have positioned ” brand Ireland ” and for the way that they handled this opportunity. There are many places where HubSpot could have based it’s European Headquarters but it chose Dublin, Ireland.

Chris said ” I have contacts within the Irish I.D.A. and they have a Boston office which has been communicating with HubSpot for a number of years . The Boston team of the Irish I.D.A. obviously did a good job in presenting the case to HubSpot “.

To me this just emphasises what we have said elsewhere – there is an unstoppable flow of fully funded companies coming from the U.S. to Europe and other countries. This is particularly true of High Tech and software companies.

4 years ago HubSpot was a small Boston based software startup. Today it is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world. Probably second only to Salesforce.com.

When HubSpot received further funding earlier on in the year and investment from e.g. Google and Salesforce it was almost inevitable that they would open a European Headquarters soon. Around 300 companies in Europe are HubSpot customers but this is not enough. HubSpot needed a European base to compete against WordPress based competitors and new startup – The Six Figure Mentors – which is rapidly expanding across the globe from the U.K.

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Well actually this lie about Web Marketing was not heard in Lichfield but received in an email from U.S. Marketing guru, Charlie Cook, whose blogsite and article with a title similar to mine is here . Hopefully Charlie will be o.k. with me borrowing from his email ( initially ) and blog post.

You really want to take the time to follow this link ( here it is again )

http://www.marketingforsuccess.com/blog/web-marketing/the-biggest-lie/

and read it before coming back to my blog post.

The gist of it is this: Business people realise that they have to invest considerable amounts of money, time, skill, knowledge and effort into” bricks and mortar sites ” like for example a new restaurant in a chain of restaurants or a new office location in an expanding company but they think that they can open up the Internet or online part of a company for nothing and in a short space of  time, with no skills or knowledge and little effort.

They then wonder why it has not worked.

Charlie says ” Isabela, a successful restaurant chain owner,  knows that when she opens a new restaurant, it’s a big investment. On average it takes, $494,888 to open a restaurant. Yes almost a half million dollars. Of course, within 18 months the typical restaurant is grossing $1,171,629 a year and making a profit of $91,103 – which isn’t bad at all.

How about Isabela’s online business? How much did she spend to get it up and running? Practically nothing – and no surprise it makes practically nothing. ”

I often say to people ” Treat your website like an online sales team ” . Now guess what – a successful physical sales team takes  all the things to build that I have mentioned earlier money ( and some ! ), time, skill, knowledge, experience and effort. Not to mention the fact that you need tools, processes and systems in place to monitor the performance and effectiveness of your salesforce. Those of you that have built a salesforce
( accountancy, law practice etc etc ) know that getting the right team is an extremely difficult and time consuming process.

Charlie reckoned that Isabela’s Internet business could be making $200,000.00 for her but was actually making virtually nothing. This is like a salesperson carrying a ( profit target ) of 2 restaurants worth. To generate $200K the investment would be huge.

I whizzed Charlie’s email off to one of the Director’s of a company that I work with and he came straight back with:

” I always say to the retailers I speak to that want to be e-tailers that the web store needs to be treated like any other store, and will require time and investment if it’s going to be a success on the same scale. “

So, maybe this will help ?? When you are thinking about starting an online business think about it like opening up a new restaurant, a new store a new branch or building a new salesforce and maybe you will get things into perspective !!

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!